Are We Human?

Even with the steam frosting over the bathroom mirror, Drew could still see the coloration sunken into his skin; Lady Sparrow's malice branded gleefully into his neck.

"

Love of mine, someday you will die,"

Abby sang over the water thumping against her. "

But I'll be close behind. I'll follow you into the dark."

He prodded the bruises, felt the pain awaken and disperse in dull ripples. One night's sleep had done nothing to quell the aftermath of her violence; the screams of broken vessels lingered, loud and anguished, in a beautiful spread.

"

No blinding light, or tunnels to gates of white,

" she continued in her vocal rivalry with the showerhead. "

Just our hands clasped so tight, waiting for the hint of a spark."

The pleasure hadn't been forgotten either; the small nibbles of pain reflected the larger, savage bites that had marked him in the first place, and the memory of the heat and the helplessness made his breaths go deep. These were the bruises he deserved, reminding him through sight and sensation of where he belonged and to whom he belonged. There was a curious feeling of pride buzzing in his stomach when he regarded his latest accessories. They were the markings of a slut, yes, but the markings of a slut with purpose.

Finally hitting the chorus, Abby's serenade rang out with fervor, "

If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied, illuminate the No's on their vacancy signs. If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark."

With the fantastic night giving way to the reality of a new day, however, he found his initial anxiety toward his slut marks returning. The future had felt so far away beneath her gnashing teeth, but the consequences of surrender had finally come to collect on his debt. He prodded again and winced at his reflection in the fog.

The knob of the shower gave a strained creak as the water pittered to a stop. Abby pulled the curtain open to reveal her dripping, naked form to Drew, who drank it in with wide eyes. She regarded him coldly, curdling the steamy air with tension.

"Have you been staring at yourself this whole time?" she asked flatly. "I'd expect you to be a little more humble than that."

She extended her hand toward the towel he was holding, and Drew obeyed her wordless command. As she dragged the towel across her body, clearing the droplets from her pale skin, she gestured her head toward a wicker basket on a table beside the sink. Inside, resting atop the potpourri, were two black plastic jars of body lotion; scrawled across the lids in white font were the names "Mid-Afternoon Dream" and "Hazy Nirvana."

"Mid-Afternoon Dream," she instructed.

Drew took the jar from the basket and twisted off the lid, letting loose a gust of sweet scents that his unrefined nose had trouble identifying. The label informed him that he was now basking in luscious flavors of oat milk, lavender, and rose water. He sniffed again, but still, the intricacies of the different components were lost upon him. To him, it merely smelled like a pair of thighs that had once locked tight around his head or a soft rear that had beckoned for his fervent worship. It was the flavor of a breeze that had brought him here one Friday night, what felt like a lifetime ago.

Abby placed the towel on the rack and extended her arms toward Drew once more. He scooped out a portion of the sweet-smelling lotion and began to paint his mistress. His palms slid across her skin, fading the cream and its essence into her body. When her arms were properly anointed, his hands circumnavigated her neck; the gentle caress earned him an appreciative sigh for his troubles. There was noticeable hesitation as his hands descended from her neck, a slow crawl that built ultimately to a halt just before the cosmetic touched her breasts. It made Abby giggle.

"Are you nervous about touching my boobs, boy?"

"Am I... allowed to?" he asked quietly.

"Duh. I want them as luscious as the rest of me. Quit acting like a high schooler," she scolded.

Drew's hands curved around the outer sides of her breasts, then spread the thick globs of lotion across their surface with the pads of his fingers. Abby could feel his attention to detail as his fingers drew tight circles again and again, blanketing her skin in softness. They journeyed beneath her breasts and brushed gingerly over her nipples, hardened by both the attention and chill of the bathroom. His thumbs painted an even tighter circle that made her tilt her head back to further vocalize her appreciation. Her thighs pushed together impatiently.

The procedure continued; Drew attended to her stomach and her sides, then came around to dress her shoulder blades and down her spine. He knelt down to adorn her butt, his fingers caressing and squeezing in a familiar way. She permitted him to massage her for longer than was necessary, delighting in the ease with which her body could captivate him. Even when his lips pressed against her flesh, her response was merely an affectionate twirl of his hair. It wasn't until she felt his erect cock slinking up against her calf did she decide to cut him off, yanking him away by the hair and tapping the back of her thigh to refocus his attention. The guilty pet murmured an apology before applying the cream to the rest of her legs.

Abby turned around and stared down at the kneeling figure, who was eye level with the one part of her that his anointment had neglected. She parted her smooth legs slightly and revealed herself to him, shining with joy and majesty. Drew was entranced.

"This, you ask permission for," she informed him.

Drew pulled his teeth out of his lip and looked up at her. The desperate, puppy-dog face made her insides sing.

"Please may I touch your pussy, Lady Sparrow? I want to pamper you like a queen, from head to toe. Your gorgeous pussy deserves so much attention and- and I wanna keep it nice and perfect because I love it so so much."

Abby looked up at the ceiling and mulled it over, tiling her head from side to side.

"Came on a little strong there, but you sound sincere enough."

"Thank you Lady Sparrow, thank you so-"

Abby crouched down to stare him in the face, catching Drew's voice in his throat. He stared back into a raging void of darkness.

"Don't get any ideas in your head," Lady Sparrow warned in a tone of lethal severity. "You try to get me riled up, you try to take more than you deserve, and you will find yourself in a sort of discomfort that you won't be able to even crawl away from. Do I make myself clear, slave?"

"C-Clear," the slave responded, offering a trembling nod.

Abby patted him on the cheek and stood back up. She barely detected his fingers rubbing the lotion onto her lips; it would have felt nice, but his terror felt even better. Finally, she was done, and Drew was permitted to stand. She wiped the fog off the mirror and took a brush to her short black hair.

"I kinda like having a domestic around the house," she told him. "Makes me wonder what else I could have you do for me."

"Does that mean you want me to stay?" he asked, the faintest glimmer of hope in his voice.

"Nope. I've got things to do, as do you, I imagine. You've taken up enough of my time this weekend."

"Well, can I at least shower before I leave?"

"Not after you questioned me."

"Question you? When did I question you?

Abby placed the brush back on the shelf and turned toward him.

"Just now."

As she walked out of the bathroom, Drew mumbled deep below his breath, "God damn it."

Drew followed her back to the bedroom where she was already sifting through her drawers for the day's outfit, assembling the pieces atop her dresser.

"So you mean I have to walk home looking like yesterday's mess with hickeys all over my neck?" he lamented.

"Well it's not like I'm gonna let you live out the rest of your days in my house. You're too much of a distraction." she rebutted.

"A distraction? Jeez, that's kind of dismissive."

When she turned around again, she didn't look like Abby anymore. The raging darkness had returned to her expression.

"You should be happy I even think about you enough to be distracted by you," she remarked, her voice oozing with slow contempt.

Drew implored, "I'm sorry Lady Sparrow, I shouldn't have said that. It was rude, I'm sorry."

He raised his hand in a calming motion, attempting in vain to halt her threatening advance.

"But how could I not be distracted?" she grilled. "Look at the way you parade around with no clothes on, always staring at me with that stupid, needy expression on your face."

The daggers she stared into him forced him to his knees. The stupid neediness was deteriorating into terror before her eyes. She grabbed him by the chin and scrunched up the expression; his frantic breaths struggled to squeeze out of his compressed lips.

"I keep you around when I'm bored, understand? I use you when I wanna get off, then your ass is right back on the street corner till I feel like using you again."

Drew tried to apologize again, but her grip grounded up the pleas into indistinguishable sounds.

Ignoring his attempts at communication, Lady Sparrow continued, "I don't have the luxury of boredom today. In fact, I'm busy to the point where I wanna step in front of a God damn bus. You really wanna try me today? My patience for your shit is shorter than Antarctic dick in winter."

With his power of speech rendered useless, Drew resorted to shaking his head vigorously from side to side. Lady Sparrow's hand dislodged, bucked from the mechanical bull, but in the next breath, she retaliated with a backhand across the face that spun him to the floor. He rolled onto his back and, once more, put up his hands to stave off her impending wrath.

"Please," he murmured in a shaken voice. "I won't push... I won't push anymore."

She stepped forward so that she had him cowering in between her legs. Seeing her looming over him made his hands go defensively to his face.

"Scared of me, huh?" she observed, changing her tone. "Gimme your hands."

His shield didn't falter. He kept his guard up, too afraid of her anger to be obedient. His eyes were shut and his face was covered; perhaps that would be enough to make it all go away. Maybe if he didn't look, his perturbed owner wouldn't be hovering above him. He was a child trembling under the comforter, hiding from the monsters in the closet, under the bed, lurking in the shadows.

"You gonna make me take them from you?" the monster asked, her rage present but restrained. "Does that sound like a good idea to you?"

It felt like a long time since Drew had had any good ideas. Slowly, he extended his hands toward the ceiling; he kept his eyes closed, his last line of defense against reality. Lady Sparrow took one of his hands between hers and shaped it so only his pointer and middle finger were sticking out. She guided the two fingers up between her opened thighs and between her lips; the pads slid along the pink flesh through a coating of her lust that stuck to Drew's fingers as he traveled the full length of her vulva.

"You feel that? You feel how wet I am? That's what I think of your fear."

She didn't let him go. Repetition upon repetition of his stroking was encouraged by the force of two clenched hands and deliberate grinding against his fingertips. Although her sighs were contented, Lady Sparrow still pored down on her troublesome pet with disdain. Drew cracked open his eyelids and found his vision flushed with her raining contempt.

"You're distracting me again, slut," she admonished, exasperated. "I was getting ready and you just had to go and distract me again."

"I didn't mean to, I promise. I can stop, I can stop and never do it again." Drew assured her, his voice hushed and hasty.

"You're gonna stop now? You're gonna tease my pussy, get me all wet, and you're gonna stop before I get off?" she asked with slow, volatile disbelief.

Securing her hold on his hand, she stepped back and started for the nearby desk chair; Drew scrambled his way after her with great difficulty, her dragging making it hard for him to keep up. Soon, his arm was relinquished, and he found himself in a heap at the foot of his seated mistress. She opened her legs once more and snapped her fingers for attention, before gesturing for him to raise to his knees.

"You do this quick. Don't tease, don't waste my time."

"Yes, Lady Sparrow."

"And use your fingers this time."

Drew nodded. His heart fluttered at the sight of the pink folds of skin peering out between two raised mounds of pale stubbled flesh, and the fluttering aggravated as he leaned in closer and her vagina began to play with his other senses. It lavished his sense of smell with the odors of oat milk, lavender, and rose water, all coupled with an unmistakable natural scent. When his mouth pressed against her lips, his nerve endings illustrated the valley of short black hairs blooming out the soft soil of her lotioned skin; he moved to her center, and in the place of the prickly hairs, the sensation of welcome dampness fell upon him. His ears picked up the reticent sigh at first contact, as well as the sound of his own pounding heart as the prospect of tasting his mistress concretized into reality. Finally, he stuck out his tongue and dragged it up the sodden labia, methodically collecting every drop of nectar that he could. The stimulant entered his system. Drew's brain drowned in a paradisiac flood.

Lady Sparrow lost herself as well. Her pet's tongue swirled around her clitoris like the hypnosis spirals from old cartoons, and she reclined on her throne to let her stresses spin down into them. The eight page research paper on the interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics of eating disorders with its requirement of at least six peer-reviewed sources, the infant socialization presentation featuring a group composition of 75% uselessness and 25% Abby, and the God damn Univariate Statistics exam all flushed away to an unseen place. The studying and writing and researching and negotiating with an oligarchy of morons could afford a 10 minute delay. She needed this today.

She hadn't anticipated getting off before getting back to the real world, but he was right there, staring at her. Touching her. Stiffening and throbbing and yearning for her. Just the sight of him, timid at her voice and frozen in her glares, was enough to imbue her with that invigorating spirit that made her heart turn delightfully cruel. The bruised up, quavering wretch had been too petrified to make eye contact, but even that was not enough to keep his cock down in her presence. She had the unconscious loyalty of his body; his cock swelled and subsided at her will. Standing over him and revelling in her unchallenged rule, Lady Sparrow could not help but take out Abby's frustrations on him. The boy belonged to her, after all; she had caught him in the wild and domesticated him into something halfway competent. Effort on that scale warrants compensation, especially when the person accomplishing said feat is as busy as Abby Heyman.

Lady Sparrow inhaled sharply as the digits of Drew's fingers began their slow advance inside her. When the force of the first stretch dissipated and her muscles relaxed to accommodate him, Lady Sparrow exhaled through a dazzled smile. She felt base knuckles pressing against her vagina, then she felt them go, taking the fingers out with them. They curled upward so that she could feel the pads of them on her interior; Drew had learned this technique from a friend of his from freshman year of high school.

"It's like when you pump your legs on a swing: straight and then curled," Lucas had told him. "That's where the G-spot is, dude."

Drew had never actually asked any of his partners to confirm what Lucas had seemed so confident about; considering the fact that Lucas had not yet interacted with a vagina at that time and would not do so for another four years, Drew should have been somewhat skeptical of him. Instead, he took his words as science and had utilized this technique unthinkingly ever since; even now, with his middle and index finger stroking the roof of Lady Sparrow's vagina, his fingers operated on this learned instinct. She didn't notice it much either; the individual sensations of his tongue flicking at her clit, his fingers pushing against the resistance of her muscles, and the fingertips massaging her overloaded her comprehension. All she could do was sit there, hand tensed around the edge of her desk, shaking from the fantastic distress of her nerves.

While she could still speak, Lady Sparrow yanked Drew's head away by his hair and made him stare up at her with his hazy, half-closed eyes. He was panting, mouth hanging open, cum and saliva splashed across his face.

"You look braindead, sweetheart," she informed him in a strained but bubbly giggle. "Lights are on... no one's home."

He nodded, but his expression didn't shift. The only noticeable change from him was a quickening of his curved fingers. Lady Sparrow laughed and gave him the back of her hand to wake him up. He yelped; his fingers sped up again. He blinked out of his daze and replaced it with an alert look.

"I'm beginning to think this is what you wanted all along. You knew I was too busy to play... but you're just too fucking obsessed with me... to let me go. You'd do anything... all for my attention."

"Anything Lady Sparrow, anything for your attention," Drew repeated.

"You're obsessed with your mistress, right?"

"Obsessed. I can't think about anything other than serving you."

"You flatter me, pet... almost as much as you repulse and annoy me."

Her needs for conversation met, Lady Sparrow cupped her hand behind Drew's head and brought him back between her thighs, which had begun to sweat from pressing and writhing against the sides of his face. The fingers slowed their rhythmic pushes and curls as Drew blanketed her clitoris; the warmth and wetness of his tongue were nearly indiscernible from that of her own flesh. He trudged up deliberately, extending the duration of unbearable contact to her most sensitive nerves and drawing from her an exhausted moan that oscillated in pitch and passion. His lips surrounded the small bundle and smothered it in a carnivorous embrace. There was no escape from the caress, no break in the stride of his pumping fingers.

Lady Sparrow's concerns fell away, like glacier shards crumbling into the sea. The essay and the exam, the presentation and the confederacy of dunces, the imminent deadlines and dwindling hours of the day. The need to think. The need to be busy. The need to keep her volume down.

"You ready for me to cum, little bitch? Huh?" she called out.

The need to stay composed. The need to hold onto her tension. The need to resist the blooming rush of ecstasy seeping into her bloodstream. The need to stay bottled up.

She had the need to explode.

"You..."

Then she didn't.

"Ahhh fuck!"

Lady Sparrow jolted in her seat, doubled over and grabbed Drew's hair to tear him away. His digits kept stroking her screaming nerve endings, a sensation that quickly turned torturous as it began to overwhelm her. Her hands snatched his wrist and saved herself from another agonizing pump at her tender pussy. His fingers were still deep inside her; he tried to remove them, but she dug her nails into his skin to stop him.

"Don't... too much... holy shit..."

As much as it pained her to have his fingers inside her, feeling them move even the slightest millimeter was angry, excruciating fire that she couldn't endure. She braced herself against his wrist and fought to catch her breath. Drew nuzzled her damp thigh, offering a series of gentle, grateful kisses that dampened it further.