6. Gulfstream
(part 1)
The back balcony overlooked the yard; smallish, wedge-shaped, shadowed by big trees. Surrounded on three sides by fences and on the fourth by our house, a gate on each side. It was kind of a long way down.
"Shit," Mari said, handed me her boots and clutch, said "hold these", pulled off her calf-length hose, grabbed me by the waist and fucking threw me over her shoulder, jumped up with me to the edge of our roof, hind claws scrabbling on the composite shingles, and jumped over the fence into our new neighbors' back yard, cradling me like an oversized baby as we descended to keep me cushioned when we landed, her wrap flapping behind like a cape, or wings, me flooding with pleasure from her compulsions as soon as she grabbed my waist. I saw two people on our back deck look up at us, mouths in prominent "0"s.
We ran to the far corner of our neighbor's yard, behind all the nice new ornamentals, then Mari *carried* me over their back fence as she jumped it easily, barefoot in her bombshell leather catsuit and long leather wrap, claws retracted, me holding her ... boots. She put me down. We were now on the back lawn of a professional center, buncha office types behind thick windows getting quite a show if any had been watching. I know one guy taking a smoke break at a rubberized picnic table sure did.
Mari reached for her clutch, pulled out a phone as we walked, punched in some numbers, said into it "Come get me. The office park behind where you dropped me off."
We walked around the buildings as she continued lacing up her overflowing bodice, then sat at a bench just inside the sidewalk. She took her stockings and boots from me and pulled them on. A yellow-gold Lamborghini drove up. The passenger door opened.
"Find a bus," Mari said through it. "Go home and take a nap for a few hours. The car will turn up." The driver, some brogrammer not born within five thousand miles, got out and moved to the sidewalk, looking mournful, befuddled, bereft. Mari climbed into the driver's seat. The car was a lot lower to the ground than the ancient Alfa coupé in my garage and growled a heckuva lot louder. We roared off. I heard a siren in the distance.
"What was your plan?" I asked.
"I have a Gulfstream at the airport," she said.
I nodded. "That'll do for now, though we'll need to lose this car first. Too visible. I bet you could get us a ride from some coffeeshop." It would've been 25 minutes to the airport, but it took a few minutes more to park in some up-and-coming neighborhood just beyond the airport runway. Mari exchanged looks with a café patron coming out the door for about six seconds, then he drove us. Our halting conversation, which had started on the way, tottered on.
"Bob," she'd begun, "I don't know what's happening to me. You weren't supposed to be able to break control. And I don't know why I seem to be liking you so much, or why I'm not just taking what I want, which is all I've ever known how to do."
"I don't think the spell you got was exactly the one you might've thought," I said. "That witch you visited may have planted something to guarantee that something would go wrong. How well do you get along with her or him?"
Mari grimaced. "Maybe not so well. I might've been a little ... forceful, even before I moved into this new form. I can be like that."
I gave her a few seconds, trying not to nod. "Mari, this new form of yours is incredibly powerful. I know you already have some sense of that, but I don't know if you understand what a beacon it is, what a temptation for someone with the power to take it from you, to use it to master you, and there are people out there with that kind of power, like your witch friend and probably a lot stronger."
She looked at me, suspicious, maybe a little threatened, in a way that suggested I'd better not ...
"Not me," I said. "I don't need or want that kind of life, and I also don't ... well, I don't want to see you get hurt." That's about the time we parked at the café. Her gaze was searching, evaluating, wondering, swirling spirals and all, her eyes as enthralling as ever.
Riding together in someone's back seat barely a minute later, she held my hand, her thumb in my palm, fingers curled against the back of it. Not so much companionably or lovingly as 'I'm going to extend my claws through your helpless pinioned hand if you so much as hint at wanting to do anything I don't like.'
"Right now you feel kinda like an unattended nuke," I said, trying to keep steady, "available for use or misuse by the first bad actor to happen by. And in an airplane your visibility to such an actor will be much greater. It may be just dumb luck or raw speed that you didn't get taken on your way here, but now I think antennæ will be up and waiting for your return. You need to change back before you take off."
"And there's something else ... it's not just that this amazing new form of yours is vulnerable to the right kind of power, it could also be vulnerable to affection in ways you're not used to. And frankly, um ... it might go both ways. I'm a happily married man and don't want anything about my life to change, but I ... ... your witch friend might have built in these vulnerabilities as a kind of booby-trap."
"Heh heh, he said boobies,"
came a disembodied voice from unconscious past.
"I'll need to power up before changing back," Mari said, "the witch made that much clear ... if I don't I could end up crippled."
"I've been working on that," I said. "While I was ... um ... eating you out in my dining room, I came to understand something about energy exchange, which we were doing a lot of at the time, and there are many different ways to get energy, not just smoking hot sex. There's wind flowing over a smoking hot car, for instance, and I was feeding you that on our ride here ... I wondered if you felt it. But I also got a sense for the limits of your were-tigress spell, and, well ... you'll need more. We both know how." We got out of the car, Mari ensuring the driver would go quietly on his way without remembering a thing. She was still holding my hand as we walked to the hangar, more companionably now, one finger brushing up and down my palm, which was making me a little weak in the knees and more than a little hard.
"I guess I did sense that," she said, "I figured it was just the thrill of driving the Lambo, but ... that was nice of you." She smiled warmly, put her other hand over mine, possessive. "I'll try to return the favor." In her boots like this, she was a couple inches taller than me. One more unprecedented tick in a life spinning far beyond normal for me, a tall man, to look up into the eyes of an amorous, powerful, crazy-sexy woman. To say nothing of her spirals making my world spin. She put her arm around my waist as we climbed the steps into her jet.
"Is this your plane?" I asked, "or did you just rent or borrow it or ..."
Her lips closed over mine. There was an enormous bed in the cabin, bigger than king-sized. She put long muscular arms under my fleece, lifted it over my head, wrapped them around me and under my ass, lifted all of my 230 lbs easily. She was so damned strong.
"Get ready, smart guy," she said, then pushed her tongue into my mouth, let go with one arm to flip a switch behind her that raised the steps behind us, still easily holding me off the floor with her tongue deep inside me but now with just one arm, so much pleasure coursing through me at this new revelation of her power, then with both arms carried me in front of her to the edge of the bed, let go so I fell backwards onto it, and leaned down onto me. She was so damned heavy.
"Take off my wrap," she said, her eyes half closed, raising herself a little so I could comply.
"Goooood boy," she crooned, and I felt more tendrils of shivering pleasure. A lot of what she'd told me to feel in response to her words and actions earlier must still be in place. She climbed onto the bed, straddled my stomach.
"Strip," she said softly, and I drew up my legs to reach past her, removed my shoes, socks, pants, boxers. The fingers of one of her hands inside the neck of my T-shirt, the claws of that hand extended slowly, consciously reminding me of their power, their danger, the backs of her other fingers playing up and down through my t-shirt over my nipples.
"Mmmmmmm," she crooned, then noticing my eyes locked on hers, said "don't be shy about watching me work ... enjoy the show, sweet moth. I know I will."
I tore my eyes from hers, which wasn't easy, and was rewarded by one of my first opportunities to directly appreciate the vision of her fabulous breasts, the deep canyon between them, still encased in tight, supple leather, nipples showing through as much smaller bumps than I knew they would be when released. Her claws sliced through my shirt. I was going to need some new clothes, and a good thing it was that when she left, as I assumed she still would, she hadn't shredded more of them.
Wanda: "What about my tits?"