She doesn’t bother to finish. Mutants have certainly become known for inspiring terror in others.
Lacey doesn’t look scared as she keeps staring at me with the color back in her cheeks, her wide eyes curious instead of panicked. Windswept, maybe. Like she’d gotten off a rollercoaster instead of freefalling.
I nod quickly and try to look anywhere but at her. I never thought I would talk to her in person and didn’t realize how nervous it would make me. The Channel 6 News crew hasn’t done her justice in capturing how expressive her eyes are.
Then she reaches out and touches my wing, fingertips delicately gracing the thin skin, and a shiver runs down my insides at how good it feels. Oh God, now I’m panicking a little.
“Uh, stay safe, um, miss,” I manage to get out with some semblance of finality. I stand up on the balustrade, and from a floor this high, just let myself tip over the edge into the night. She rushes to look over the balcony’s edge as I catch the air current and take it a few streets over.
I spare a glance back when I feel safely enveloped by the dark again. She’s still standing where I left her, watching the sky.
My heart is pounding in my chest, to have been so near her, to have held her in my arms and felt the weight of her against me. It would not calm.
Swallowing, I angle myself toward home and try not to wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed a little longer. Maybe I would have just stayed on that balcony with her for the rest of the night, if she kept looking at me like that.
But I couldn’t. Maestro will be waiting for me.
4
Lacey
Channel 10 News has been playing that clip of the mutant diving off the side of the building to save me nonstop—just that one clip.
And I, in a completely non-obsessed way, keep watching.
At first, I thought the stomach-flipping sensations were because I had been literally falling out of the sky, but they return even when I’m on solid ground. Just seeing the footage of him arcing through the air does something to me.
It plays again—him swooping up to meet me on the edge of the balcony, his arm closing around me as his wings beat powerfully, taking off as the top floor of the building crumbles into dust. My rescuer’s long, pointed, blue tail is the last thing to disappear out of the frame before the clip repeats.
As many times as I watch it, I’m remembering the details the cameras weren’t close enough to capture. His skin is a different texture, sort of soft, like the inside of leather. His nose is flattened; there’s something almost catlike about it. The back of his hands leading down his knuckles are a little too fuzzy, the fur growing thicker and curling into little cowlicks. The black bodysuit stands out against the sky, outlining his lithe build, but up close the suit made it clear he wasn’t lacking muscle.
He moves like no mutant I’ve ever seen before. Where the others have all been shambling and staggered, he’s deft and quick. As wide as his wings span, it’s clear they’re light and thin,bat-like even. He pulls them in so close to his body it’s like they were never there and then opens them just as quickly to slow his descent. There’s something about his knees, the arched, clawed feet, they don’t quite bend the way a human’s would, but more like a deer or a lion’s would. I’ve never seen Dr. Maestro’s mutations change a body in a constructive way like that.
I’m not hung up over this guy. This mutant. I’m not.
I realize the irony in reassuring myself that as I pin a print-out of one of the blurry frames of him from that sent-in footage to part of my ooze investigation board.
He is part of the board; I’m not just pinning a picture of him to the inside of my closet door for no reason. Even if none of the pink yarn zigzagging across the rest of the newspaper clippings and printouts stuck to my wall connect to him. I mean, he’s a mutant, he has to connect to all this somehow. Even if only tangentially.
Somewhere in the middle of getting ready for the gala tonight, I lay down on my bed, transfixed. Whenever Laura Beckingham comes back on screen to start reading the traffic report, noting the delays and newly closed off streets due to all the rubble, I find myself staring at the sky.
I know he’s not just going to fly by my window, but a girl can hope.
It’s not obsessive, I remind myself as I slip my vibrator out of the bedside table drawer. The silicone is a little too cold, so I put it under my leg to warm it up, as I tug up my skirt and my knees fall away from each other. You can’t have a crush on a guy you’ve only spoken to once, only seen in person for a few seconds.
I mean, he’s a mutant, he works for the vile Dr. Maestro. Being attracted to one of his henchmen would be like unethicalor something, I don’t know. And obviously the dumbest thing I could do.
The clip of him flying up to meet me comes back on screen, and I suck in a breath. I trace my fingers lightly against my underwear, the fabric growing damp after a few strokes.
Falling like that had been like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The asphalt below rapidly approaching for a few terrifying moments, the air whipping past, the way I couldn’t control my movements at all. Being caught after falling was what my mind kept going back to, the almost gradual way his hands had come up around me, encircling me in his grip, gentle and then firm and strong.
Ok, maybe I’m obsessing a little. I don’t know how I’m supposed to react normally and apathetically when a mutant just drops out of the sky and rescues me, drops me, and rescues me again. Maybe it’s perfectly reasonable to want to tear the pants off a guy that saves you. Even if he is blue and a little demonic looking.
Laura comes back on screen after the only thirty seconds of footage of this guy in existence, and I’m back to looking out the window. The glimpse of something flying by excites me, before I realize it’s just a bird. My clit pulses with need as I trace my fingertip around it.
It wouldn’t be him. That would be absurd. He’s not going to come by and check on me, to give me another chance to talk to him. He’s not going to just drop by my window and see me touching myself.
A wave of heat floods my body at the thought, and I let it unfurl.
