Page 34 of Soul Food

AMIT

Night had fallen and Ruth had gone home with the driver.

Now here I was like always.

There was something about habits that proved to be horrendous. Some were worse than others, but this one was lining up to be the worst of them all.

Because for the last decade, I’ve watched her on most nights.

And in those nights, I’d grown increasingly aware of Ruth. The way she worked and moved, slept and ate, bathed and smiled…maybe too much. Definitely,entirelytoo much.

I couldn’t stop myself then, nor could I stop myself now, from simply seeking her out—just to stare upon her in any given way. Her habits were memorized, ingrained so deeply into my system that she walked around inside my head like a ghost, but even that wasn’t enough. I had to see her.

On the nights when she pulled her covers up to her chin and slipped a hand between her legs, I knew what she was doing. I could practically smell the ripeness of her sex—decadent and spicy like I imagined her soul would taste, and it didn’t help that I could see the shimmer in her soul as she reached her peak. A mere hour from leaving my side she was pleasuring herself again.

She made me a stranger inside my reaping form. All I could feel was the ghost of my human cock twitching in rhythm to her every whim. As much as I detested being here, doing this, making me loathe myself further watching the same human over and over, I still did it. Watching her wasn’t needed to eat her soul, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d grown to enjoy her life as if it were my own. Her pleasure? Mine to watch. Her voice? Mine to listen to. Her legs spreading? Mine to keep anyone else from parting. My thoughts had long since twisted with Ruth. Because she was entirelymine.

“Sire, you’re doing it again,” Lars observed. I skimmed over his tiny stature beside me. I hadn’t even realized the gremlin was here, especially when he knew how much I disliked him being present while she was…

I glanced up at the lights flickering throughout the house. She had turned all of them off when she laid down, but that didn’t seem to matter. Was it something I did causing the light show?

She moaned as her legs widened, tossing her head from side to side, rubbing it into the pillow. The flickering grew worse as my own need for release, just as tightly wound as hers, grew. We reached our peak simultaneously—hers ended with a satisfied cry while my reaping form flared along with the flashing lights. Her knees crumbled, the lights stopped, and it was over.

My release hadn’t been physical while in this form, but it was sexual to the highest degree. For it was my very soul yearning for Ruth every time she shuddered.

“Do not smack me, Sire, but how…” He pointed toward a panting Ruth. “How is this not wrong when I’m not allowed to play with my food?”

Anger rippled through my form as I realized what he implied.

Lars backed away, covering his head with his hands. Finally, he held them high in surrender.

“Lars,” I whispered darkly.

“Yes?” he said hesitantly.

“The question is, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Yes, right, of course… I’m not to be anywhere near her when she’s touching herself.” My patience thinned as he spoke. “You are behaving awfully strange around this soul, Sire. I will be happy when this is all over.”

I threw him across the room. His ugly green frame smacked into a picture on the wall, and it fell beside him. Ruth jumped up and made a noise in her throat as she turned on a lamp. Her wild curls were tangled while her glassy gaze still held remnants of her self-induced pleasure. Her fear-filled eyes darted around the room until they landed on the picture.

“Now look what you did…” Lars placed his hands on his hips and shook his head with a tsk-tsk sound that grated on my nerves. “So much for her soul, you keep disrupting it more and more each day, whether it be in your human form or…” Lars rambled on and on with his pointless complaining. As I tuned him out, I wondered why I bother keeping him around.

Chapter Ten

RUTH

If it hadn’t been for Jayne, I wouldn’t have gotten up the next morning. She yanked the cover off me around ten, the air conditioning biting into my bare skin as I tried to snatch back the blankets but she was quicker. At that moment, I regretted giving her all the codes and passwords to my life.

“What are you still doing asleep?” she asked.

I groaned, pressing my face into the pillow. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

A picture falling off the wall just as you were drifting off would give anyone a heart attack, especially when you were very aware of certain soul-stealing demons lurking in the world.

The shudder that wracked my body now wasn’t from the chilly air.

“You never called like you said you would,” she grumbled. The mattress dipped under her weight. I lifted my head from the pillow. Her brown hair was slicked completely back into a tidy office bun. She wore a red pencil skirt with a white top looking cute as hell when I knew she was no doubt trying to look sexier. “I want to hear all about what happened when you and Amit went for drinks.”

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