Page 147 of Night's Fall
I shoved my hands into his sleep pants and dug my nails into his behind.
That did it.
In the end,Alekseihad to commMurielto tell the beings he was meeting that he’d be half an hour late.
ButIallowed myself time to laze and doze beforeIgot myself together, commedAntheme, and headed to my studio.
Chapter23
Blobs
That evening, beforeImade my way toMadamGarwah’s,Igot a text comm fromAlekseisharing he had a late meeting he couldn’t avoid, and as such,Ishould have dinner without him.
AlthoughIwas bummed he wasn’t going to be home whenIgot there,Iliked getting an everyday text from him about everyday stuff, like late meetings and dinner.
WhenIarrived back from class,I, with a tour guide ofComet, who seemed rather keen to show me the fullness of it (and he had a lot to say during the tour, butIwas sensing his approval, many more places to find trouble) finally took a tour of the penthouse.
The back hall led to the freight elevator, along with a full complement of laundry units, and the two bots who’d unpacked me.Theywere shut down and plugged into their chargers.
And nowIwas seeing how the bed got made, the clothes were picked up from the floor, andAleksei’smess when he was cooking was cleaned up, because he norIdid any of that.Butapparently, they were programed to slip out and take care of business when we weren’t around.
Pretty cool.
The upstairs, as noted, was his bedroom, but most of that level was taken up with his landing bay.
The rest was a cornucopia of awesomeness.
Yes, there were four fully kitted bedrooms with ensuites.Andthe wine room, which was large, stocked to the gills and had a sink, a small refrigerator and a full bar with all the complementary needs, like an array of sparkling clean glasses, and a drawer that opened that contained only ice.
There was alsoAleksei’smore formal office, which had a state-of-the-art holographic conference table (totally going to holo the girls in there one day).
There was a library with three walls of floor-to-ceiling books (real ones!) and a comfy seating area in the middle in which to hunker down and read.
There was a room that had a billiards and a poker table (and another full bar, wouldn’t want to have to walk down the hall to grab yourself a whisky in the middle of a game).
And there was a media room with the biggest screenI’dever seen, a massive square couch that was more like a couch-bed, a station that did have aBev-Buddy, along with aSnack-Sensation, because if you were in the middle of bingeing a show or watching a vid, you wanted to program in the soda or popcorn you had a hankering for and not have to mess with making it yourself.
I’d camped out there with myPalm, doing some back-and-forth text comms withMonique,GayleandCatabout the photo op, assuring them a task force was on the case about the gallery sitch (but not going into detail), and sharing the great news that my beast was stirring (I’dhad two more flutters since that morning!).Ialso received some updates on their lives (Gaylewas being closed-mouthed aboutSirk, which meantI’dhave to take it out of a group comm to get the skinny fromCatorMon).
I finished it by telling them we needed a get together, becauseIwasn’t going to go into detail over a text comm aboutAlekseiand me consummating our mating, and just how phenomenal that was.Thathad to be face to face.
We’d almost made a date beforeMoniquereminded me,Iwas now one part of a couple, and we would need to confirm afterImade sure it was cool withAleksei.
This did not bother me at all.
Truth told, it was thrilling, thinkingIfinally had someone in my life to check plans and schedules and leave digi-notes for.
I left them holding for confirmation, and with all three of my cats in attendance,Iwas munching some sour cream and cheese flavored potato blobs, sipping a grape sparkle and watchingTheyCamein theSunlight, a vid about theTrollInvasionthat was released a few decades ago (my troll skin was going to beso much better, ifIdid say so myself).
I felt his arrival (gods,Iloved that), but stayed whereIwas, becauseIknew he could find me easily (andIwas super comfy).
So this was asIwas whenAlekseientered the room.
I lost interest in the vid in favor of watching my mate wander in in shirtsleeves, the collar open, but still wearing his suit vest and trousers.
Yum.
He stood at the side of the couch-bed, gazing down at me. “Isthat your dinner?”
