The Sentimental Succubus

Again, that pitiful emotion shame sickened me.

"Let's talk, then," I said.

The human grew calmer, but the ghost of his previous terror still lingered. I felt guilty, then, as well. Yes, guilt as well!

I didn't know until then what such a thing was."

"Can you describe the sensation?" asked Forneus.

"It's very difficult," Lavandé replied. "It resembles an iciness in the stomach, a tightness of the chest, like something inside you is sinking."

"I see," said Forneus, scribbling hurriedly.

Lavandé continued. "He gestured towards the bed. I sat down on it. It gave a little with my weight but was comfortable. The human looked at me. He kept his eyes steadily on mine. I realised, then, that he was striving not to look at my body. Did it not please him?

No. He was merely embarrassed by my, as he saw it, 'nakedness'. That ludicrous human sensitivity!

"Lavandé," he began. "I-"

He lowered his eyes. Whatever he wanted to say, he was struggling to express it.

"Yes?"

He raised his gaze. "Why did you come back?"

I stared back. Sitting on that bed in that tiny room with this human I was the most anxious I'd ever been in my existence. I placed my hands in my lap, entwined my claws. "I... truly, I don't know. I was feeling sick. I need orgone."

"You need orgone to live, right?"

I nodded.

"Can't you take it from..." He frowned at the thought. "... from other humans?"

"I can, but..." I left the rest unspoken.

"I'm happy to give you my orgone," the human said. He lowered his blushing face.

I gasped and turned my face away, scandalised by the pink colour I'd glimpsed on his cheeks. "I don't need a human's charity! If I require your orgone, I will take it."

"But-" he said.

Anger fuelled by shame and guilt surged in me. I leaped to my feet and strode towards him while he sat there, watching, the expression on his face enigmatic. He was both afraid and aroused, orgone streaming off him in intermittent waves. He raised his arms as if to embrace me. The movement enraged me further. I grasped him by his upper arms and lifted him straight up off his chair. A succubus, as you know, has strength which belies her slender appearance. He struggled, but my grip was inexorable.

I turned and threw him clear across the room and onto the bed. He bounced once, tried to right himself, but by then I was upon him.

"Wait," he gasped.

"No," I said. Standing over him I pressed a foot against his chest. "You will not give me your orgone. I will take it from you."

He struggled beneath me, in vain of course. I slid my foot off and straddled him, grabbing his wrists and holding them down against the bed. I could feel his hardness bulging from his pyjama bottoms against my sex. For all his protests and struggling he was deeply aroused.

"No!" he cried. "No, not like this. Please, Lavandé!"

I sat up, lifting one of my feet so that I could hook a claw in the waistband of his pyjamas and pull them down. His member pounced out and stood up hard in the air.

I drew my already swollen sex across the head of his hardness. He was emitting more orgone now and I fed, famished, his energy streaming into me.

I slid down onto him.

He burst out with a cry that sounded like anguish, but could only have been pleasure. Delight was already spearing up along my spine. As I began to move my hips I looked down at him.

"Ah! You say no, but your body-"

I stopped.

He'd covered his eyes with the crook of his arm, unable to bear the sight of me, and his mouth was contorted in a grimace. He seemed on the verge of weeping.

His anguished cry had been just that, and now he fell to sobbing. Horrified, I let go of his wrists and slid off him.

"I... I am..."I didn't know what to say, babbling as if I was some mindless wandering spirit.

He wiped at his eyes with his hands.

"I'm sorry." I turned away and slid off the bed. "I don't know why I came here. I'll bother you no longer."

"No, wait!" he cried. "Don't go, Lavandé! Please don't go."

I turned. He was at the end of the bed, reaching out for me. His eyes were swollen red, wet with tears.

Those fingers. He still wished to touch me, even after I'd tried to...

I raised my own hand. What had it looked like in the picture? I reached forward, touched the tip of my fingers to his.

Warmth flooded me then, a powerful, all-encompassing warmth, the mother of that earlier one that had touched me. I jerked my hand away, terrified.

I looked at him there, sitting on the bed, staring at me in confusion. His vulnerability touched me. I'd wronged him. Why had I expected a human to act any differently from the way he'd acted? There was a reason that harvesting is done with the male asleep and dreaming.

The thought of the pain I'd caused him made my chest ache with a second bitter taste of guilt.

It was all my fault.

"Please Lavandé," he said. "Come here. You can take my orgone, but just..." He looked up at me from under those thick lashes of his. "Please be gentle with me."

I'd been on the point of leaving, but his words rang true. Was I to forgo orgone because of my stupid pride? A succubus does not torment men, but pleases them. I was no torturing demon, like Migraine or biting Envy.

Was it wrong to please him, then? If being gentle would please him, then I would be gentle.

I felt my hunger grow. The warmth transmuted that hunger into something stranger still. I desired to feel his body under mine, to feel the touch of his soft skin for the sake of feeling it, not just as part of the process of drawing the potent orgone from his body.

I took a step forward. Joy burst onto the human's face as he coaxed me closer.

"Lavandé," he murmured. "I'm yours."

I'm yours.

The words touched and excited me. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing to have orgone offered to you as a gift. Did everything have to be taken?

I climbed onto the bed. Confusion still surged in my heart, ignited by that strange warmth and the pain that had come with it. I straddled him. He looked up at me, his eyes eager, but still tinged by nervousness.

Such foolishness. To allay his fears I ran a hand over his chest. It was a perfunctory gesture, intended just to calm him since touch seemed important to humans, but as I did it I found myself enjoying it. He closed his eyes and produced gentle murmurs.

I took my other hand and eased it along his smooth side. His skin was soft, so unlike my own toned body. He gasped as my claws brushed against his ribs.

"Sorry," I said. A smile crept onto my face. What a strange new thing this was! It was like an extension of the teasing that is taught as a technique to new succubi, but as I performed it, that delicious warmth inside me grew.

Delicious? Oh yes, by now I had learned to enjoy it. Enjoying a malady, a disease? Who knew what it truly was. Perhaps it was an enchantment of some sort. The warmth ebbed and flowed through me as I delighted him with my touch.

The human lifted his hands up to my sides and let his fingers trace the curved contour of my waist, then went higher, slipping timidly over my breasts. My nipples were hard, and the sensation of his palms covering them, the gentle stroking of his fingertips on the skin of my breasts made me bite my lip.

He was exciting me, with such a simple touch! Yet it was the tenderness of that touch, the warmth it engendered in me...

"Lavandé?"

"Yes?"

His eyes were shy. "Can I kiss you?"

"No," I said, horrified. Didn't he know? But of course, how could he know? So few humans these days even believed in demons, so why would they know anything about succubi? "No succubus may survive a human's kiss," I explained.

I knew I shouldn't have told him. I wasn't afraid of him using the knowledge against me, but rather that, ignorant of the dangers, he might kiss me when I was distracted and thus doom me to immediate destruction.

"Oh," he murmured. He was disappointed. "C-can I hug you, then?"

I shrugged. "Do as you wish, just no kissing. Of the lips, I should say. Kissing elsewhere is permissible." My face grew warm and I knew I was blushing.

He sat up, then, and embraced me. His warmth enveloped me and I took joy in it. I felt his lips against my neck and I shivered.

"What's the matter? Is... is it okay to kiss you there?"

"Yes," I said. "Do it again."

He did.

And so the two of us engaged in fornic-, well, rather we had sex, as the humans call it. It was slow, and gentle, so different from what we'd done before, and yet its joys were equivalent, if not greater for all their novelty and the way they fed that warmth inside me. His every touch, the tender caresses of his lips and tongue across my body, fed that growing fire inside me. And delicious, too, was the orgone that flowed from him, flowed like an endless spring from him. I had my fill, and then some, until he ended his sweet thrusts inside me, crying out and spilling his seed into my belly as I held his shivering body against mine, digging my talons into his back and crying myself from the overflow of orgone that wracked my over-replete body with wave after wave of pleasure.

He slumped back, exhausted, gasping and wincing from the scratches I'd left on his back. I moved to get off him but he took hold of my hands.

"Do you have to go right away? Can't we cuddle?""

The courtroom was utterly silent. All present were hanging on Lavandé's every word, horrified to the point of dumbness.

Lavandé dropped her gaze. "I'm sorry, Your Horror. I know my account is shockingly depraved. It's just... it's just that I wish to be honest with the court."

The courtroom gasped as one.

"'Honest'?" Forneus shook her head in disbelief.

"Oh dear, oh dear," muttered Abraxas.

Lavandé swallowed and continued:

"Blushing, I consented to be cuddled. In truth, I was eager to try this 'cuddling'. Such affection being alien to our kind, I remembered how his tender touch had wrought such a novel pleasure in me, and I submitted to being drawn down onto the bed beside him. He embraced me and I did the same. I was eager to keep my lips from his, so after a few anxious moments face-to-face, I turned him around so I could embrace him from behind. I felt safer that way. He understood, nestling back against me. He seemed even smaller in my arms this way. He quickly fell asleep. Wholly ignorant of sleep as a demon, I lay there, holding him as he slept.

I was filled, filled to overflowing, with both orgone and his seed, and full, too, of that warmth, that strange new sensation. It fluttered, like something blossoming in my chest, growing all the stronger with him in my arms. At last the feeling overwhelmed me and I slipped my arms from around him. And yet I didn't want to just leave him as I had done in the past. But how could I...?

I saw the desk with the papers on it. I took one which was blank. Not knowing how to draw or write, I instead placed a palm upon it. I lifted my hand away, revealing its smouldering imprint.

I left it on top of his other papers. He would understand my message, somehow. I had no doubt of that. We seemed to understand each even without speech, now.

As I descended back to Hell, my chest twinged with that earlier pain. It visited me more and more often, now. Only by throwing myself into the everyday duties of a succubus in the Satanic mills was I able to forget it.

And yet, I could not forget his face.

From then on I visited him every evening. I knew I was risking everything, that I'd already broken innumerable demonic protocols. But that warmth - it was a drug to me. The orgone was secondary now. Our sexual relations were ever delightful, but more delightful still were those gentle moments before and after. Were it not for them, the pain of our parting, the agony of being separated would have been too much for me.

Often now we talked together before sex. I'd grown curious about him, and of course he was curious about me. One night I was sitting on his bed, looking about his room. Since I'd started to visit him it'd become a little tidier, but it still had the appearance of a cave to me, or rather a prison.

"Are you here under arrest?" I suddenly asked.

He laughed. "I guess you could say that."

"What was your crime?" I asked eagerly. Such topics are of course always of interest to a demon.

"Just too sensitive, I guess," he said, shrugging. "If you can call that a crime."

"So you're too good a person?" I had no idea that humans had similar protocols to us in Hell!

He laughed louder that time. "Oh, no. No way. I'm not anything like a good person. It's just..." He inclined his head towards the tiny slit of a window which was all the basement had. "Out there is... well, you know that fear you have of being kissed?"

I nodded. I'd told him much about being a demon. He'd been a very good listener.

"If I go outside I have that fear running through me every single moment I'm out there."

"What are you afraid of? Demons?"

He chuckled. "Demons aren't scary. Well, not now, anyway." The sweetness of his smile melted me. "No. I'm scared of people."

"Ah." I thought I understood. Humans are, after all, capable of such a greater degree of evil than demons, since our own angelic ancestry prevents us from the most extreme examples of cruelty and sadism."

The jury murmured, uncomfortable.

"There is no need to veer off on a tangent about such unpleasant matters of ancient history, Miss Mamorra," said Onoskelis. "Please keep to the point."

"I will, Your Horror.

I turned to the human. "So you're your own gaoler?"

"Yes," he replied. "That's exactly it."

"So you wish to escape this place?"

"Well, it's not as easy as all that," he explained.

"What if I was to go with you?"

He blinked at me. "Go where? Outside?"

He looked panicked. I placed my hand on his. I knew that such a gesture was a calming one for humans. "Why not at night, when there are no other humans around? Humans are what you're afraid of, right?"

He shrugged. "Well, I used to go out during the night. But it's been a long time."

"I'll be there to protect you," I said. "From demons and humans."

He looked at me. The panic had left his eyes, but he remained unsure. "If you were with me, I think I might be able to. But just for a little while." He glanced up at the ceiling. "We'll have to sneak past my parents, though. They sleep pretty lightly."

"Oh, don't concern yourself about that," I said, taking his hand. "Are you ready?"

He swallowed. "What, right now?"

"If you get scared, we can come straight back."

"Okay," he said. He closed his eyes. "I think I'm ready."

It was a simple matter. With all the orgone I'd been harvesting from him, I'd grown in power. Lending the enchantment of phasing through objects to another was simplicity itself, now.

We passed though the wall and then rose up through the earth. With our feet hovering just above the ground I removed the enchantment. We grew solid again and landed with a jolt.

We were standing in the street outside his home.

"Can I open my eyes?" he asked.

"There was never any need to close them," I replied, amused.

He opened them. At the sight of the darkened street around us he grabbed hold of my arm and clung to me, looking about in alarm.

"It's okay," I said. His closeness was filling me with that strange warmth again and I covered him with a wing. The gesture seemed to calm him somewhat and he turned to me.

"I'm outside!"

"Yes," I said. "There's no one here. But even if there was, you'd be safe with me beside you."

He nodded and brought his body closer to mine.

"Let's go for a walk," I said.

"What if someone sees us?" he murmured.

"No one will see us," I said. "I've rendered us invisible."

I led him down the street. After a while his grip on me loosened. The streets were empty, the ights pooling their glow on the bare concrete. It was beautiful, in its way, the dark shapes of the homes and the buildings reminding me of our own forests of shadow. No one was awake. Only a few houses had lights still in them. I could sense the humans inside, giving off their gentle waves of orgone. There were the different flavours: the young, the old, the satiated, the hungry, the male, the female.

Silence, except for the padding of his feet and the clicking of my talons. This sleeping world was ours, belonged to just the two of us. And yet he remained nervous.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. Such a gesture, I thought, would calm him. He sighed and covered my hand with his own. Then he drew my hand down and entwined his fingers in mine.

I was startled, but allowed him to. Warmth suffused me, rising to my head so that I grew dizzy. So this was holding hands! The picture he'd drawn did not do it justice.

"Thank you, Lavandé," he said. He drew closer and placed his head on my shoulder.

I thought I might burn up from the liquid fire that spread through me, then.

We didn't go far that night. I could sense the rapid beating of his heart whenever there was a noise or some movement out among the shadows of the city. After a while we returned to his home. That night our sex was even slower and gentler than usual. He'd been through a lot, after all.

And so it went every evening from then on. I'd take him outside and we would walk together. Often we talked, like we did before and after sex, but not always. At times the silence was just too beautiful, too precious. The warmth of his hand, that scent of his body that I knew so well, now, was enough. I enjoyed our little walks together very much. Were they what humans called a date, I wondered?"

Forneus broke in. "Your Horror, the prosecution seeks a definition for this word."

"If you would, Miss Mamorra," asked Onoskelis.

"Please allow me," said Abraxas suddenly. He had been silent for a long time. "A date is a preliminary encounter where two humans meet each other to ascertain whether they are suitable romantic matches. It usually involves attending places of entertainment or refreshment."

"Romantic?" Forneus returned to energetically scratching on her notepad.

"Like the little guy said," said Lavandé. "Even then I knew such thoughts were foolish. After all, demons and humans are in no way compatible. And yet. And yet, I felt good being around this human. I sought his company, desired to have sex with him exclusively, enjoyed conversing with him. I also wished to protect him, to make him feel better. That was why I was here with him, after all. I wanted him to be happy. His happiness made me happy, happier than I'd ever been before. But then, of course, before I'd met him, I'd had no idea what happiness was.

At last a night came when we encountered another human on our walk. I'd been taking him out earlier and earlier, acclimatising him to places frequented by people. Those human vehicles called cars often passed us and occasionally we heard and saw people far off. Such things had alarmed him at first, but he quickly grew used to them. I was proud of his readiness to face his fears.

This night, however, someone actually approached us. He was a male, about the same age as my human, and had been drinking. As he drew near my human clung to me closer.

"Lavandé!" he whispered in alarm.

"Don't worry," I whispered. "I'm here."

He walked past us and then stopped and turned to look straight at my human.

"Hey bro. Which way is the 7-11?" he asked.

My human stared at him. Then he raised a trembling finger and pointed further down the street, behind us.

"O-over there," he stammered.

"Thanks buddy," said the drunk human, and then he stumbled away.

"Lavandé!" he whispered to me hoarsely as the young man drunkenly crossed to the other side of the street. "He could see me!"

"Of course he could," I said. "I can't really make humans invisible, you know."

"So you lied to me," he said, frowning.