Not me.
Not my family.
They were the definition of trash.
Unwashed and underfed with far too many people living in one trailer with smoke always billowing out—cigarette, pot, meth. My parents' "friends" were their dealers. And while I never told a single soul this, my mom used to do favors in trade for the drugs that kept her and my father going.
We were the trailer with the trash piled high in the backyard, with old, discarded couches in the front, getting pissed on by all the neighborhood cats and burrowed inside by the local opossums or rats.
We were the house that the police got called to every couple of weeks. For disturbing the peace, for domestic violence calls, or to look for one of my parents' friends who had warrants out on them.
And it killed me that everyone else knew that, and would never let me live it down. They'd found every single opportunity to remind me of my cheap clothes, my choppy kitchen table haircuts, my shoes full of holes.
I dreamed of suits and fancy dresses, of food in the fridge and cabinets, of going out to eat, of—and this was my most coveted dream of all—going on vacation, seeing a city somewhere, experiencing something other than my small-town life.
So, of course, when I came across that, I latched on hard. I would have agreed to anything to make them take me with them into their fancy lives.
The cost, at the time, didn't matter.
I never saw myself being attracted to anything other than their sophistication.
Yet here I was, feeling a swirling in my stomach that was a close cousin to actual arousal, while looking at a rough-around-the-edges biker.
He was tall and fit with dark hair and a matching beard. He had dark, stormy blue eyes. But, and this was strange, matching red birthmarks in each eye.
Red?
Red made no sense.
Well, no, not by human standards, of course.
But he wasn't human at all.
"Your eyes..." I said, trailing off, not wanting to be insulting.
"Demon thing," he said, shrugging, as he grabbed pumpkin seeds next, pushing them into my mouth as well.
"What..." I started, getting cut off when a whole broccoli floret was shoved into my mouth.
"We covered this. Fire and brimstone and metal pokers up the ass. Demon," he said, shrugging. "Chew," he demanded, frustrated when he couldn't shove the dried fruit in.
"Trying," I grumbled, wincing a bit at the mixture of tastes in my mouth.
"Got these things too," he said, going into the bag, shaking a bottle of iron pills at me. "What do you take? Four or five?" he asked, ripping into the seal under the cap and tossing the cotton back into the bag.
"One," I told him, salivating a bit over the bottle of water in the bag. Wash away the taste of my makeshift breakfast.
"You have no color," he grumbled at me, shaking two into his hand.
"One later," I said, shaking my head. I was sure I could use the extra supplement after Davor took so much from me for so long, but I didn't want to go overboard on the first day.
"Fine. Suit yourself," Drex said, shoving it in my mouth, then holding the bottle of water up for me to sip. "Chew faster," he demanded, shoving the fruit in my mouth. And, I might add, not gently. The man didn't seem to have a gentle bone in his body. "We have to hit the road in ten if we are going to make it to our first stop before dark."
"Looking... me," I managed between bites.
"I don't know. Probably. That old fuck probably wants you back."
"Davor."
"Yeah. His wrinkly ass. The fuck you see in him anyway?" Drex asked, reaching for some cereal, cupping it in his hand over my mouth, and letting it fall in.
The man would make a terrible caretaker or parent. But he was getting the job done, I guess. And I did find myself suddenly ravenous.
"Didn't have a choice," I said between bites as he just kept putting more and more food in my mouth.
"Thought that was part of the deal. You pick the life."
"They loan us out," I said, losing my appetite the more we talked about it. "Friends come to visit. They need to drink..."
"Do you have to fuck them?" he asked, point-blank. I guess the bluntness shouldn't have taken me by surprise. Everything about the man suggested he wasn't for subtlety.
"No. It's a choice," refusing the next bite, motioning to the water instead. I was pretty sure I could have grabbed it myself, but I was finding it oddly comforting to have him do it for me. "And I wouldn't choose to... do that...with him."
"Did you fuck the other bloodsuckers?" he asked as I drank some of the water.
"I... yes," I admitted, feeling a swirling in my stomach. Normally, I would have blushed with embarrassment. But I lost the ability to blush around the same time I started needing to wear sweaters outside in the summer. Anemia, and all that.
"Why do you look sick?" he asked, and I noticed two lines formed between his brows when he frowned. "Who cares who you've fucked?" he asked, shrugging. "You know how many human women I've taken for a ride?" he asked, lips curving up as his eyes danced.
That look, that cocky, proud of himself look, yeah, it was making that inkling of attraction from before start to grow and build until there was no denying what it was.
A dull, yet insistent, ache started throbbing between my thighs, reminding me how long it had been since I'd felt the touch of a man, felt his hands roaming over my skin, finding spots of pleasure, exploiting them until I peaked, then slipping inside me, moving with me.
God, I thought I'd lost the urge for sex.
I guess I'd simply lost the urge to have sex with my captors. No matter how attractive they were. No matter how many nice words they fed me.
But the urge was still there, the need to feel close with someone, to get the relief of an orgasm.
Something keen and dark crossed Drex's eyes then, almost as if he knew exactly what I was thinking.
Did demons read minds?
Or was the truth simply written all over my face?
"I'd let you take a ride too," he said, arranging everything back in the plastic bags. "But right now, we need to ride my bike, and get the fuck out of here," he said, moving toward the door where he'd dropped a large backpack, reaching inside to grab a handful of clothes, then shoving the food inside. "We gotta get you dressed first, though," he said, making his way back to me. "Can't have you on the bike in a fucking cocktail dress in the middle of the day," he explained, kneeling in front of me, grabbing the hem of my dress, and working it upward.
A bigger woman would have told him that I was pretty sure I could undress and redress myself.
Hell, a sane woman would do that.
Sane women didn't let random demon bikers strip them out of their clothing after barely knowing them. And being drugged by them. Regardless of the circumstances.
But, apparently, sanity was no longer a trait I possessed.
Because I let Drex slide the dress up over my thighs, yanking hard to get it out from under my butt I was still sitting on, then pulling it higher. Up my sides, his knuckles teasing up my ribs, the sides of my breasts, then yanking the dress free.
"Fuck," he hissed as he tossed it aside, noticing my bare breasts, my barely-there nude thong.
He didn't look away. He didn't protect my modesty.