Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties

Morning arrived quietly in Kelly’s apartment.

The curtains held the light back to a dim gold that sat along the edges of the window frame without fully committing to the room. The apartment was still and warm, the specific stillness of early hours when the city outside had not yet decided to be loud about the day.

Kelly was asleep against Liam’s chest, one arm across him, her breath slow and even, her blonde hair loose around her face and across his shoulder.

She was still in the bodysuit, or what remained of its dignity, the fabric spread across both of them in the loose arrangement of something that had stopped being a costume partway through the previous night and had become just the thing she was wearing.

Liam was awake.

He had been awake for several minutes, lying still, his eyes on the ceiling, his arm around her so she would not feel the absence of warmth when she stirred.

Then he felt it.

Not pain. Not exactly.

Something lower and more internal than pain, a specific pulling sensation in his chest that had a direction to it, like something being tugged from a distance, something that had been placed inside him the first time he had put the collar on Stella and had been quiet long enough that he had almost forgotten it was there.

It was not quiet now.

His jaw tightened.

He lay there for another moment, feeling the pull, calculating it, and then he moved.

He shifted slowly, lifting his arm from around her with the patience of someone moving through something fragile.

She stirred but did not wake, her breath catching once and then settling back into its slow rhythm.

He adjusted her body carefully, moving her from the position she was in against him to lying on the floor on her side, her head resting on the inside of her own arm, the bodysuit spread around her.

He looked at her for a moment.

Her chest rising and falling. The three hearts above her head, all full, all present, all exactly where they should be.

He got dressed.

Shirt first, then jacket, then he crouched and tied his shoes with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this in the dark before.

He stood and looked at Kelly one more time, on the floor in the morning light in her costume with her hair everywhere and her face carrying the complete peace of someone whose body had been through a great deal and had made it to the other side of it.

He went to her door and opened it slowly and pulled it closed behind him.

The corridor was empty at this hour, the building holding its morning quiet, the overhead lights at the dim setting they used before the day fully started.

He walked to the elevator and pressed the button.

The doors opened.

He stepped in.

There was someone already in it.

Standing in the back left corner with a dark hoodie pulled up over their head, their face pointed at the floor, their hands in the front pocket of the hoodie, their posture the posture of someone who was making themselves small in a shared space.

The doors closed.

The elevator began to descend.

Liam stood at the front of it and looked at the doors.

The pull in his chest was stronger in here.

Much stronger.

His hand moved before the rest of him had finished the thought, turning and covering the distance to the corner in one step and getting his hand around the person’s throat and pressing them back against the elevator wall with a force that was not gentle and was not trying to be.

The hoodie fell back.

Stella looked up at him from against the wall, his hand at her throat, her neck extended, and she was smiling. Not nervously. Not in the strained way of someone trying to appear calm while being genuinely afraid. Actually smiling, the full warm smile of someone who had arrived exactly where they wanted to be and was pleased about it.

"Hello, master," she said. Her voice was compressed by his grip but present, warm, entirely unbothered.

Liam looked at her.

"I’m going to kill you," he said. Low and completely without performance. Just the statement, sitting between them in the small space of the elevator.

"Hello to you too, Master" she said.

He pressed his hand tighter against her throat.

She reacted to that, her chin lifting involuntarily, a small sound leaving her that was not fear but was adjacent to something, her smile not leaving her face through any of it.

"Why are you here," he said.

She moved her free hand to the hem of her shirt and lifted her shirt.

He looked at the mark on her side. The one he had left on her the night he had dominated her in her own club, the collar and the claim, glowing faintly even now in the dim light of the elevator.

He looked at it.

She brought his gaze back to her face by speaking.

"I cannot seem to stay away from you," she said, his hand still at her throat, the words arriving around it. "I have tried, master. Genuinely tried. I even drained seven men and." She paused, her expression carrying something mildly embarrassed. "None of it was enough. Not close to enough."

"Why cause trouble while being here," he said. "Why touch the people around me."

She looked at him with the smile still present but something more honest sitting underneath it.

"I was jealous," she said. "And I kept looking for you and I could not find you and I got bored." She tilted her head as much as his grip allowed. "I thought a little chaos would draw you out."

He stared at her.

His grip tightened.

Her expression changed for the first time. Not fear.

Something closer to the effect of the grip itself registering properly, her eyes widening slightly, her hands coming up and finding his wrist without gripping it, just resting there.

"You’re going to fix this," he said. His grip loosened by one degree, enough for her to have the air to respond.

She coughed.

Once. Then twice. Then a third time that took longer to resolve, her hand at his wrist pressing slightly as she got her breath back, the elevator continuing its descent around them while she pulled air back into herself.

"I can’t," she said. Her voice was rough from the grip.

He looked at her.

"If that is true," he said, "then I am going to kill you right here."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

The elevator was small and warm and the two of them were the only things in it and the space between his face and her face was not large.

Then she smiled again.

"You are very scary when you are like this," she said. "I think that might actually be part of why I am here." She reached forward and drew one finger slowly across the front of his jacket, tracing the line of his chest through the fabric. "I missed it. I might be lying about the mark being the reason I came back."

He took her hand by the wrist.

"Watch it," he said.

She looked at his hand on her wrist and then at his face with the expression of someone who was aware they were pushing something and had decided to push it anyway.

"If you want them restored," she said, "you know what to do. The same thing you did the first time." She tilted her head. "And I know some part of you is not entirely unhappy about that."

His jaw tightened.

"Shut up," he said. The word arriving with more force than its volume would suggest.

"There is no need to hide it," she said. She raised both hands slightly in the surrender position, her wrists turning upward. "I can feel what you are feeling. That is what the mark does. And what I am feeling from you right now is not entirely anger."

Liam said nothing.

The elevator stopped.

The doors opened onto the ground floor lobby, pale morning light coming through the building’s front glass, the lobby empty at this hour.

He stepped out.

She stayed in the elevator.

He turned back to her.

"Do not do this again," he said. He looked at her directly, no uncertainty in any of it. "If you touch any of them again, if you go anywhere near any person connected to me, I will not bring you back from it. Do you understand me."

She looked at him with the smile softer now, carrying something in it that was not entirely defiance.

A glow appeared at her side.

Both of them looked at it.

The mark, beneath her shirt, lit from the inside, a warm light showing through the fabric and then intensifying and then settling back down to the faint permanent glow it usually carried.

Liam looked at it.

Then he scoffed, a single short sound that carried everything he was not going to say out loud about the situation, and turned away from the elevator.

"It is not going to be easy," Stella said, from inside the elevator behind him, her voice warm and entirely too comfortable with everything that had just happened.

He stopped walking.

He turned his head back toward her over his shoulder.

"Watch me," he said.

She smiled.

The elevator doors closed.

He stood in the lobby and looked at the closed doors for a moment. The lobby was quiet around him, the morning light coming through the front glass in long pale strips across the floor.

He turned and started walking toward the exit.

’I am going to have to deal with her at some point,’ he thought, pushing through the front door into the morning air. ’Actually deal with her. But everything I think of that would constitute dealing with her seems like it would produce the opposite effect from what I am going for.’

He walked to the M4 and got in and sat there for a moment with his hands on the wheel.

The morning was fully outside now, the city beginning to move, the street in front of the building picking up its first proper activity of the day.

He started the engine.

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