She came in.
She crossed the threshold into the apartment and stood a half-step inside the door and did the spot-check she'd done both other times. The framed print, the coaster on the coffee table, the window onto the parking structure. Confirming what was here. Different clothes from Wednesday: a sweater the color of red wine that fell loose to her hips, the same dark jeans, hair down past her shoulders in the platinum she'd been wearing since the day at PeakForm. The hallway behind her had the same one-bulb dimness, the same smell of garlic-and-tomato from across the way. The good coffee was on the shelf behind her. She did not look at it.
"I wanted to understand what happened," she said. "Professionally. I've got questions about the mechanism."
"Sure," I said.
She looked at me. I looked at her. The professional framing lasted about two seconds.
She crossed the floor first. Same as before: no ambiguity about who was moving toward whom. Her hand went to my shoulder and I was already turning toward her and her mouth was on mine and the research was over.
She kissed me the way she'd kissed me Sunday. Open, slow at first, her tongue against mine, her other hand finding my jaw and angling me where she wanted. The wine-red sweater came off over her head in one motion and her tits were free under it, no bra, the same heavy fullness of them, the nipples already stiff. I had my hands on them before the sweater hit the floor. I pulled her closer, my mouth on her neck, my hands moving from her breasts down to her waist, around to the small of her back, and she made a sound against my ear that had nothing professional left in it. Her hand went to my cock through my jeans and gripped.
She dropped to her knees in the hallway. My cock was in her mouth in seconds. Not slow this time, not the careful teasing of Sunday. She took me deep on the first stroke, her lips tight around my shaft, her tongue working the underside, her hands working my jeans down my thighs. The wet sound of her mouth on me carried in the small space of the hallway between the door and the kitchen. Her eyes came up to mine and held. She kept going down on me with her eyes locked on my face.
I pulled her up and she wrapped her legs around me and I carried her to the bedroom. The lamp on the nightstand was on. The sheets were the clean gray ones I'd washed Sunday morning. She unhooked her legs and stripped the rest of her clothes off as I laid her on the bed. Jeans, no underwear under them. She was already wet when I pushed into her, slick and tight, her pussy gripping me as I slid in to the base. She gasped. Her back arched and her tits pressed against my chest and her hips started moving before I did.
I fucked her slow at first, long strokes, my hands on her hips, watching her tits sway with every thrust. She lifted her hands above her head and gripped the headboard, the muscles in her arms cutting under the tanned skin, her eyes on mine.
Then something changed. Faster than Sunday. Maybe thirty seconds in her rhythm went ragged. Her hands stopped doing organized things. One came off the headboard and went to my shoulder, the other slid down to grip my ass and pull me deeper. Her voice dropped into sounds that had nothing to do with nine hundred years of practice.
That fullness from Sunday was back, building faster this time. Not draining. The opposite, heat moving toward me, accumulating. I didn't have a name for it. I didn't care.
She pulled back just enough to look at me.
Then she wasn't Amber.
Not at the end this time. Earlier. Somewhere in the middle, with her under me and her hands on my chest: one moment the woman, the next moment not. Red skin saturated all the way through. White hair falling forward across the pillow and across her shoulders. The horns sweeping back from her temples, crimson at the base to near-black at the tips. Wings extending from her back, bone-white frame and deep red membrane, half-open against the bed. Eyes amber-gold all the way through, no white anywhere, looking up at me.
She looked at me like she was waiting for something.
I pulled her back down to me.
The sound she made when I pushed back into her: I don't have a word for it. Her wings went to full extension, too wide for the room, the right one knocking the lamp on the nightstand. She didn't notice. The tail found my ankle and wrapped. The sigil on her lower abdomen was glowing now, bright bioluminescent red against the deeper red of her skin.
I fucked her like that. Red skin under my hands, the wings open across the bed, the sigil bright against her abdomen, the silver rings through her nipples catching the lamplight. She rolled us in one motion and she was on top, her hands flat on my chest, her tits fuller now, the nipple rings catching the light again as she rode me, her hips moving like nothing she was doing was deliberate anymore. The sigil pulsed brighter with every stroke. Her tail wrapped tighter around my ankle. The wet sound of her on my cock filled the room. Her mouth was open and her breath was coming in short sharp bursts.
She came saying something in a language I didn't know. The sigil peaked, a brighter pulse that filled the bedroom for half a second with extra red light, and her wings shuddered and her pussy clenched around me and I came inside her.
Afterward I stayed still.
Wings folded down against her back, not retracted, just compact, the right one angled against the headboard where she'd knocked the lamp during the change. The lamp was at a slight tilt now, still on. The tail had settled somewhere around the foot of the bed. The sigil had gone dormant, the heart-shape just a slightly darker patch on her lower abdomen, not glowing.
She lay in my bed in true form with her eyes open, staring at my ceiling.
The ceiling crack. Still there.
She hadn't expected to still be here. I could see it in her face. Not distress, just surprise. She'd come over to understand what had happened. That had been an hour ago. She was still here.
I kept my breathing even. I didn't say anything about her still being there.
Something quiet, almost to herself.
"That wasn't supposed to happen again."
I didn't say anything.
"When I feed, I'm the one running it. Every time, for nine hundred years. The sex is real and the pleasure's real, don't mistake me for cold — but I'm the one holding the reins. I hold the channel open, I take what I need, and every shiver it pulls out of me is one I decided to give — all the way down." She was still looking at the ceiling. "I don't have orgasms during a feed. Not the kind where I stop being able to decide."
She turned her head and looked at me. The amber-gold eyes, no whites. The horns pressed into my pillow.
"Sunday I did. That's why I changed. I lost the form because I lost everything else with it." A pause. "Tonight it happened again. Faster."
I looked at her. Red skin. White hair on my pillowcase. The tail doing something slow and unconscious near the foot of the bed.
"I don't know what you are," she said. "I thought I did. I came here tonight to find out." She looked back up at the ceiling crack. "I still don't have an answer."
The *there's more* from Wednesday. This was the more.
After a while I said: "Do you want coffee."
She read me for a second.
"Yes."
She went to the bathroom. I got up and pulled on a pair of shorts and started the coffee maker. Not the mediocre brand this time. The bag from Beverly was open and the smell that came out of it when I opened the bag was nothing the mediocre brand had ever managed. Bright, slightly fruity, the way good coffee smells before it's even been brewed. The machine ran through its cycle and made the same sounds it had made for two years and produced something I'd never gotten from it before.
A few minutes passed. When she came out of the bathroom she was back in human form. Platinum hair, blue eyes, the wine-red sweater pulled on over nothing. She looked like someone who'd made a decision and wasn't ready to say what it was.
I handed her a mug. She looked at it, then at the bag on the counter, the brown paper with the printed label and the date stamp.
A sip.
"Still," she said.
I almost laughed.
She drank the coffee slowly, standing at the kitchen counter with the lamp from the living room throwing yellow across the kitchen tile. The wine-red sweater was loose enough that I could see the slope of her chest when she lifted the mug, the small movement of the muscle in her forearm. At eight-thirty she was still there. She left around nine. Neither of us mentioned the extra time.
I watched her go. She went down the stairs the same careful way she'd gone down the stairs Sunday, conscious of the hour and the walls. The street door at the bottom opened. Closed.
The door closing on her at nine on a Thursday was not a thing I had expected to mind. I minded it a little. I put that away for later.
I went back to the kitchen and washed her mug. The coffee bag on the counter was open. I closed it.
I thought about the ceiling crack for a while after she left. I would tell the building manager on Monday.