Cat's Claw Page 20

  So, our coffee date went reasonably well—I only spilled my cup of coffee on myself—and we ended up dating in earnest for, like, two weeks.

  Now, at that point in my life, I had never had sex with another person—and barely even myself—so this thing with Samuel was new territory for me. I mean, I’d fooled around with people and stuff, but actual “penetration” hadn’t really been on the table yet.

  Well, the more time I spent with Samuel, and his sexy accent, the more I wanted to get some “penetrating” action going on, but the funny thing about Samuel was that the more I insisted that I was ready to give it up to him, the more he kept insisting that it wasn’t a big deal and we should just wait.

  At first, I thought it was supersweet that he wanted my first time to be special, but then as the weeks wore on—we were coming on three weeks now, which was like an eternity in college—I started to get kind of antsy about all the waiting I was having to do. Heck, I was a red-blooded American girl who was more than ready to make love to the handsome British man of my dreams—and the handsome British man was so not cooperating. This was not the way this sex thing was supposed to go down. I was the one who was supposed to be fending off his advances, not the other way around.

  Finally, after I couldn’t take it anymore, I called my best friend, Noh, in Rome to ask her for some advice. She had deferred her first year of college in order to spend time in Italy with her aunt Sarah, volunteering on an archeological dig outside the city. They were helping to excavate and catalog an ancient Roman cemetery before the city planners razed it to make room for a new road.

  Anyway, when I finally got ahold of Noh—time difference and odd working hours making the call much harder to put through than one would’ve expected—she had one piece of advice for me, and one piece only.

  Seduce him.

  So, on an evening I knew my roommate would be out partying all night—and hopefully puking her guts out in someone else’s bathroom for a change—I invited Samuel over to “hang out.”

  At least, that was the plan . . . but I had other ideas in mind.

  I opened the door wearing a silk kimono with a dragon embroidered on the back that my mother had given me for my last birthday—and nothing on underneath it.

  After shutting the door and locking it behind him, I whispered this fact into Samuel’s ear. I expected him to kiss me, or hold me or something, but he just nodded, a little frown creasing his sensitive face.

  Even though my room was just a typical mouse hole of a dorm room—with two twin beds, two desks, and two chairs—I had put sandalwood candles on every available space in the place and it looked and smelled incredible. There was even an open bottle of red wine that I’d bought off a guy down the hall and two wineglasses waiting expectantly on my desk while soft, sexy music—a little Jeff Buckley, actually—played in the background.

  I took Samuel’s coat and dropped it on my desk chair, then took his hand and maneuvered him toward my tiny twin bed. He sat down beside me and I handed him a glass of red wine. We sat like that for a few minutes, each of us sipping wine and looking uncomfortable. After two glasses, I had a little Dutch courage, so I leaned forward and kissed him—which he seemed pretty all right with—so I took that as a sign that it was time to move forward with my plan.

  I started unbuttoning his pants.

  Once again, let me state for the record that he seemed perfectly okay with the whole thing. I mean, it wasn’t like he didn’t know where all this was going, right? Candles, wine . . . naked Callie? Pretty self-explanatory, I think.

  After a few more minutes of kissing, I pushed him back on the bed and straddled him. He tensed and stopped kissing me back, but I was too hot and bothered by now to really notice.

  “Do it,” I moaned in his ear. “Put it inside me.”

  I reached down and grabbed his penis—which was erect, so there had to be a little reciprocation going on—and pulled it toward me. All that was left for me to do was climb on top of him and—

  Suddenly, Samuel started squirming like an eel beneath me, shoving me so hard that I went flying off him and landed hard on the floor, slamming my tailbone against the bottom of my desk.

  “Rape!” Samuel screamed, cuddling his now-limp penis in his hand like it was a wounded animal.

  “No! No rape!” I yelled back at him, terrified someone in my hall would hear all the commotion and call our RA. “There were candles, for God’s sake!”

  He glared at me, wild-eyed.

  “You took advantage of me!”

  “No, I didn’t,” I pleaded, crawling over to him and grabbing his leg.

  “Rapist!” he hissed as he pried me off his leg.

  “Please don’t go . . .” I cried, but he just shook his head, slamming the door resoundingly behind him as he went.

  I was too upset and shocked to even cry, so I just sat there on the floor, kimono askew, wondering what I had done wrong.

  I spent the next two hours—and two hundred dollars in long distance—on the phone, rehashing the whole story for Noh. After laughing so hard that she started snorting, the only thing my friend could come up with was that Samuel was either gay or just highly allergic . . . to me.

  In the end, it turned out he was just gay. A few weeks later he started dating this really hot guy in our literature class, and after that I didn’t feel so wretched about the whole experience.

  Needless to say, it was a long time before I tried my hand at the “penetration” game again.

  “Okay, I know that you are a gambling woman,” Senenmut said, startling me out of my thoughts, “so I will offer you an exchange.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, wondering what I’d missed while my mind was ruminating over my old “sex gone wrong” memories.

  “You help me find my great love and I will help you acquire yours,” he said, sniffing the bottle of shampoo again. “Bast is a jealous one. She will keep you from your man just because she might.”

  I narrowed my eyes, wondering what the catch was.

  “I know that you have promised to take me to Hell, but before you do, allow me one last folly . . . and I will help you steal your love away from the Queen of the Cats.”

  This was an enticing offer, but I really didn’t think we had the time to piss around looking for Senenmut’s lost love. Still, I pulled out the little rubidium clock so I could check to see how much time was left before we had to get our asses down to Hell.

  “We only have, like, twelve hours,” I said. “I don’t think this is such a good—”

  “I beg of you,” Senenmut cried, scrambling out of the water and grasping my arm, getting me even wetter than I a lready was.

  I tried to ignore the fact that a naked man was holding my arm and focus on the situation at hand, but as the bubbles started sliding down his wet torso, I found myself getting pretty darn distracted—and unbelievably embarrassed at the same time.

  “Help me find my great love, then I will go with you willingly,” Senenmut said, squeezing the fatty part of my upper arm. “Otherwise, I will be forced to find a way to escape and search for her on my own . . . and Bast will make a prisoner of your lover’s spirit forever.”

  “Is that a threat?” I asked incredulously.

  Was this guy really sitting in my parents’ tub, eating their shampoo, and threatening me?

  Yup.

  “It is a promise.” He sighed.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  I decided that the first thing I needed to do was find Bast and make sure Senenmut wasn’t full of crap. Then I could make a more informed decision.

  “Hurry and make up your mind, Calliope Reaper-Jones,” Senenmut said as he sat back down and reached for the lemon verbena bar of soap sitting on the side of the tub. “Time slows for no one.”

  I glared at him as he started scrubbing his pits with an expensive-looking loofah.

  What the hell does he know about time? I thought angrily, but little did I know then how very right he was.
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br />   eighteen

  Bast looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Of course he belongs to me now,” she said in between licks while grooming her honeyed coat. “Finders, keepers.”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe she was being serious. Finders, keepers? That was so elementary school. Yet there it was, rearing its ugly head again. I’d always thought that getting older meant dealing with a whole new caliber of problems, yet more often than not these days, I found myself confronted with the same old business over and over again.

  “Fine,” I said. “Be a bitch.”

  “Can you call a female cat a bitch or is that just for dogs?” my sister said offhandedly as she flipped through the channels on the television set.

  I could tell that she wasn’t really paying attention to what she was watching because she passed her favorite show, Cities of the Underworld, twice and didn’t stop either time.

  “Just for dogs,” Bast said, looking over at Runt, who was splayed on her back on the floor in front of the television. She was snoring softly, unaware that she was now the topic of our conversation.

  We were in Clio’s utilitarian bedroom, where the girls had decamped after I took Senenmut to the guest bathroom for his bath. Clio was on her bed, a bottle of pink toenail polish on the floor beside her. I had never known Clio to have any interest in makeup or clothes, so watching her paint her toenails with such practiced dexterity was kind of shocking.

  Bast was curled up at the foot of Clio’s bed, looking for all intents and purposes like she owned the place. I stared at Clio, hoping she would intercede on my behalf, but she was more interested in messing with her remote control than helping me.

  “Clio, can you explain to the Queen of the Cats here that Daniel belongs to me?” I said.

  Clio put her remote down and cocked her head, thinking.

  “I thought you were mad at him for pretending to be dead,” she offered finally.

  “Well, I was—” I began, but she interrupted me.

  “Then why do you care what happens to him now? Good riddance and all that, right?”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to think of a witty comeback, but nothing came to mind.

  “No, not good riddance,” I said. “I don’t understand how someone can call finders, keepers on another human being.”

  Bast looked up, midlick.

  “Who says that he’s a human being?”

  Well, that stopped me in my tracks. The cat was right about that. I was just assuming that Daniel was a human being, but I’d never even asked him about his past before. I’d been much more interested in myself and what was happening to me than in what Daniel’s deal was. I guess that made me a pretty cruddy friend . . . and an even less appealing possible lover.

  Argh.

  “Look, human being or not, he doesn’t belong to you, Bast,” I said.

  The cat lazily blinked her golden eyes twice, then went back to licking one of her back legs.

  “Callie, you just said that Daniel belonged to you,” my sister said instead. “So, I don’t know how you can accuse Bast of treating Daniel like an object when you’re doing exactly the same thing.”

  “You’re my sister. You’re supposed to me on my side,” I whined at Clio, who only shrugged.

  “Just pointing out the obvious.”

  And with that, she went back to futzing with her remote control, leaving me to stew in my own thoughts.

  Okay, Clio was kind of right. I had just treated Daniel like a piece of meat, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have his best interests at heart. Once I got Daniel back to normal—and asked him a few pertinent questions—I was going to let him go on about his business, no strings attached. Bast, on the other hand, might have other plans for him, plans that involved indentured servitude or the relinquishing of his firstborn. She was a wily feline, I would give her that, but that wiliness served only to increase my mistrust of her. After all, she had lured me into the Jackal Brothers’ torture chamber and then completely left me on my own to fend for myself—and if that wasn’t an indicator of her sensibility, then I didn’t know what was.

  “I’m just gonna lay this out there once, so you guys had better pay attention,” I said firmly. “If you don’t release Daniel right this instant, I will not be responsible for what I’m gonna have to do to you.”

  Bast blinked, but didn’t respond. My sister shrugged.

  If I didn’t know better, I would think that Bast had Clio in some kind of thrall because Clio was being just as obstinate as the cat.

  “Clio, help me out here,” I said.

  “I think you need to focus on Senenmut and then we’ll worry about finders, keepers after you’ve taken him to Cerberus.”

  I threw up my arms in frustration.

  “I just said that if Bast didn’t produce Daniel’s Shade, I was gonna have to do something that I don’t want to have to do and it will directly affect you guys. Why are all my threats just considered ‘idle’? Am I that pathetic?”

  “Runt’s future is at stake here,” Clio said. “And Bast isn’t gonna hurt Daniel in the interim—”

  “This is absurd!” I almost yelled at Clio. “You’re taking the dumb cat’s side over mine? What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Clio set her remote down on the bed and crawled over to the edge so that we were only a few feet away from each other now.

  “I think that you need to go take Senenmut back to Cerberus before you screw everything up for Runt,” Clio said. “That’s what I think.”

  I stared at her, my mouth hanging open so wide that I would’ve caught flies if there’d been any around to catch.

  “I can’t believe you just said that. I so do not screw things up . . . very much, that is.”

  Clio crawled back over to the head of the bed and picked up her remote, turning up the volume on the television just as Paris Hilton’s bulbous bleached blond head filled the screen. I gawked at the television, in shock that my superintelligent sister would be watching a Paris Hilton reality show—especially after how many times she’d made fun of me for watching shows that were just as inane.

  I opened my mouth to comment on her choice of show, but then shut it again. Bast was watching me intently, waiting for me to say something that would push my younger sister even further away from me than she already was.

  Well, I thought, I will not give her the satisfaction.

  “Okay, Clio, you’re right,” I said, letting the lie flow out of my mouth with as much confidence as I could muster. “I’ll just take Senenmut back to Cerberus like you said and then we’ll figure out the Daniel thing later.”

  Clio appeared pleased with my answer.

  “I’m glad you’re doing the right thing, Cal,” she said, her gaze still on Paris Hilton’s face. “Bast said you were impetuous and wouldn’t listen, but I knew you’d see the light of reason.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Clio.”

  I gave her a wide, mocking smile, but she ignored the sarcasm and smiled back. I turned to Bast, who was quickly sashaying her way up my shit list. She was looking at me through narrowed amber eyes.

  Trying to size me up, huh? I thought. Well, you can just try all you want, kitty cat, but don’t expect to get one over on me anytime soon.

  I pointed to my eyes, then pointed back to Bast.

  “I’m watching you,” I mouthed as I stood up and walked to the bedroom door.

  Bast was definitely trying to dominate my sister’s mind, but standing there arguing with her wasn’t going to win me any friends. I was gonna have to align myself with Senenmut and hope that he was as good as his word. Otherwise, I was going to have one hell of a time disentangling my sister’s mind from Bast’s malicious machinations.

  “See you guys later,” I said, trying to be as cheerful as I could as I gave my sister one last lingering look and let myself out.

  I stood in the hallway next to Clio’s door and took out the rubidium clock. I decided that if I had more than
eleven hours and forty-five minutes left on the clock, then I would take Senenmut up on his offer.

  “How much time do I have?” I asked.

  The numbers slowed to a crawl.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath.

  I had exactly eleven hours and forty-six minutes, eleven seconds, and 3.4 × 10-44 s left.

  “I’m in!” I nearly yelled as I threw open the bathroom door and found myself standing face-to-face with an intoxicatingly handsome man whom I had never seen before. He had large, almond-shaped eyes, an aquiline nose, a wide, sensuous mouth, and a clean-shaven, honeyed complexion.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said as I started to turn back around and close the door.

  “It’s me,” the man said, grabbing my arm to stop me. “Senenmut.”

  I stared at him.

  “Where’s your beard? And your hair?”

  This was all I could manage to say as I took in the man that stood before me. He was so unlike the Senenmut I’d first met that I had a really hard time reconciling that this was the same person. Where the Senenmut I knew looked like an escapee from a prison camp—which he was—this guy looked like an Armani model.

  “I found a razor.”

  The only razor I’d seen in the guest bathroom was of the ladies’ disposable variety.

  “Oh. That was a lot of work, then,” I mumbled, trying not to stare at his naked torso.

  He shrugged and once again I couldn’t help noticing the muscle definition in his chest and abs. Of course, he had a towel chastely wrapped around his waist, so I couldn’t see if the rest of him matched his chest muscles, but I had a funny feeling that they did.

  “You look so different,” I said meekly. Seriously, he was like a different man. I thought back to when I’d last seen him. He was standing in the bath, pleading for me to help him find his lost love, and I was pretty sure that those muscles hadn’t been there then.