A Better Offer?
Sometimes, a hero’s life is more hassle than it’s worth.
It was raining lightly, and getting dark, with an autumn raw in the air, as the Raider circled the sky above the west end of the City University campus and checked his PDA with the special scanning software. There was nobody around on the ground-not too close, at least-and no signs of any active detection beams or cameras. He knew that he couldn’t be too careful about maintaining his secret identity; defending the innocent didn’t pay anything close to a living wage and, even if it did, he didn’t need to be spending all his life as the punching bag for every thug who either saw a hero as a threat or hoped to make a rep by knocking one out.
Take tonight, for example. Our hero had already been through a long day of teaching undergrads, grading papers, and doing the usual garbage-work that Ph.D. candidates get to do in order to make ends meet, and he had been on his way to grab a sandwich and a Coke and get back to his carrel in the library, hoping to get a few hours of research in on his own dissertation. He’d heard the screams from the alley and reluctantly decided to step-or, rather, fly-in when he sensed no cops around. He found three guys with knives, pushing and shoving and starting to disrobe a fairly studious, mousey-looking brunette . . . who happened to be Amy, the new student in his Western Civ. survey course, the one who he had been tutoring!
He made short work of the three of them . . . but he hadn’t seen the fourth, who was as big as a Humvee and twice as dense. After getting whacked into two walls and tossed through a plate glass window, he’d managed to dodge the Mongo wanna-be who barreled into some shelves and pulled half a hardware store down on himself. Raider looked out to see Amy sobbing and shaken but unharmed-she didn’t seem to recognize him beyond being a costumed guy she’d seen on the news-heard a patrol car pulled up, and took off before hours of questions, paperwork, and (depending on the cop) an attempt to arrest him ensued. Then he found his civvies had been stolen, which was why he was trying to both sneak and fly his way home.
Sometimes, a hero’s life is more hassle than it’s worth.
He was sore (flight, heightened senses, quick reflexes, and even the light body armor in his costume didn’t make him completely impervious to the kind of pounding he just took), dirty, and now damp, and his shoes squished in the mud as he snuck through the unlit gap that led to the back entrance to his basement studio. He was tired, he still had to get to the library, and he hadn’t had a date in . . . well, between a persona that was supposed to be heroic, chaste, and pure and a persona with loads of work and no money or time, he felt repressed, to say the least. The last few weeks, he’d even been dozing off in the library stacks. And now he was further behind.
The studio was dark as he found his way in but, with the door closed and the blinds already drawn, he felt safe in turning on a light. He thought he caught a whiff of something . . . come to think of it, he smelled it in the alley, too; maybe it was just on his suit. He flipped the switch, and almost immediately heard a woman’s voice behind him: “You never gave me a chance to say, ‘Thank you, Jay.’“
Jay? She was in his apartment-how did she get in?—looking at him in cape and mask, but using his secret-identity name. Why did her voice sound like Amy’s, but deeper, richer, more confident, more . . . sensual . . . somehow? Why was he just standing there, not spinning around to at least confront the intruder? It was probably just a second or two, but it felt like ages that he stood still. And why was part of him so anxious to hear more of that gorgeous voice?
“Well, lover, why don’t you turn around and look at me, like a good host?”
Oh, yeah, that was the voice! He turned, slowly, and there she was: she looked a little like Amy, but there were no glasses; her eyes were darker, deeper; her hair was a mane of shiny, raven-colored tresses; her skin was creamy and almost seemed to glow. Draped sideway over his easy chair, her five foot, ten inch frame was amply endowed-a nice “C”—cup at least, he guessed-and clad in a short-skirted, low cut, red latex dress that left almost nothing to the imagination. Spike-heel patent leather pumps finished the ensemble. He was becoming aroused just looking at her . . . which he knew was wrong, he knew he had to resist. He’d been in the presence of beautiful looking women before: how was this different?
Time to focus: “Have . . . we . . . met?” was all he managed.
“Oh, lover“—again, a tingle ran through him—“we have met, but we were never . . . properly introduced. Not to your conscious mind, at least. I am Amora, and my business is seducing and . . . shall we say ‘re-directing’ men.”
“Your . . . business?” His mind struggled to form words. “What . . . Amy?”
“Well, I must confess, Amy was a bit of a personal ruse-not that you haven’t employed such a ruse all along, eh? Most men are fairly easy to ‘re-direct,’ as it were. A quick look at this”—she gestured along the length of her voluptuous form, as if she needed to point it out to him—“and they are quite ready to receive whatever new ideas I’ve been hired to present. But you, lover, are so”—her eyes traveled, hungrily, up and down the length of his six-foot physique—“disciplined. I needed to find other ways to enter your mind.
“You would be amazed at how easily, by the process of elimination, I could narrow your secret identity down to just a few dozen possibilities. You were the fourth man to meet Amy and experience a quick hypnosis; for you, of course, there were several more hypnotic sessions”—he began to realize that each of his unscheduled naps in the library had begun at a tutoring session, something he’d been induced to forget—“during which I got to know you really well and begin to mold you. I put in trigger words that I’ve already been using. I arranged for you to rescue me this evening so that the adrenaline and pain would put you in just the right hormonal balance for this ‘encounter.’”
He’d completely forgotten about the soreness and adrenal rush he’d been feeling when he came in. Come to think of it, he’d almost forgotten coming in: a rosy fog was settling into his mind, and it felt so delicious to . . . no, he had to resist, had to re-focus himself before . . . but she was so beautiful, so enchanting . . . but he had his duty, and . . .
She could see on his face that the conflict was still raging within him. She had him caught, but she didn’t have him. There was work to be done. ”Lover“—his knees melted some more and the fog in his mind thickened—“come over here and kneel.” His feet could move! He should run . . . but he so wanted to be closer, to be at her feet, her delicious feet . . . and, in a moment, he was kneeling. He heard a click, and gasped, and was enveloped in the sweet fragrance he had sniffed when he first came in.
“Ah, you still . . . appreciate my perfume.” Her eyes twinkled. “It’s another trigger-the olfactory is such a powerful mental pathway-with a little chemical helper. Amy was wearing a version of the fragrance since the first time you met her. I knew the Raider would be alert to a frontal assault, so I introduced a slightly higher percentage of pheromone content each time we met. During our sessions, I reinforced the scent as a trigger, and early on, I took a little of your blood, so that my clients’ labs could precisely match the pheromone to your DNA. Now, you should have no chance to resist.”
Resist. There was some reason he needed to resist, some reason to . . . to . . .
“That click, lover, was just the camera I set up over there. My clients in this job didn’t want you simply re-directed; they want to make sure the Raider won’t be getting in their way any more. At first, they were looking for this to end with your death . . .”
The Raider . . . Jay . . . lover heard the words, and some small part of his frontal cortex was still grasping at details, still hoping to get out of this and stop the bad guys. But most of his mind was rosy fog, with no awareness beyond the sweet fragrance, the melodious voice, and the vision of perfect wet-dream loveliness before him. Amora knew that, even while she was fulfilling that desire of his reasoning center to find the facts, she was winning her battle against it. The more keenly he listened for facts, the more keenly he listened, and the further he sank into her trap.
“ . . . But after our first session, that first light trance where I knew you were my target, I saw a much better possibility for you than as a corpse. My special talents come with special . . . appetites, shall we say . . . that are never quite fulfilled by most of my assignments. You, lover, have the stamina, reflexes, and physique, of course, and I quickly discovered that you have great passion, which you discipline and restrain to make yourself the Raider. I began to imagine how delicious it would be to remove those restraints and re-discipline those passions in that delectable body . . . and then keep you for myself. As long as you are out of circulation, my clients won’t care; the photo will satisfy that. And, with what they’re paying for this job, we will be exceedingly comfortable in a very secluded place until long, long after I have fucked every bit of your brains-and everything else I want-out of you. I think you will find it to be a much better offer.
“Now that business is done, lover,” she placed her hands with their long, crimson nails on either side of his head and tilted his face upward, “look into my eyes, fall into their depths . . . again.”
Oh yes! He knew this place, these wonderfully compelling, enchanting, dark depths. She-as Amy-had brought him-as Jay-here before. She would peer over her glasses to ask him a question, and within a breath he was gone, only to recover himself hours later with no memory of how it happened. Now he remembered the glory of submission, of surrendering the control that he usually worked so hard to constantly, persistently maintain. He could just give everything over to her. he could just be for Her.
But, no, he had duties, responsibilities. It was like that clown from New York said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Pompous, but true. Things were expected of the Raider. He had a duty to the world. Still, those eyes . . .
“I know you’ve noticed my breasts, lover, now that they aren’t lost under Amy’s frumpy sweaters. Look at them again: so firm, so round, even softer then the buttery latex that’s holding them in like this. You can see my nipples trying to poke through the dress, can’t you? Imagine what your hard rod would feel like right in that cleavage, lover.”
And, suddenly, he had a straining erection, and he could feel those exquisite pillows around it, even though his cock was still struggling inside his pants. Waves of orgasm were crashing over him. His reason, amazingly, still hung on, but it was blurry.
“You know you won’t cum, can’t cum, lover, until I let you.” Amora smiled as she watched his eyes roll back into the slits of his mask, and then lock back into hers. “Do you know who you are?”
“i . . . am . . . the Raider, . . . hero and protector of the innocent.”
My, his sense of duty was strong. She sat back in the chair, the besieged hero still kneeling at her feet. She, bent down, took his hands, and removed his gloves, licking each finger of each hand as she set them free. His breathing was becoming shallow and irregular. Good. She placed his hands on the insides of her thighs, and heard a gasp and a whimper from the powerful man before her. Excellent. “Who am I?”
His eyes were almost glazed: “You are Amora, the beautiful, desirable embodiment of all that is sex.”
“And who are you, lover at my feet?”
“i . . . am . . . the . . . raider . . . hero . . . who . . . must . . .”
She placed a finger on his lips to stop his exertion, and he greedily sucked at it. She was amazed that the battle still raged. “What do you WANT, lover.”
A look of feral hunger suddenly came into his eyes. It was as if he was lost in a fever. He pulled his cape away from himself and nearly tore his top from his torso, then dove into her short skirt and, finding no panties there, began tonguing her shaved pussy, with a few simple touches, she guided his insatiable mouth to just the right place, threw her own head back and moaned as she came. This was even better than she expected and . . . and . . . it stopped!
Suddenly, he was pushing himself back, panting, but still kneeling, his eyes slammed shut: “i . . . am . . . i . . . must . . . i . . . can’t . . . duty . . . in . . . no . . . cent . . .” he was almost crazed, incoherent, but his sense of persona as the raider somehow hung on, kept him from completely submitting.
But Amora was by no means done. Having recovered from his submissive assault, her eyes gleamed as she conceived her final attack on his mind. She grabbed the golden cape from its heap on the floor and draped it over her own shoulders. ”Thank you, Jay. Thank you, lover!“
The double dose of trigger words snapped the hero’s eyes open and locked them on her gleaming dark pools again. ”lover, if you are the raider, why do I wear the cape?”
He was clearly confused, and has almost lost the capacity to speak, so she continued. “What do you really WANT? Are you so satisfied as a hero? My offer might be better: be My lover, and experience ecstasy beyond anything you could imagine. Be Mine, and let Me take you and hold you.”
The rosy fog was almost all through his mind, save a tiny corner whispering of duty. He recalled the pain, the weariness, the repression, and then gazed on the irresistible vision before him, and thought of a life consumed by Her.
“Who are you?” she sang.
“i . . . am . . . the . . . your lover, if you will have me, Goddess.”
She smiled but wanted to push him even farther. “Pull those pants away, lover, and remember you still can’t cum.” He was a fever of lust, bounding to his feet and dropping the last of his hero uniform, his armor (save his mask) at her feet. She marveled at his huge, throbbing, engorged erection, lightly kissed its head, and, even as her prey shuddered, she easily guided him onto his back. In a flash, she was on top of him, lowering her slit over that distressed manhood. “Give me a ride,” she purred, and he began to buck and lift, edging his new mistress toward her own orgasm. “Take off my dress,” and he madly unlaced and peeled the garment away, never losing rhythm, pulling himself up to nuzzle and devour her bouncing breasts.
This was wonderful, but the slave transformation needed to be sealed. “In a moment, I will remove your mask, and then kiss you. you will kiss Me back, and then you may cum. Once you do, you will be mine, completely, forever and always my lover.”
“Y . . .Y . . .Y . . . YES, Goddess.”
Amora removed the mask of the hero who didn’t exist any longer, then kissed him. he hungrily took her tongue, offered his back, and came explosively. his mind was lost in a blinding flash. When it ended, everything that had been there was gone.
“Jay?” No response.
“Raider?” A confused, blank stare.
“lover?“
“How may i serve You, Goddess?”
Sometimes, a hero’s life was more hassle than it was worth. She was sure this was a better offer for him.