Love, Laugh, Lich (Claws & Cubicles Book 1)

Janice looks up from her desk as I approach, her expression becoming confused as she takes in my significantly more lifeless than usual state.

“I think I might be getting fired soon,” I sigh, too exhausted to give any emotional weight to the statement. I think if I tried, I’d crack open and blubber about it for hours.

“What? What’s going on?” she asks, looking a bit alarmed. I don’t usually visit her during the workday.

“C’mon, smoke break.”

“We don’t even smoke—”

“Then we’ll start, or whatever. Coffee, we’ll get coffee,” I grumble, pulling her up from her desk in an attempt to drag her along with me. She gets up and pulls out of my grip, but follows me out to one of the break rooms on a lower floor. “Although, apparently that’s a fireable offense now.”

I wait until we get to one of the break rooms, and the door swings closed behind us. Janice approaches the vending machine and starts trying to feed it coins.

“I had a fight with Soven,” I sigh as her coins plunk through the slot, one by one. “I stood on a table and yelled at him.”

“…Yeah, I think there’s no coming back from that,” she concedes after a moment. She doesn’t ask if it was before or after the pit opening up in the office floor.

I nod weakly. I don’t know how to explain all of it, why I had to stand on a desk.

“It wasn’t just a shiver,” I say at last.

“I had a feeling,” she says, rolling her eyes. Sounds like she hadn’t really believed me when I’d told her about the shiver initially.

I give her a rundown of the last few days, not sparing any detail except about Soven’s absurd number of cocks, though I wondered if it might make her any more sympathetic to my motives.

“Are you sure you didn’t get a promotion from secretary to sex slave?” she asks, looking somewhat unimpressed with me.

“I’d think there’d be a change in my benefits programs,” I say dryly.

“I mean, new desk, an intern to delegate to, those are the perks of dating your boss,” she shrugs. “Alongside getting taken advantage of, nepotism, lack of boundaries—”

“Hang on. I’m the one who seduced him; he’s not taking advantage of me.”

“What are you saying? You want to file a harassment claim against yourself?” She rolls her eyes and gives me a look. “Honey. He’s the one with the power to fire you.”

I hang my head and sigh, because I hadn’t thought about how badly things could go. When I had first kissed Soven, all I could think about was how exhilarating it was, how his body made mine react. All our goofy chats in the office had only ever brought us closer and closer, of course I never thought this would drive us apart, and be unable to ever have that again.

I let Janice go back to her desk, despite her offers to try to handle whatever comes next with me.

I go into the waiting room, my office, whatever it is, with a cardboard box.

As soon as I push through the door, however, I can see Soven waiting for me, his full beast form hunched over my desk, crowded into one of the waiting room chairs.

I approach slowly, wondering if I should ask him if he wants me to tender my resignation. He hadn’t yet banished me through a hole in the floor though, so maybe it’ll be more like a two-week notice while I find someone to replace me.

He looks up as I cross the room, unfurling himself from the ways he’s knotted his limbs together to fit into the human-sized chair.

Slowly he rises, his stare held carefully upon me.

I swallow and look to the floor awkwardly, running my thumbs along the cardboard box while I try to kick my brain into thinking. I don’t know how to start this conversation.

I don’t have to, apparently, when he brings one curled fist before him. His claws fall open, to show he had two vials curled up in his hand, one I recognize by its soft lilac glow. My shiver.

“I couldn’t bring myself to waste one bit of you,” he murmurs, and those words make my heart ache.

My eyes are filling up with tears. I’ve been such an idiot. He’s been so careful, so precise with me, how could I ever think that was anything but his way of expressing tenderness?

“I cannot give you my heart,” he says, voice low and guttural. He brings out his other massive hand, to pluck up the second vial from his palm and hold it out to me. “As I have none.”

I study the vial in front of my eyes, the inky darkness in its deep red contents, the way it seems to pull shadows into it.

“This is—”

“My phylactery,” he nods slowly, holding it out. “If you take it, I hope you will be protective of it. But I will ask first if you want it.”

I have no words. My throat is so tight with emotion I can barely nod. I bring a shaking hand up to take the phylactery from him. The glass is cool to touch, and just holding it, I sense it’s more fragile than a heart.

“I’ll keep it somewhere safe,” I promise, looking up at him as the tears spill down over my cheeks. I sniffle as he brushes them away with the back of his knuckle.

He makes a gesture, and the vial of my shiver disappears into mist, likely tucked away somewhere only he can reach.

I tilt my head back for him, and he drags a kiss along my jaw, brushing his cheek against mine, the suede of his body gently grazing my skin. I give a soft gasp as I feel the toy pulse again deliciously, a flirtatious touch of his magic, so comfortable in my ass I’d all but forgotten its presence there.

I look up at Soven, unable to disguise my excitement. His claws graze carefully down my body, as he crowds me backwards, coaxing me to sit on my desk.

He drags a claw through his teeth, sharpening the edge before he draws it up my pencil skirt, my blouse, the sound of fabric slicing open, falling off and around me, petal soft.

It’s as I lean back on the table, spreading my legs apart, that I realize this isn’t for a ritual. There’s no alchemical circle drawn, no runes, no candles. This is purely for us.

The thought makes me pause, as more warm tears well up in my eyes. As much as his magic intrigued me, this is what I’ve really wanted: just a girl and her undying Lich lover.

I think Soven realizes it too, because he does something he hadn’t done before in our previous sex magic rituals– he kisses my forehead, carefully combing his claws through my hair. He takes a long moment to just trace my neck, my arms, my waist and thighs appreciatively, his gaze lingering, marveling at all the new territory we have to be soft with one another.

The toy gives another few pulses, warming my body up as Soven parts my ass cheeks, slowly teasing the toy out. The sheer tenderness of it serves as a prelude for how thoroughly he will fuck me on all of his cocks.

His fingers trail up my stomach from where he held my hip, to graze against my breast. He looks at my face again, and I nod, quivering with anticipation, aching at how slowly he moves over me, and relishing in it.

He places a hand over my breast, working his way to my nipples, thumb rolling over them, hard and perky, and listens hard to my little gasps, the way my hips twitch and stutter helplessly as I melt under his touch.

“Let me know if I should stop,” he murmurs, in a voice soft and deep, looking into my eyes. I bite my lip and nod again. He presses a kiss to my forehead, and begins to work his way down. 

I don’t know why he would think I would ever ask him to stop.

Even though we’ve done this all before, it’s different. In some strange way, it feels like our first time all over again, in the way each movement holds reverence in its exploration. There’s some new excitement in knowing that everything he does is because he wants to, not because it’s part of a ritual.

He licks my tits, sucking on them, grazing his teeth against them, unraveling my composure with the utmost precision and care. Soon I can’t contain the noises of pleasure, moans and keens of ‘keep doing that please’.

As he continues to kiss and caress my breast, he trails a clawed hand down my stomach, a shiver going through my belly.

My hands drift down his tight abdomen, finding his cocks hot and hard, ready to take me. His second cock is thick and heavy in my hand, too much for me to properly hold. Even as I stroke him up and down, for a moment it makes me doubt whether or not it would go inside me properly without being fucked open on his tongue again.

His enjoyment is clear, however, the way pre-cum beads at the tip of his cocks. He tilts his head back, letting out a sound half sigh, half moan. “Lily… if only you knew the power you have over me.”

I lick my lips and bite down against my smile. “Well. I’ll keep that in mind next time I want to ask for a raise.”

He chuckles, the sound going right to my thighs.

After a moment, he gestures for me to lay down. He hunches over me and kisses my breast again, I can feel his engorged cocks pressed hard against my stomach as he pulls me close, parting my knees, positioning me.

“Before, when you said, ‘use me’…” Soven starts to say, the trails off.

“What about it?”

He shakes his head a little. “I don’t know that I could fulfill that request properly. You’re not just an ingredient in a spell.”

As he says this, his cocks graze up against my entrances, drawing his middle cock wet and leaking up my center to part my cunt’s lips. Roving hands feel me thoroughly, searching until he finds my cunt soaked and wanting, poised himself and pushed in.

I try not to moan at how he feels inside me, how nicely he fits after I had been aching for him to fill me, stretch me to my limits. At first the one was more than enough to make my hips twitch as he worked in and out of my cunt, but then the press of his third cock against my hole made me realize how much more I wanted.

I catch my breath, looking up at him. I reach up and touch his face. He leans into my palm. “I know.”

“You’re not a means to an end. You are the end.”

I think my heart is so full it might burst. “You’re my end too.”

He grins, as much as his beastly face will allow. His half lidded eyes dip down across me, taking me in, and I watch him taste my wetness off his claws. I whimper. I have a thousand things to say, all of them yes and please, do whatever you want with me.

I watch, near breathless and quivering as he slathers the lubricant along his third cock, the bottle plucked from thin air. I hope he has several more stowed away somewhere for the days we’ll have ahead of us. 

I tense as he eases the very tip of his third cock in my ass.

He thrusts once, and everything slides into place, his top cock connecting with my clit, a spark of sensation against the fullness of his cocks entirely inside me. My hands curl around his horns, as I shift my hips experimentally, feeling every doubly penetrating inch slide in and out of me.

Soon enough he’s pounding into me, every nerve in my body on fire, stripped and raw and sparking with sensation. I lose count after the second orgasm, I lose track of time, and I lose the ability to make any noise but a moan or a scream.

It doesn’t matter, as long as I have Soven.

My hand curls tight around his phylactery and I hold it to my chest.