Arcadia Resurgence by Vague Vermillion (e books free to read txt) 📖

as much as Hall interrupted Eiri. The spring tests came back strong and they were cleared to enter the final sprint to launch worldwide.

Just ten days. Eiri thought he'd enter into the state of panic he felt completing his thesis - a mind numbing haze of anxiety and pressure.

But all he thought about was her. Whenever he left the campus - to shower, change, or find food when the cafeteria closed, her car would swoop past him on the street. He'd find her more often than not in the backseat, naked and waiting, not even caring at times to have him tie her hands or pull her hair. 

The vintage limousine added another thrill for Eiri - he'd grown up on ancient prints of pre-Collapse moving stories where lovers met in the back seats of cars on cliff sides. Never before Starbucks had he spent so much time inside of the antique vehicles. Now he had a chance to experiment with the thrill of the confined space, so close to exposure with its moving window panes. He delighted in lifting Noth onto his lap, feeling her squirm against his hard cock as he fondled her breasts, stroked the hot, wet crevice between her legs. 

He liked to have her resist him in the car, pushing his hands and begging him to stop, saying someone might see them. He peeled more and more of her clothes away with each fake, frantic plea, unless she was already nude. Then he settled for pinching her nipples, her labia. Once, trapped in his lap, he even spread her legs far apart using his knees to wedge open her thighs and he slapped her bare sex until she screamed. Surely the driver heard - but the tinted window between his compartment and theirs remained sealed. 

The few times they did make it back to her place without her impaled on his cock, he indulged her - contorting her over tables or chairs, tying her up, tying her down. Pulling her over his knee to spank her bare buttocks with her wooden hairbrush until they flushed a deep, angry red. Winding a leather belt around her face, threaded through her mouth for her to bite down on as he plunged his cock into her from behind, holding the ends in one hand. Shoving a short, thick device into her trembling anus while he fingered her dripping cunt in a steaming hot shower. His favorite was tying her hands behind her back and lifting her up with him inside her, until just his swollen tip fitted into the gaping mouth of her sex - and then he'd let go, watching her slide back down his length, writhing to balance herself with her hands bound, clenching all around him. 

He always gagged her, and commanded her not to look at him when they didn't have the blindfold handy. She took it as part of the game, calling him "Master," and keeping her eyes downcast while he stripped her, bound her, beat her. But seeing her delight in it, the flush of her skin, the sheen of sweat glistening over the high color, he found himself losing sight of the boundary between play and reality. He sometimes caught himself glancing at her on campus, as she passed him in the hall, wanting to reach out and slap her, command her to strip.

They were so close to the end. Even Hall was caught in the mania of the final sprint, whirling between meetings like a dervish, eyes always darting to the next task. Eiri tried to keep the pace of meetings and syncs with his team, but it wasn't until three days before launch that he even managed to find ten minutes for Christy and a friendly cup of coffee.

She had fresh bite marks on her neck.

Under his hard stare, she blushed. "Come on, don't be like that... I told you, she's nice about."

"The Director?"

"Yeah," said Christy. "She listens, you know? And we go out to dinner and she talks about all kinds of things. She's over eight hundred years old, did you know?"

Eiri's jealousy pierced the fog of his lust. He tried to tell himself to keep calm, that it didn't matter, that at the very least, they could talk about it later. But he found himself striding to her office, not even bothering to knock as he pushed inside. She was not alone. A tall elf - the same from the night of New Year's party - held her in his arms from behind, his bearded mouth at her neck. Kissing her. She caught sight of him at the door.

"Can I help you, Lao?" she asked. The elf lifted his mighty head and stared. 

"Director," he said, unsure. "I... hoped for a moment of your time."

She considered him a moment. Then rested a hand on the forearm of the elf and said, "I'll see you for breakfast, dearest."

"I can't wait, my love." He kissed her again on the cheek and brushed past Eiri on the way out.

Eiri waited until the door closed behind him before uttering a furious exhalation. He stared as hard at her as he had at Christy, disgusted. Horrified. "Who was that?"

"My fiance," she said, cool and correct. She seated herself behind her desk and motioned for him to take one of the chairs. "What's on your mind, my friend?"

Friend? He sat. "Why does my chemical engineer have your teeth marks on her? I thought you didn't feed on coworkers."

"Oh, that?" She smiled. "She's... an edge case." 

"Explain," Eiri fumed. He did not like to see her so jovial, so carefree. He preferred to see her stretched over the back of a chair, ass red and raw from his belt. "Do you... do all of that with her too?"

"No, of course not," she said. "Is that it? You're jealous? Don't be. Christy is type AB negative - the rarest blood among humans. I couldn't resist taking the odd sip when she offered. That'd be like turning down a glass of pre-Collapse Yamazaki - ludicrous!"

He didn't like the comparison. "Is that how see us? As sips?"

She sighed, broke eye contact. "I can't change my nature. In any case, if it makes you feel better, I haven't been... intimate with anyone but you."

"And your 'fiance?'"

"Eiri," she said, sternly. "Don't be childish. A business relationship sometimes needs social engineering. When Fulbright debuts, there will be questions. A marriage distracts."

"What kind of questions?"

"About the blood." She locked her eyes onto his; he felt her touch in his mind. "You don't know...? Hall didn't tell you?" Her tone took on a menacing pitch. "I can assume the whole team is in the dark?"

"What does the team need to know?" Eiri asked. "About blood?"

"You really don't know! We use blood to roast Fulbright beans," the Director said. "That's the 'secret' ingredient. Only vampires have the means to source that much blood. Why else would the elves need our help to produce coffee when they've been making it ever since the Collapse?" 

Stunned, Eiri put his head in his hands. They didn't tell us. "We were brought onto the project because they felt humans had better insight into human tastes..."

"Elves and their bullshit intrinsic theory," the Director said. " You were hired so they could profile your blood, and send it to us to clone at scale. I'll go over it in the sync - you all should have been informed at kickoff."

"But I don't understand," Eiri said. "Why us? Why our blood?"

She blinked at him, her brow furring with mingled compassion and pity. "Eiri. You're B negative. So is Jaymin. Alan is AB positive. And that intern was O negative. I've known this about you - all of you - since before joining the project. You were selected by blood type, and approved by me as a perfect combination of rare types - we fiddled with it for months to get the right combo for soft boil. I can't believe Hall left you in the dark. That's just fucked up."

"It is!" He felt sick. Angry. "You hired us because of blood type?"

"Oh, it's not just that," she said, trying to comfort him. "Each of you is more than qualified to launch a consumer product! Beijing Design is no joke. And you know how elves are about looks... Even I'm only here because I was considered aesthetically pleasing! My VP couldn't get a visa." She set down her phone. "Calendar invite for a team huddle tomorrow should be in your inbox. I'm very sorry, Eiri. This isn't good management practice. It's below even demon standards." 

Eiri didn't respond, at first. Selfishly, he thought only of his own turmoil. Drinking coffee made with human blood... He barely thought of his team. Poor Christy. Just a sip. He stood up. "I'm going home for the day."

She looked at him, eyes full of pity. "Yes. That sounds reasonable."

...

The Director broke the news the next day during a team sync. Hall, sulking, stood behind her, not even bothering to move his lips in sync to the Director's apology. Eiri glanced at the faces of his teammates and saw them paling with the realization that their work hinged on their own bodies. Christy feigned a careless little shrug, but even she was subdued for the rest of the workday. 

Eiri thought briefly of rebelling - walking out, quitting. Sabotaging the launch, somehow. Deleting data or leaking it to some human rights activist group. But in a post-Collapse world, he knew that none of it mattered. The elves could replace him; the project would launch with or without him; humans would still drink the coffee even if they were reading the full list of ingredients. He wondered, darkly, if he'd already tasted the coffee made from his own blood from the pots in the office. 

He moped through the final days, feeling none of the adrenaline he usually did from completing a project. Even the odd sight of the Director in the halls didn't distract him from his melancholy, though sometimes he caught her gaze lingering on him. When he saw her car in the street, he deliberately walked by it. She did not send her assistant to collect him.

House Air planned a launch party for them the week after they went live. Rather than a company-wide campus happy hour, the invite gave the address somewhere in the Marymoore Copse that didn't show up on Google Maps. Rumors swirled of a mysteries fairy mansion that only appeared under the full moon. A magic place, dark, and secret. 

"Great place to celebrate launching a shady project," Alan joked. Christy and Jaymin laughed along with him. No one had seen Tim the intern since the Director broke the news about Fulbright's "secret ingredient." 

Eiri considered not going, leaving the calendar invite to languish in his inbox. Christy nudged him on Messenger three separate times in a day, trying to entice him. 

"It's just a party," she said. "You're the product designer - how would it look if you don't go??" And, finally, "Wear one of your sexy suits. Rub in their knobby faces. They couldn't have done this without you, Eiri."

He caved and said he'd go with her. At the very least to keep her away from vampires looking for "a sip." Almost as soon as he replied to her, he caught sight of the Director and her assistant strolling to the fishbowl. Eiri decided to trail behind them, wondering if he could catch the vampire's eye - inflict some of his turmoil on her mind. 

Her fiance waited for her in the office with two of his own associates. The Director left the glass transparent and Eiri discreetly watched from the