58 The Flip Side of the Sex Coin

Lily

Lily couldn’t stop her loud guttural wheeze as Bel’s full body weight crushed her into the mattress. No, not just his full body weight. He’d thrown himself downwards with force , ejecting all air from her lungs in possibly the least sexy noise she’d ever made.

She fought to clear away the decadent high of her orgasm, to think around his bone-crushing weight, the fact that he still filled her, the pulsing of his own climax fading by the moment. She pressed her head back into the pillow, twisting to stare at the door, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

Sharkie’s face went from blank shock to horror in about a second.

“Are you doing adult stuff?” she asked, words slamming together in her rush to get them out.

Fuck. What was worse? Lying? Telling the truth? There was no good way out of this was there? Was there??

“Just a little,” Lily said breathlessly at the same moment Bel said, “I mean, yeah?”

Sharkie’s expression went from horror to outright revulsion, followed by a gag that came from her soul. She spun, slamming the door behind her. Another gag sounded in the hallway.

Lily grimaced.

“I didn’t hear a knock. Did you hear a knock?” Bel asked, looking down at her. His eyes widened and he pushed upwards, guilt written all over his face. “Shit, sorry.”

She sucked in a lungful of air that really, she didn’t need, but it felt nice anyway. “I didn’t hear a knock either, but then I wasn’t listening super hard.”

Bel sighed, dropping his head onto the pillow beside hers.

Lily blew out a long breath, closing her eyes. Oof. Well, sometimes kids walk in on their parents.

She had when she was younger, and her reaction had been about the same, except she hadn’t said anything, just immediately shut the door. Her parents had never addressed it, which hadn’t been great, honestly. It’d made her feel worse about it.

They needed to start locking the door. Knocking or not, they’d nearly been caught twice in as many days. She attributed the uninterrupted months before Bel had marched out to a stroke of luck.

Bel lifted his head, silver eyes back to their normal dilation. “So. Breakfast will be fun.”

Lily curled into him, smothering her mortified laughter in his chest.

* * *

Lily handed Sharkie her cocoa, then poured two mugs of hot water and added a tea bag to each while Sharkie squinted at her. She’d told Bel to grab a quick shower if he wanted and said that she would take care of talking to Sharkie. She thought it might be better coming from her.

Lily steeled herself and tried to deliver her little speech as naturally as possible. “Hey, so I’m sorry you walked in on us while we were having a private moment. It’s totally normal to feel uncomfortable seeing that. We felt uncomfortable too. Sex can look and sound a little weird, so I’m sorry if that upset or scared you. We have a lock on our door for a reason, and we should have used it. In the future, let’s have a house rule where, if the door is shut, we knock first and wait until we get permission to enter.”

She hadn’t been blushing and bashful about explaining sex to Sharkie before, but it felt a bit different when she was talking about her and Bel together. Thank fuck Sharkie hadn’t walked in on them in the middle of celebrating Bel’s release from bedrest…

“Okay,” Sharkie said slowly, moving the melting marshmallows in her cocoa around with a spoon. She seemed to start asking a question and talk herself out of it several times.

“You can ask me anything, bug,” Lily said gently.

Sharkie nodded, stirring her cocoa.

Lily swished the tea bag in her mug around a bit, waiting.

“You and Bel do that for fun, right? For the ‘because it feels nice’ reason, not the…other one?”

Oh, Sharkie…

One day after school, Sharkie had come home concerned and jittery with a panicky kind of energy that reminded Lily of when she’d first met her. They’d gotten the school version of the sex talk, and while demon school was wonderful for many reasons, it failed to take into account the sole mortal soul in attendance and what mortal ideas and trauma she might have about sex. Demons and denizens of the Afterlife in general had a much healthier attitude towards sex and sexuality than most people in the mortal world. That healthy attitude had caused a lot of confusion and fear for Sharkie.

Lily had explained, pinkie promising the whole time, that there were normal, healthy kinds of sex, like what the school had been talking about. Sex for pleasure, connection, fun. That was what most people had. There were some people who didn’t like sex, for one reason or another, people who were on a spectrum of asexuality and people who just preferred not to. Then there was the other kind of sex, the kind that had been warped and twisted, weaponized to hurt people, to exert power in a cruel way. (Lily had figured that power play dynamics in healthy sex and BDSM were a bit much for Sharkie’s maturity at that point.) Weaponized sex was what had happened to Sharkie, and to herself, and it was not, and never would be, their faults.

Sharkie had soaked up all that information like a sponge. She usually did when people took the time to explain things properly and had been relieved that there was a positive side to the sex coin.

It made sense that, given the shock of walking in on Lily and Bel, she might need a bit of reassurance and clarification.

“Do you think Bel would want to hurt me?” Lily asked.

“No.”

“Do you think I would ever want to hurt Bel?

“No,” Sharkie said, relaxing a bit. “So you do it for fun.”

“We do it for fun,” Lily confirmed, pulling her tea bag out before her tea got bitter. Bel liked his a bit stronger, so she left his in.

Sharkie huffed a sigh and took a hearty gulp of her cocoa, licking the chocolate mustache it gave her.

She wrinkled her nose. “It seems very messy.”

Bel pushing his seed back into her as she lay on his desk. Their combined release dripping down her thighs after she’d ridden him. The way he’d carefully wiped her clean with a damp cloth, just as he always did, after he’d bent her over the bench press in the new home gym.

Lily, thankfully, had only just raised her mug to take a sip, so she was spared the indignity of spewing tea across the kitchen. Even so, her face felt hotter than the magma rivers in Hell.

“It is.”

“And noisy. It sounded like you guys were dying in there. Like, again.”

“Only one of us in that room has died, and I did so in silence, thank you very much. But yeah, it can be.”

“And you like it?” Sharkie couldn’t have been more disbelieving if she tried.

“We do, but that’s a personal preference.” Hoping for some relief from the Sharkie Inquisition, Lily decided to offer a new topic of conversation. “Hey, by the way, Asmodeus and Sariah had their baby last night and they want us to visit at noon.”

“They did ? And you didn’t tell me that first?!”

* * *

Sariah’s face went from “happy to see them” to tearful joy when Lily presented her with the cinnamon mocha. She lay in one of her and Asmodeus’s guest rooms that had been prepared as a birthing suite, propped up in a nest of pillows that Lily would have bet her Paradise had been carefully and fussily built around her by Asmodeus.

“Oh,” she breathed, taking a deep sniff of the steam, “how did you know?”

“Two guesses,” Lily said, dropping down into the chair next to the bed.

Asmodeus sat on the couch, his son draped across his bare chest, Bel and Sharkie sitting on either side of him while he talked quietly.

“Not only did I marry the right man, I married up,” Sariah said, taking a sip and moaning. “Who cares if he’s the reason our kid has a big head.”

“Yeah, how was labor?”

“Mercifully, not as long as I was afraid it would be. Nothing went wrong, even though it hurt like a bitch. My mother was right—active labor was the worst part. You’re not pushing, you’re just contracting, and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting fucking anywhere, even though you know you are. Pushing I was fine with, because it meant there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Then”—Sariah smiled over at her boys, cradling her coffee—“he was here, the most beautiful thing in the world and screaming his head off.”

Lily followed her gaze to where Asmodeus was carefully transferring Osmodai to Bel’s arms, and he looked even tinier than he had with Asmodeus. An itty-bitty tail curled as he scrunched up his little legs, and Lily had to focus to realize that there, plastered to his back, were delicate, filmy little wings, disproportionately small for his body compared to the powerful wings of his father and uncle.

Sariah must have seen her expression and line of sight. “The wings are like that when they’re born. They’ll unstick from his back in about a week, and then grow to be more proportionate. I knew from talking to the healers about what to expect if he came out with wings, but I still have to keep reminding myself that it’s okay.” She took another sip. “This mocha tastes like sex.”

“See, that’s what got you into this position,” Lily said dryly.

“Speaking of which, turns out that a lot of the positions that got the baby in are the same ones that help get the baby out. Asmodeus thankfully withheld that little observation until after Osmodai had been born.”

“Because he wanted to live.” Lily chuckled.

Sariah hummed in assent, and they watched Asmodeus show Sharkie how tiny Osmodai’s feet were.

“That baby is going to help Asmodeus get through the funeral, I think,” Sariah said softly.

Lily tore her gaze away from the scene on the couch. Sariah’s features were soft, and her eyes bore a grief that Lily had seen in the other partners of warriors who had been in the recent war.

“He and I will turn to each other as we always have, but Osmodai…he’ll be a tangible piece of hope, a reminder that there are always endings, but there are beginnings too.”

“Lily!” Asmodeus called carefully, glancing sideways at the baby. “Quit seducing my wife with coffee and come meet our son.”

“Joke’s on you. She knows you put me up to it.”

“She’s seducing me for you, babe,” Sariah added, cradling the cup in both hands.

“Well, then she’s doing a shit job of it. Swap places with me, Lily, so I can flirt with my wife properly and tell her what a fine baby she cooked up.”

Sariah and Lily rolled their eyes at each other, but Lily rose, bumping Asmodeus’s fist as she passed. Bel had stood and was swaying a bit, staring down at Osmodai so tenderly it melted her. Sharkie stood on the couch to keep an eye on the baby, her eyes sweetly curious, a little smile on her mouth.

Lily had asked Bel about people visiting a newborn so soon, but apparently, since they didn’t have to worry about germs in the Afterlife, except for occasional colds once they hit adulthood, visitation was based more on the social preferences of the parents and not medical concern.

Osmodai stared up at his uncle with wide bronze eyes, clearly taking after his mother in that regard, though Sariah’s were more golden. His little tail was curled around Bel’s forearm as far is it was able to go, which, considering Lily needed both hands to wrap the thickest part of it, wasn’t all that far. Those bronze eyes blinked in her direction while he yawned.

Lily nudged his delicate little hand with her finger, and he gripped it with surprising strength. Joy surged through her veins. Such a tiny, powerful little life.

“I can’t believe I was ever this small,” Sharkie said, carefully touching the downy hair on his head.

“You were probably smaller. He’s a bit bigger than the average mortal baby,” Lily told her, running her thumb over the tiny little fingers gripping her own and marveling as she always did at the teensy fingernails, which happened to be black.

“Really?”

“Mm, I’d say so. Though birth size isn’t really an indicator of where you end up. I was on the small end of average for humans when I was born. Then I got tall.”

“This may shock both of you, but I was a big baby,” Bel said.

“You’re still big,” Sharkie said.

Lily bit her lip to let that golden opportunity pass.

“Only when I’m not next to someone bigger,” Bel murmured, smiling softly at the baby socks with bats on them.

“Which is why, when he gets his ass handed to him in wrestling, it’s deeply amusing for me and humbling for him,” Asmodeus called across the room.

“What happened to flirting with your wife?” Lily asked.

“We disagreed and it became less flirty and more conversation-y,” Asmodeus explained while Sariah shook her head.

“Nothing to disagree over, I’m going. The healers agreed to spend extra time with me—”

“Healing wears you out. Ask me how I know.” Asmodeus scowled at her.

“The healers,” Sariah said more firmly, “agreed. Frankly, even if they hadn’t, I would have gotten someone to carry me there. I’ll have a chair for the ceremony and come home early, but I’m going.”

“Sariah—”

“If the roles were reversed, what would you do?”

Asmodeus subsided, looking more serious and general-like than Lily had ever seen him. The funeral. That had to be the ceremony in question.

“Lily, if you had just given birth , would you, two days later, go to a funeral?” Asmodeus asked in a sweet but deeply misguided attempt to make a point.

“Try to fucking stop me,” Lily said. “To be there for Bel when he needed it and pay my respects to those who died to protect all of us? You couldn’t keep me away.”

Asmodeus exchanged a long look with his wife, who, for all her fire, seemed soft at that moment. She leaned in to say something to him that none of them could hear, and Lily returned her gaze to the baby still gripping the life out of her finger. Bel, his finger held captive by Osmodai’s other hand, nudged the back of her hand with his. His silver eyes were searching, quietly intense.

Lily smiled at him. “Try to fucking stop me.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up in a smile, then he slid that look to Sharkie, who kept petting Osmodai’s little head with extreme gentleness.

“You can try to fucking stop me, but you’d have to catch me first.”