Categories > Original > Fantasy > To Dance With the Devil
Good Enough
0 reviewsCameron has a relationship with Venkata... sort of. And that's good enough. Right?
0Unrated
Title: To Dance With the Devil
Author: MakaiKitty
Rating: NC-17
Category: Original Fantasy, "Above and Below” series
Pairing: Venkata/Cameron
Warnings: Slash, M/M, Anal, Angel/Devil sex, Mention of past child abuse
Distribution: My website, My LJ and any LJs I choose to post at, AFF.net, and FicWad. All of my accounts are under the user name MakaiKitty. If you'd like to use it just let me know.
Disclaimer: The characters, daemon realms, and situations in this story are all original and belong solely to MakaiKitty. Please don't steal, borrow, take, or otherwise use anything from my fics.
Updates: Just join my Yahoo!Group to be informed of any updates to this or any of my other fics - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/makaikittyfics
Status: Complete/One-Shot
To Dance With the Devil
Chapter Three: Good Enough
Cameron couldn’t ever remember being so nervous before in his entire life. He’d faced his father’s belt, had watched his mother approach him with a wire hanger and refused to cry out, had stood strong against a Catholic priest of dubious credentials who’d wanted to drive his demons out in ways that most certainly weren’t sanctioned by the church, and he’d let men twice his size and meaner than his parents could ever hope to be tie him up while knowing that there would be no hope of escape once they were done. And, although those things had taught him fear, he couldn’t ever recall his heart threatening to burst right out of his chest with the strength of its pounding rhythm.
He’d told himself that he’d only gone to the club because it was lonely back at his apartment. Told himself that he hadn’t seen Tommy face to face in almost a week, and that since his best friend was working the Saturday shift instead of working on his paper on the history of the tattoo and its cultural significance in post-modern society, then the least that he could do was come and keep the other man company. But that reasoning was as false as the easy smile that he wore on his handsome face, as false as the easy sway of hips and the relaxed slouch of his body against the bar. He was waiting. Waiting for Venkata Mekjian. And nothing would ease the nervous fluttering in his stomach or the uneasy tenseness of his heart until he saw the other man walk through the front doors of the Forever Club.
“Can I buy you a drink, gorgeous?” Cameron thought that the handsome, if somewhat non-descript man who was standing next to him at the bar might have been talking to him for some time, but he couldn’t be sure. He would have blamed it on the music blasting the room from the stage up front, but that would have been a lie.
“No.” Cameron didn’t care if he was being rude. The guy would get over it. He was cute and clean-cut, looked relatively well put together, and there would be no shortage of guys willing to show the other man a good time.
“It’s just a drink,” the guy didn’t give up, thinking that Cameron was just playing hard to get. Any other night he might have been right. “You look like you could use one, is all.”
As if Cameron weren’t already nervous enough. Now he /looked like he needed a drink/? He momentarily thought of running right past the persistent man and making a run for the bathroom to check his appearance in the mirror. But he didn’t want to risk missing Venkata’s entrance, too worried that even if the other man came looking for him that he would turn around and leave if he didn’t see Cameron. He could only keep his fingers crossed and hope that he didn’t look like something that the cat had dragged in.
“Look,” maybe talking would calm his nerves a little, or at least distract him from them, “I don’t mean to be rude, but-“
Just then a gust of warm air breathed across the back of Cameron’s neck and he froze, the words of apology that he was about to offer completely forgotten, the moment frozen in time as he waited with anticipation for what he hoped was to come. He didn’t know how, but he knew that the thing that he had been waiting for all night was about to happen. And then the breath at the back of his neck became the feeling of lips on his sensitive skin, the soft mouth forming the words that he had longed to hear, “I’ve been waiting for you, Cameron.”
***
“Are you seeing Venkata again tonight?” Tommy fell back against the couch, propping his feet up and balancing his plate on his thighs. He would have yelled at his younger siblings for thinking that lunchmeat sandwiches were an acceptable substitute for a healthy dinner, but for him and Cameron it was just fine.
“I hope so,” he never knew the answer to that question until he got to the club. But Venkata had been waiting for him every night for the past two weeks, even though Cameron still couldn’t quite figure out how getting there after him was considered /waiting/. Tommy thought that he was being strung along, thought that it was highly suspicious that Venkata always met him at the club and never talked about himself when he and Cameron were alone together, but Cameron didn’t care. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand how odd the man’s behavior was, he did, it was just that he didn’t really mind so long as Venkata kept coming for him. He couldn’t explain it, but over the past weeks he’d begun to crave the other man like a drug. It was as if, when he was locked in the embrace of those strong arms, when he looked into those hypnotic black eyes, nothing else mattered. He felt safe and wanted, cared for, and even if it was an illusion he wasn’t going to give it up for anything.
“Is he still pulling his disappearing act every morning?”
His lack of a comment was answer enough for Tommy.
Cameron didn’t see why it mattered so much. So Venkata never stuck around to say goodbye? At least he stayed until Cameron fell asleep. That was enough for the blonde. He turned his lithe body smoothly in the oversized armchair, coming to a rest with his head hanging down towards the floor and his feet planted on the wall above the headrest. He let the blood flow to his head, the rush sending a strange thrill through his body, and hoped that Tommy would drop the subject. Just because he didn’t mind Venkata leaving didn’t mean that he liked it either, and that made it a rather uncomfortable conversation. He wasn’t about to demand more of his already generous lover, so there was not point in arguing over it.
“You don’t suppose…” Tommy didn’t want to say it, but he felt compelled to make his younger friend see the truth. Although, he really wished that he didn’t have to. Cameron had seemed happier in the past weeks than he had been in the entirety of the five years that Tommy had known him. Despite always waking up alone, he seemed well rested, and his smiles were more real than they had been before Venkata had come along. If the dark-skinned man hadn’t been so mysterious and evasive, Tommy might just have thanked him for the change that a little TLC had wrought in Cameron.
“Has a wife and kids to get home to?” Cameron had already considered this. And, again, he didn’t care. As long as Venkata gave him his nights, he had no right to ask for the day too. “It’s none of my business even if he does.”
“None of your…?” Tommy had hoped that a new, more attentive and caring lover might have changed some of Cameron’s opinions about himself. Apparently, it hadn’t.
“Do you see this?” Cameron didn’t move from his wrong-side-up position on the chair, didn’t turn his face to meet Tommy’s; he just pushed the clingy fabric of his shirt up to lay his stomach bare. They both knew what Tommy would see there. The mark was anything but new. “Well, he has, and he doesn’t seem to care.”
Cameron’s tapered fingers traced down the length of his scar, feeling the contrast between the smoothness of his stomach versus the roughness of the twelve year old knife wound. His mother had told him that it needed to be done, had assured him that she was doing God’s work when she’d carved the inverted cross into his young flesh, and she had not stilled her hand until he was left with a mark that could never be ignored. He had screamed and begged, fought with all of the strength that a ten year-old’s hundred-pound frame could manage, but she had not been swayed. His scar was the proof of her convictions, proof that all of his struggling had been in vain, and that he had never stood a chance against his mother and her god.
“She told me that the inverted cross was a symbol of unworthiness and a fall from God’s graces. It’s proof that you’re unclean,” he still couldn’t understand how a ten year old was unclean. How one so young was capable of enough sin to earn St. Peter’s mark upon him. He suspected that he never would. It was another mystery better left to his mother and her Master. “She wanted everyone who saw me to know just what I was, to warn them.”
Tommy put a hand atop Cameron’s, his thumb running across the edge of one of the cross’s arms, knowing all too well that wounds didn’t have to continue to bleed to still hurt. Not for the first time did he wonder what Cameron might have been like with a mother as loving as his had been, if it would have made a difference. He was pretty sure that it would have; relatively certain that he wouldn’t be sitting in Cameron’s living room listening to his friend talk about how unworthy he was of the simple love and affection that they all craved. It made him shudder at the unfairness of life, of a world where his own mother had died without seeing her children grow up while he knew that Cameron’s still lived.
“She used to tell me that I was begotten of the Devil. That my father had been possessed when she’d conceived me. She used to blame his drinking on the demons, claim that he was possessed too when he’d beat us and rave like a madman,” he could understand all too well how she had believed that. The man had been a terror when he lost control. Funny that his only physical scars were not from that man. “But apparently his demons were transitory, they only came to him when he was weak and gave in to temptation. I was born bad.”
“You weren’t born bad,” he meant it with every fiber of his being. He’d grown up in the darkness of a night club, had spent his youth there, was planning on spending most of the rest of his life there too. He’d had chance enough to witness bad-seeds in action. And Cameron couldn’t even come close. “You’re a good man, and you deserve to happy, just like the rest of us.”
“But I’m not just like the rest of you,” there were tears in Cameron’s eyes when at last he looked at his friend, their hands still joined on the soft flesh of his belly. There was genuine fear there, in the depths of his sky blue eyes, the look of a frightened child begging to be proven wrong. But too many strange things had happened over the past years for any words of comfort to ever truly drive away the uncertainty of that particular fear. They both knew it. “I never have been.”
“So what, you’re a little different?” Tommy wanted to be serious, wanted to pull Cameron into his arms and promise him that it would be all right, but he knew that the only thing that would accomplish was Cameron pushing him away. When he fell into a mood tinged with memories of the past, it was better just to laugh it off, to let the other man go on forgetting. Tommy was worried about what would happened when he couldn’t push it all to the back of his mind any longer, but that was a fear for another day. “I bet Venkata appreciates that you’re such a freak. I mean, who doesn’t want a double-jointed lover?”
“That’s not…” It wasn’t what he had meant, but it would do. He’d take laughter over heartache any day. “Don’t you have kids to look after or something? I have a date to get ready for.”
TBC ...
Author: MakaiKitty
Rating: NC-17
Category: Original Fantasy, "Above and Below” series
Pairing: Venkata/Cameron
Warnings: Slash, M/M, Anal, Angel/Devil sex, Mention of past child abuse
Distribution: My website, My LJ and any LJs I choose to post at, AFF.net, and FicWad. All of my accounts are under the user name MakaiKitty. If you'd like to use it just let me know.
Disclaimer: The characters, daemon realms, and situations in this story are all original and belong solely to MakaiKitty. Please don't steal, borrow, take, or otherwise use anything from my fics.
Updates: Just join my Yahoo!Group to be informed of any updates to this or any of my other fics - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/makaikittyfics
Status: Complete/One-Shot
To Dance With the Devil
Chapter Three: Good Enough
Cameron couldn’t ever remember being so nervous before in his entire life. He’d faced his father’s belt, had watched his mother approach him with a wire hanger and refused to cry out, had stood strong against a Catholic priest of dubious credentials who’d wanted to drive his demons out in ways that most certainly weren’t sanctioned by the church, and he’d let men twice his size and meaner than his parents could ever hope to be tie him up while knowing that there would be no hope of escape once they were done. And, although those things had taught him fear, he couldn’t ever recall his heart threatening to burst right out of his chest with the strength of its pounding rhythm.
He’d told himself that he’d only gone to the club because it was lonely back at his apartment. Told himself that he hadn’t seen Tommy face to face in almost a week, and that since his best friend was working the Saturday shift instead of working on his paper on the history of the tattoo and its cultural significance in post-modern society, then the least that he could do was come and keep the other man company. But that reasoning was as false as the easy smile that he wore on his handsome face, as false as the easy sway of hips and the relaxed slouch of his body against the bar. He was waiting. Waiting for Venkata Mekjian. And nothing would ease the nervous fluttering in his stomach or the uneasy tenseness of his heart until he saw the other man walk through the front doors of the Forever Club.
“Can I buy you a drink, gorgeous?” Cameron thought that the handsome, if somewhat non-descript man who was standing next to him at the bar might have been talking to him for some time, but he couldn’t be sure. He would have blamed it on the music blasting the room from the stage up front, but that would have been a lie.
“No.” Cameron didn’t care if he was being rude. The guy would get over it. He was cute and clean-cut, looked relatively well put together, and there would be no shortage of guys willing to show the other man a good time.
“It’s just a drink,” the guy didn’t give up, thinking that Cameron was just playing hard to get. Any other night he might have been right. “You look like you could use one, is all.”
As if Cameron weren’t already nervous enough. Now he /looked like he needed a drink/? He momentarily thought of running right past the persistent man and making a run for the bathroom to check his appearance in the mirror. But he didn’t want to risk missing Venkata’s entrance, too worried that even if the other man came looking for him that he would turn around and leave if he didn’t see Cameron. He could only keep his fingers crossed and hope that he didn’t look like something that the cat had dragged in.
“Look,” maybe talking would calm his nerves a little, or at least distract him from them, “I don’t mean to be rude, but-“
Just then a gust of warm air breathed across the back of Cameron’s neck and he froze, the words of apology that he was about to offer completely forgotten, the moment frozen in time as he waited with anticipation for what he hoped was to come. He didn’t know how, but he knew that the thing that he had been waiting for all night was about to happen. And then the breath at the back of his neck became the feeling of lips on his sensitive skin, the soft mouth forming the words that he had longed to hear, “I’ve been waiting for you, Cameron.”
***
“Are you seeing Venkata again tonight?” Tommy fell back against the couch, propping his feet up and balancing his plate on his thighs. He would have yelled at his younger siblings for thinking that lunchmeat sandwiches were an acceptable substitute for a healthy dinner, but for him and Cameron it was just fine.
“I hope so,” he never knew the answer to that question until he got to the club. But Venkata had been waiting for him every night for the past two weeks, even though Cameron still couldn’t quite figure out how getting there after him was considered /waiting/. Tommy thought that he was being strung along, thought that it was highly suspicious that Venkata always met him at the club and never talked about himself when he and Cameron were alone together, but Cameron didn’t care. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand how odd the man’s behavior was, he did, it was just that he didn’t really mind so long as Venkata kept coming for him. He couldn’t explain it, but over the past weeks he’d begun to crave the other man like a drug. It was as if, when he was locked in the embrace of those strong arms, when he looked into those hypnotic black eyes, nothing else mattered. He felt safe and wanted, cared for, and even if it was an illusion he wasn’t going to give it up for anything.
“Is he still pulling his disappearing act every morning?”
His lack of a comment was answer enough for Tommy.
Cameron didn’t see why it mattered so much. So Venkata never stuck around to say goodbye? At least he stayed until Cameron fell asleep. That was enough for the blonde. He turned his lithe body smoothly in the oversized armchair, coming to a rest with his head hanging down towards the floor and his feet planted on the wall above the headrest. He let the blood flow to his head, the rush sending a strange thrill through his body, and hoped that Tommy would drop the subject. Just because he didn’t mind Venkata leaving didn’t mean that he liked it either, and that made it a rather uncomfortable conversation. He wasn’t about to demand more of his already generous lover, so there was not point in arguing over it.
“You don’t suppose…” Tommy didn’t want to say it, but he felt compelled to make his younger friend see the truth. Although, he really wished that he didn’t have to. Cameron had seemed happier in the past weeks than he had been in the entirety of the five years that Tommy had known him. Despite always waking up alone, he seemed well rested, and his smiles were more real than they had been before Venkata had come along. If the dark-skinned man hadn’t been so mysterious and evasive, Tommy might just have thanked him for the change that a little TLC had wrought in Cameron.
“Has a wife and kids to get home to?” Cameron had already considered this. And, again, he didn’t care. As long as Venkata gave him his nights, he had no right to ask for the day too. “It’s none of my business even if he does.”
“None of your…?” Tommy had hoped that a new, more attentive and caring lover might have changed some of Cameron’s opinions about himself. Apparently, it hadn’t.
“Do you see this?” Cameron didn’t move from his wrong-side-up position on the chair, didn’t turn his face to meet Tommy’s; he just pushed the clingy fabric of his shirt up to lay his stomach bare. They both knew what Tommy would see there. The mark was anything but new. “Well, he has, and he doesn’t seem to care.”
Cameron’s tapered fingers traced down the length of his scar, feeling the contrast between the smoothness of his stomach versus the roughness of the twelve year old knife wound. His mother had told him that it needed to be done, had assured him that she was doing God’s work when she’d carved the inverted cross into his young flesh, and she had not stilled her hand until he was left with a mark that could never be ignored. He had screamed and begged, fought with all of the strength that a ten year-old’s hundred-pound frame could manage, but she had not been swayed. His scar was the proof of her convictions, proof that all of his struggling had been in vain, and that he had never stood a chance against his mother and her god.
“She told me that the inverted cross was a symbol of unworthiness and a fall from God’s graces. It’s proof that you’re unclean,” he still couldn’t understand how a ten year old was unclean. How one so young was capable of enough sin to earn St. Peter’s mark upon him. He suspected that he never would. It was another mystery better left to his mother and her Master. “She wanted everyone who saw me to know just what I was, to warn them.”
Tommy put a hand atop Cameron’s, his thumb running across the edge of one of the cross’s arms, knowing all too well that wounds didn’t have to continue to bleed to still hurt. Not for the first time did he wonder what Cameron might have been like with a mother as loving as his had been, if it would have made a difference. He was pretty sure that it would have; relatively certain that he wouldn’t be sitting in Cameron’s living room listening to his friend talk about how unworthy he was of the simple love and affection that they all craved. It made him shudder at the unfairness of life, of a world where his own mother had died without seeing her children grow up while he knew that Cameron’s still lived.
“She used to tell me that I was begotten of the Devil. That my father had been possessed when she’d conceived me. She used to blame his drinking on the demons, claim that he was possessed too when he’d beat us and rave like a madman,” he could understand all too well how she had believed that. The man had been a terror when he lost control. Funny that his only physical scars were not from that man. “But apparently his demons were transitory, they only came to him when he was weak and gave in to temptation. I was born bad.”
“You weren’t born bad,” he meant it with every fiber of his being. He’d grown up in the darkness of a night club, had spent his youth there, was planning on spending most of the rest of his life there too. He’d had chance enough to witness bad-seeds in action. And Cameron couldn’t even come close. “You’re a good man, and you deserve to happy, just like the rest of us.”
“But I’m not just like the rest of you,” there were tears in Cameron’s eyes when at last he looked at his friend, their hands still joined on the soft flesh of his belly. There was genuine fear there, in the depths of his sky blue eyes, the look of a frightened child begging to be proven wrong. But too many strange things had happened over the past years for any words of comfort to ever truly drive away the uncertainty of that particular fear. They both knew it. “I never have been.”
“So what, you’re a little different?” Tommy wanted to be serious, wanted to pull Cameron into his arms and promise him that it would be all right, but he knew that the only thing that would accomplish was Cameron pushing him away. When he fell into a mood tinged with memories of the past, it was better just to laugh it off, to let the other man go on forgetting. Tommy was worried about what would happened when he couldn’t push it all to the back of his mind any longer, but that was a fear for another day. “I bet Venkata appreciates that you’re such a freak. I mean, who doesn’t want a double-jointed lover?”
“That’s not…” It wasn’t what he had meant, but it would do. He’d take laughter over heartache any day. “Don’t you have kids to look after or something? I have a date to get ready for.”
TBC ...
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