Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience. Crystal - By Deacon Blues Four - After the Loving The world came back in little steps. This was probably all for the good, as a large step would have hurt my head more. Someone had tapped out a tune on my head, and pretty hard, I might add. My right arm hurt too, and the wrist felt almost broken. I tried to move my left hand to comfort my aching jaw, but I couldn't. I pried my eyes open allowing in some light, which bounced off my eyeballs painfully. I looked around. I was on my bed. Naked. I was tied up, or down, rather. I craned my neck to look at my left hand, and immediately regretted the motion as a spike of pain drove into my skull. "Ah." I said, wincing. I heard Crystal's voice say "Serves you damn well right, pulling that shit." I was about to chastise her for language when it all came crashing back down on me. It felt like a ton of bricks, encased in a few more tons of concrete. I started moving my head to face where her voice had come from, and kept moving despite the pain. Finally, she came into view, squatting on the dresser. Still nude. She looked remarkably like a pink tree frog that way, and I almost cracked a smile. There was nothing funny about her expression though. "You sorry son of a bitch." She said quietly. "I finally get you to do what I need you to do, and then you go and try to chicken shit out?" She shook her head, short abbreviated movements. "No." She said. I sighed. "I don't deserve to live now, Crystal." I said. "What I did was unforgivable." Tears started to pool in my eyes again. I laid my head back down on the bed. Crystal stood up, I could barely make her out at the edge of my blurry vision. She had the Barretta in her small hands. "You want to die?" She asked me, her voice suddenly cold. There was a tiny metallic click. Then the gun fired. The pillow beside my head exploded in a hail of fluff and cloth, pieces of it actually stinging as they were thrown off at high speed by the bullets impact. I flinched, then raised my head again "That the fu..." Where my head had been exploded like the first shot, causing bits of headboard and pillow to spatter against the back of my skull, I even felt some of the wooden shards cut me. "Crysta..." Another loud report from the gun, the bullet grazing my other ear, opposite the already cut one. I looked down at her, the barrel of that handgun looked huge when I was looking down it. "Ple..." The pistol fired again, blowing out a hunk of the bed under my shoulder. "Damn..." The bed under the other shoulder disintegrated, and I felt a chunk of coil stab into me. Then there were three shots in rapid succession, turning my headboard completely into sawdust, chunks of it flying in all directions. "Ok..." Followed by another report, nicking my neck then tearing into the mattress, sending out fragments of padding. Then I felt the hot barrel of the gun on my temple. "Is this how you want to go?" I heard Crystal's voice in my ear, over the ringing caused by those repeated shots. "Leave the daughter who loves you, who still loves you, who loves you even more now?" The barrel pushed against my skin, harder and harder with each phrase. I whimpered out a tiny "Yes." I heard the gun click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber. "Too fucking bad." I heard Crystal say, then she dropped the cold chunk of steel on my chest. "Out of bullets, guess you'll have to live." I looked down at her, as she stormed out of my room and flipped off the light. I heard the shower going for a bit, then she came back in, dripping. She sprayed air freshener around the room and even directly on my face, burning my eyes. I opened my mouth to protest, and she just said. "Shut up before you start." She put her hands on her hips and looked at me. "If, as you say, you raped me, then you will just lay there and take whatever the hell I dish out, you hear me?" She sat on the dresser again, in that peculiar squat. "But you didn't you know?" She said. "I didn't?" I asked back. "No." Crystal shook her head. "I wanted you to do it." She smiled weakly. "I didn't count on being knocked out cold, though." She sighed. "I should have warned you, but didn't expect the effect to be so powerful, or so fast." "What effect?" I asked. She just stared at me. "The one which caused you to almost eat your pistol." She smirked. "Funny, I would have thought you would have noticed yourself doing that." I sulked. "That was guilt, well deserved guilt." "It was not!" She yelled, then her voice dropped back to normal. "It was pheromones. Mine." She said, tapping her chest with a finger. "And you weren't ready for them. Neither was I." "Pheromones?" I said incredulously. "Pheromones did that? Why do I doubt that." "You shouldn't, think real hard dad." Crystal said patiently. "Even if you were the most heinous ass in the world, would you normally consider blowing yourself away right in front of me?" Her eyebrows rose. "Would you?" I shook my head. "No." I finally admitted. "I wouldn't do that to you." My head was clearing some. I had done something terrible, or maybe terrible, depending on whether she really had wanted me to do it. "Well, you almost did." She said reasonably. "You almost splattered your brains all over the bed where you had just made love to me." She pointed at the bed. I couldn't help but chuckle. "As opposed to `fillin it full of lead?'" I pointed out, jerking my head, despite the pain, at the various gaping holes the pistol had blown in my bed. "Good." She smiled slightly. "You're getting your sense of humor back, you're going to need it." She unfolded again, dropping off the dresser, then stood beside me. "I'm afraid to untie you." She said. "I don't know if you're just shitting me or if you're really calmed down now." She held her hand out over my mouth. In her fingers was a pair of pills. "Take these." "What are they?" I asked. "Downers, you should recognize them," She held them to my lips, "they're painkillers from when you broke your leg." I opened my mouth and took them, and swallowed them down. She let me sip from the toothbrush cup from the bathroom. It tasted of toothpaste but helped the pills go down. After about twenty minutes, where she just went back to her `crouching post,' I actually got a bit buzzed. "Okay," I said, "I think I'm pretty relaxed now. I smiled at her. She stood back up and came over to me, she peeled back my eyelid and nodded. "Yeah, you're pretty medicated, aren't you?" She grinned. "All right, but we should really get you cleaned up first." She looked me up and down. "You're a mess." She untied my arms and walked a bit from me, letting me untie my feet. I rubbed my wrists, trying to get them awake. She leaned on the door frame, watching me warily. "Please, daddy, don't flip out again. I need you." She said quietly. I slid down the bed then stood up. "I won't." I promised. I was emotionally drained. I didn't have the energy to work up a good sense of curiosity, much less the self-loathing needed to hurt oneself. I walked toward the door, and she backed up into the hall to let me pass, keeping those alarmingly alert green eyes on me. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the mirror over the sink. Holy Crap! There was blood caked on the sides of my head, and a bunch on my collar and neck, too. Along with that, there were chunks of pillow and mattress stuffing in my hair and stuck to the stubble of my beard. I looked back over my shoulder at Crystal in the doorway. "Wow, I do look like shit." I said. Crystal smiled and nodded. "You've looked better." She agreed. I turned on the shower and let it get warm. I turned toward her. "You going to watch me the whole time, warden?" I asked. "Yep." She said. Then gave me a single nod. "Into the shower for delousing and just cuz I like watching men shower." She pointed to the now steaming shower. I stepped in and the hot water started soothing me, running over me and washing away my worries. Water is a miraculous stuff, isn't it? I looked out and Crystal was there, propped on the door frame and watching me. She was still nude, but was definitely not a sex-object now, she was a guardian, a sentinel. The fact that she had no clothes on just drove home the point that she didn't need accessories to look ominous. I started washing, gingerly around my new cuts and abrasions and watched the water run pink with my dried blood and fresh blood released by my ministrations. Had I just tried to kill myself? God, that would have left Crystal totally alone. I couldn't do that. I soaped up my hair. I felt small hands on my back. Crystal said from right behind me, "Sorry, inmate, but I gotta help you get clean." I turned around and saw her standing there, only as high as my chest and looking up at me with nothing but love on. She smiled brightly as I smiled down. "You're a wonder, you know that?" I said, with sincerity. As she soaped up my chest, her small hands felt good on me. "Yep." She said, still being Warden Crystal. "So're you." She added as she soaped my dick and balls. "I wasn't sure you had it in you to get as far as you did." Her hands slid over the shaft of my cock, though it seemed obdurate to hardening. She grinned darkly. "The dichotomy that is me." She said. "I have to have a man who will do me. Any man who will do me isn't worth a shit, any man who is a good man won't touch me." She looked up at me. "I almost broke you making a good man do what I needed." She shrugged. "It's the burden we bear, you know?" She continued by washing my legs, kneeling to do so. She looked up at me again. "I need you daddy. Please stay a good man, even if you have to do a few bad things. I have to have you both ways." She stood back up and hugged me, a gentle, soft hug, with no lust in it. "I'll try angel." I said. "But," I added as a thought. "if we're to have this level of intimacy, you probably need to stop calling me daddy." Did I just say that? Hey! Cool, my brain's back in gear. She stepped back and regarded me with those insightful eyes. "You're right, of course," She paused a half second, "Nathaniel." She said and smiled at me. She made me sit on the toilet while she `doctored' the wounds on my ears and neck. "Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" I asked, remembering how she used my handgun like a surgical instrument. She was in front of me. She shrugged. "I don't know." She said, flatly. "I never shot a pistol before, guess I'm just a natural." She grinned. I jumped as she put coagulant from our first aid kit on my neck. "Well, you're pretty damn impressive with it, I must say." She finished her patch job on me, and declared me fit for duty. "Now," She said, walking out, pulling me by my hand. "What do we do about that mess you made?" She pointed to the now half destroyed bed. "Get the mattress from the guest room for now," I said quietly. "Or maybe, better yet, we can sleep in the guest room." I looked at her. "Ghosts." I muttered. Crystal nodded. "Sounds like a plan." She said. She guided me to the guest room's door. Opening it. The slightly musty smell of a room mostly unused wafted out. When we had designed the house, Jennifer and I had decided all the bedrooms would be the same size, so this one was a mirror opposite of my old bedroom. I said "I'm glad our bedroom is as big as our old ones." I smiled to her. "Or it'd be cramped." For some reason she hugged me fiercely, then said "I love you...Nathan." She looked in. "But are you sure we should share a bed so soon?" She asked me. "Well, the way I see it, the sooner we do," I shrugged, "the sooner I'll actually stop being jumpy about it." I looked at her levelly. "Is this forever?" I asked her. "Or just until you're eighteen or something?" Crystal leaned toward me and pulled my ear to her lips. "Forever." She whispered, so softly it tickled my ear. "You're doomed now." She said louder as she pushed me back upright, and Smiled a toothy predator's grin. Her face got serious. "What about tonight, though? Shouldn't we just kind of..." Her question was cut off by a squeal as I picked her up and carried her across the threshold into the room. "No." I said. "You're mine now, by your own admission." I laid her on the bed. Again taking in her long, and lithe form. The small breasts, the long legs, the slim arms, and the beautiful face with the silken tresses. "This is our bed." I said standing. She looked at my eyes, then let them drift down my chest then stomach to my hardening organ. Her eyes widened, and her smile got really wide. "Woah." She said, looking back up. "That's not from my pheromones, stud." She said. "I won't be producing any for a day or two, after that screamer you gave me a while ago." I nodded. "Nope." I said. "This one's all yours." I laid down beside her, my hand on her muscular belly. "I've come to the conclusion that I can't joke you." "So you're gonna fuck me?" She asked. Her small hand had snaked from her side and was now wrapping around my hard shaft. I nodded. "Repeatedly." I moaned as she gripped my cock harder. "Not yet, you don't" She said, twisting around like a snake, and engulfed my dick with her lips. She pulled away from it. "First I have need." she said, looking up at me. The hunger in her eyes was a bit alarming, but I had accepted her now, and totally, and apparently, she accepted me, totally. Her lips came back down, and kept going down until only two inches or so of my organ protruded from her sunken cheeks. She started sliding her head up and down the shaft, her tongue moving inside her mouth and one hand massaging my nuts. The other hand moved to my side, then to my ass, and she pulled my hips forward, causing me to thrust. When I did so, she moaned. I like her moaning, so I repeated the motion, and she moaned louder. Her eyes rolling up to look at me, and she nodded to me. I placed both hands on the back of her head, and started pumping more enthusiastically. She moaned more deeply now, groaning. After a few strokes I was shoving it all the way to the back of her mouth, and less than an inch remained. Her mouth was soft, and warm, and accepted my cock totally. Images of Jennifer flashed in my mind, how she had given me head frequently, even daily on occasion, or even multiple times some days. She had liked me to do this, now Crystal had me doing it. I guess some things are genetic. I felt my balls contract a little as orgasm approached, Crystal felt them move to, because her hand kneaded on my balls harder, almost to the point of pain, and she doubled the suction, and started shoving her head forward with more force, driving that last inch into her throat. I saw the head cause her neck to bulge a little, then pull out then reenter. With a jolt I started to come, spewing my semen into her throat. I felt it contract as she swallowed it down without any hesitation. Wave after wave of pleasure coursed through me as I fired off half a dozen pulses of come into her mouth and throat. Finally, I was spent, and she let my cock slide from her lips. She grinned at me. Then stood up beside the bed, pulling me to the edge where my legs hung off. She bowed to me and said "I thank you for the gift, father." It had the ring of formality to it, of a ritual. Gift? She was thanking me? I wasn't sure what this was about, but I was game. "You're welcome?" I said. Grinning self-consciously. She took on a serious expression, as if explaining something to a school child. "The proper response is `I gift freely to you.'" She said, then smiled, "If you feel the need to respond. I looked at her, then shrugged, sounds fun. "I gift freely to you, daughter." I said, kneeling to the floor and taking her hand, I leaned down and kissed her palm. I looked back up to her gleaming green eyes. "It was my honor." I concluded. If she was going to thank me for letting her give me head, I could be honored by it, at the least. She waved her hand theatrically in front of her face. "I do believe I am going to be faint." She said, in a credible Scarlet O'HARA imitation. She straightened up. "You really don't have to do that...Nathan." She explained. "It's rarely done that way." "If you can thank me for letting you do that, I can be as honored as I want about it, okay?" I said, trying to put some authority in my tone. "What's it from, anyways?" I asked. Her face took on a tiny tinge of frustration then she put a finger to my lips. "Nah. You said you wouldn't ask." Crystal said. But there was a smile in her eyes. "Just accept that it is so." I nodded, and kissed her hand again. She inhaled sharply. "My but that is something, I've never had a guy treat me like that." She said, then looked worried. I let the comment go by. But my mind grabbed onto that, she had been close to other guys, and had performed that ceremony before. That I kinda knew already, she was far to skilled at the act to be a novice. But she had said to not ask, and I had agreed, so I didn't. Crystal pulled back the blanket and sheets and pronounced that it was kinda late, and we had done plenty to deserve to be tired, so we should go to bed. I agreed and slid into the bed next to her. She cuddled up to my side and after a while of chasing thoughts about the last two days I drifted off to sleep.