… solipsubmissive …

This is a continuation.  You might wish to follow this link to the beginning:  soiled, Part 1 

Just before she slipped away, he caught her, felt his fingertips slip down her arm before closing around her wrist, tugging her back to land, half atop him, on the bed.  She tried to pull away.  He squeezed his fingers more tightly, opened his eyes when she whimpered, and found himself arrested.

Her eyes were blue, tremulous with fear, limpid pools in a pale, pale face, a face so innocent, so utterly without guile, it made him ache.  His lips curved in a cruel smile and he wondered what it would take to strip away that purity.  At her tiny gasp, his silvery eyes dropped to her lips, plump and pink and parted in shock, as though she guessed the direction of his thoughts.  A dark curl slipped down her forehead and across her cheek.  He released her wrist to smooth it back, to tuck it behind an ear. 

And just that quickly, she vanished.  He cursed and closed his eyes again, the line between reality and his dreams irrevocably blurred.

***

Trembling, Chloe slipped back into the dorm, moved quickly past the door to the office where Michael sat, absorbed in something he was reading on the computer.  She gained her room without incident, eased open the door and sidled through it quietly.

Only a moment after she’d slipped off her clothes, folded her wings and settled into her small bed, Calliope spoke.  “You went to him again, didn’t you?”

Chloe didn’t respond, but her breathing quickened.  Calliope hung her head down from the bunk above.  “Chloe, you understand you can’t have him, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to have him.”  Her voice was small.

Calliope withdrew her head.  “Make whatever mistakes you wish,” she muttered.  “I’m going to sleep.”

Chloe remained silent, thankful her friend had let it go.  She closed her eyes a moment, hoping sleep would find her, as well, then opened them again and lifted her arm.  There, on her wrist, a shadow in the pale half light of the moon filtering through the window, was a single round bruise, pressed into her flesh by his thumb.  She ran a fingertip over it, traced a circle around its perimeter, then brought it to her lips, softly kissing the forbidden evidence of their interaction.

***

Michael scrolled impatiently through the Directory of Souls.  Since it was a constantly evolving database, the Living Souls section of the Directory was difficult to navigate, had given their programmers trouble for years.  Still, it was an improvement over the old-fashioned parchment scrolls upon which they’d relied for centuries.

He narrowed his search to the Souls assigned to his squadron, then manipulated the trackball to highlight the section beginning with “C.”  Instantly, he saw the problem.  Chloe and Calliope were roommates.  Because their Guardian Angel ID numbers were only off by one digit, Chloe had inadvertently been assigned Calliope’s charge.

Michael sat back and sighed.  The mistake was huge.  Reassignment was difficult even under the best of circumstances, and the situation surrounding Chloe was far from ideal.  She’d already imprinted on her charge.  A simple switch of the names in the computer wouldn’t change that.  She’d have to be removed and remediated, which was hardly fair when she’d done nothing to deserve it.

He clicked on the Soul to pull up a profile and history.  An hourglass appeared, spun a couple times.  The file was large, which wasn’t a good sign.  Michael’s face turned grim as he waited.  When it finally opened, he shook his head and read through the history.  It ended with a list of Special Circumstances, some of which stood out in a wicked red font.  Sadism, depravity.  An over-developed sense of responsibility.  Staggering levels of self-recrimination.  And there, flashing at the top of the screen, the one Special Circumstance that saved him:  a steadfast faith and belief in God.

Michael rubbed his eyes and sat back.  The man was a hair’s breadth from becoming a Lost Soul, and his eternal salvation had been assigned to a Novice Guardian Angel with penchant for happy endings.

Chloe was in way over her head.

Part 3