We first met in Canterlot on a muggy day in September, when summer hadn’t quite burned itself out and autumn hadn’t yet risen from its ashes. I never meant for anything to happen that night, but Rouge and I were always like putty in each other’s hooves: shoved together because of choices we didn’t make, never quite melding into one mass, but hopelessly stuck to each other all the same. I still don’t know if what happened between us was good or bad, or whether a black-and-white view like that even applies to anything that ever happened in our relationship. All I know is, for better or for worse, she’ll always be on my mind, like a thorn in my side I can’t quite seem to reach.
I had just shipped back into the capital from a border detail for two weeks of leave before the Summer Sun Celebration, and the instant my hooves were beating on brick instead of dirt, I could feel the storm coming from a mile away. My squad’s always been good at two things: upholding the lofty reputation of Celestia’s Royal Guard during the day, and doing everything they could to tarnish it once her watchful sun went down. It never bothered me much; they were good colts and loyal soldiers, and they hardly ever let things get too out of hoof. As long as they were up for PT in the morning and could think through the hangover enough to remember which one of us had the gold bars on his shoulder, we got along just fine. So when somepony decided it’d be fun to take a stroll around and “see the sights” that evening, I didn’t say one word. I rolled out the standard spiel about dignity and honor, endured the wisecracks and tossed back a few of my own, and then went on my merry way to debrief with the Captain. I don’t even remember whose idea the whole thing was in the first place.
I do remember my meeting with the Captain, though, because I also remember it was his idea that I go with them.
“Captain Armor,” I started off saying, “I assure you that these colts are some of the finest, most respectable solders to have ever served under the command of Princess-”
“At ease, Diamond,” the Captain interrupted, his trademark cheeky grin spreading across his face. “It’s not your squad I’m worried about. And you can just call me Shining. This isn’t a tribunal hearing, for Celestia’s sake.”
Every time I talked to the Captain, he insisted that I call him by his first name. Considering he was a prodigy of a tactician and the youngest pony to achieve his rank in the last three centuries, I never expected anything less. The precocious ones were always the ones who wanted to convince the lower ranks than they were just like them. “What exactly are you worried about, Captain?”
He laughed and shook his head, his loopy blue mane still matted down where his helmet had been pressing it into his scalp. “Were you in the little colts’ room when they explained what ‘at ease’ means?” he joked. I didn’t laugh, but relaxed my stance a bit all the same. “I’m worried about you, Diamond,” he continued. “You’re all work and no play.”
“By which you mean I’m a dull colt?”
“By which I mean you need to get out more. Spend some quality time with your squad that doesn’t involve pushups. Explore the city you swore on your life to protect.” His grin returned. “See the sights.”
For what was only one of many times in my life, I thanked the stars for my military training. It allowed me to resist the urge to walk out of the room and let the Captain smile himself sick about that. “I like my privacy.”
“Your resistance to the idea is noted.”
“I’m not what most ponies would call social.”
“And you have a previous engagement, and you’re not a heavy enough drinker to keep up with them, and you’ve got a headache so not tonight, honey.” The Captain smirked, and something that felt like a needle stabbed me in the gut. “I’ve heard all of this before, Diamond. You’re as good a master sergeant as I ever was, and I’ll be banished to the moon if I let you burn yourself out and ruin a tremendous military career under my watch. This one time, just humor me, okay?”
I waited a few moments for the meaning in my stare to get through, but the Captain never so much as flinched. He was trained well, too. And he was also right about hearing all of this before. “Is that an order?”
And now genuine pity was dripping out of that smile. “I’d rather not make it one.”
And that was that. Night fell an hour later, and three hours after that we’d bounced through every bar in a five-block radius from the barracks, my soldiers killing as many brain cells at each stop as I was dedicating to the thought of how miserable I was. I didn’t even have the benefit of being ignored; the other guys seemed genuinely happy that I was tagging along, and kept shoving free drinks under my nose that I did my best to pretend I could stomach. Somewhere between the place that smelled like parsley and the one where my hooves stuck to the floor, I lost my patience with faking it long enough to down two whiskeys dry in a span of about eight minutes. It only seemed like a bad idea until I smacked my head on the front door on the way out. Four of my own colts had to pick me up and carry me to the next spot, tripping over every pebble in their path and laughing themselves sick the whole time. After that, it seemed like a downright terrible one.
The next thirty minutes were a blurry haze of quivering cobblestones and bleeding neon lights. My head throbbed with every new color that seared into my brain, and squeezing my eyes shut only made new flashes seep through the blackness behind my eyelids. All I’d wanted to do tonight was stay at home. Maybe read a book, or just watch the stars until I feel asleep on my balcony. Instead I was here, following around the squad I was supposed to lead every other day of the week and barely able to stand on my own, let alone stumble along behind them. The alcohol sizzled in my stomach, made me want to sprint down the street and climb the border wall and run until my lungs burst and my hooves ground down to the bone, but still I plodded along, letting the frothy scent of spiced rum and cheap beer lead me past darkened houses and crowded alleyways.
I looked up when the group stopped for a moment so two privates could take wobbly swings at each other over a joke I hadn’t been listening close enough to hear, and that was when I saw it: a single red bulb, blinking over a metal door lined with green neon and flanked by two lugs big enough to nearly block the light from reaching my eyes. I took a moment to steady myself before gritting my teeth together. Equestrians aren’t known for their subtlety. It didn’t take a genius to guess what was going to happen next.
Sure enough, we pushed our way in without so much as a glance from the bouncers, and in the span of a few seconds exited the real world and entered one a little closer to what most ponies would call pure, unadulterated fantasy—or at least, the kind of fantasy that involved a lot of girls and a lot more alcohol. These kinds of places grew like weeds in every town I’d ever served in: cheap, sleazy, barely legal on a good day, and packed with every member of the armed forces that can manage to stagger inside. We were soldiers, after all, not cops. And I was a master sergeant tagging along with my troops. A stallion without the hood to prove it.
For the rest of the group, it was heaven: the drinks flowed, mares dressed in clothing that hardly did the word justice gyrated in time to music with heavy, pounding bass tracks, and a personal show from any one of the pink-lipped performers strutting around was just a raised hoof or catcall away. And in the middle of all the sweat and heat and good clean gentlecolt’s entertainment, I sat brooding over a fruity mixed drink that only widened the hole tonight had been burning in my wallet. I’d stopped keeping track of how many bits I’d wasted around bar number three, and that was probably the only reason I hadn’t teleported myself home out of sheer shock and embarrassment. But then again, that was the pattern for the night: get out of the bunk, do something crazy, lose all inhibitions and free myself to the will of the night and the call of the wild. They had a cute little bit of slang for that, I think. I couldn’t be bothered to remember it.
She came to me during a brief lull in the main stage performance; the soundtrack had shifted from the standard progression of house music and overblown rap to an obnoxiously loud rock song dominated by the wailing keen of an electric guitar. I didn’t even notice her until she’d climbed up into my lap, her forehooves draped delicately over my shoulders as she pressed her groin against mine, a thin layer of silky black clothing the only barrier between us. I guess the idea was that the tiny sliver of clothing somehow made the dancers more alluring, but I knew it was just because anything less would’ve tread too close to prostitution for such reputable stallions as us to tolerate. Our eyes locked together for a split second, and in hers I saw smoldering lust and a sly twinkle of confidence.
“I’m not going to pay you,” I told her as soon as I felt her weight begin to shift back and forth, smelled the cinnamon perfume in her cherry red mane. She didn’t slow down for a second.
“I’ve heard that before,” she said with a wink. “And I could use the practice.”
“I never even come to these places.”
Her hooves pressed more firmly into my shoulders as she lifted herself up, her navel brushing my nose as the silk of her panties slid down my chest and back into my lap again. “Then I guess we could both use it,” she crooned into my ear, drawing her foreleg up under my chin and thrusting into me with a powerful twitch of her hips. Her eyes met mine again, her come-hither stare heated enough to melt the fillings out of a choir boy’s teeth.
“Please get off,” I said.
“Already?” she pouted. “Don’t be scared, I’m not gonna bite.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Then why are you so tense, baby…”
She leaned forward and trapped my forelegs under hers for a moment, and a painful chill shot up my spine. “Get off me.”
The dancer leaned back and eyed me, and a wave of black fury swept over me. It wasn’t offense I saw in her eyes or even disgust, but rather the vestiges of a knowing smirk, a glint of curiosity that I’d just satisfied. To her—to everyone in this place—I was a plaything, a tipsy little social experiment that would chase after any string she dangled in front of my nose.
“If you insist,” she said smoothly, slipping back off me in one practiced fluid motion, and then she was gone. Off to pick out another victim from the crowd, or simply to wait for me to seek her out, to change my mind and come crawling back to her like a loyal little puppy she’d just punted across the street. The hell with that. I’d had enough of this place, of this whole night out on the town. Let the rest of the squad see all the sights they could cram into their eye sockets. All I wanted to see were the pillows on my bed, and the backs of my eyelids as I fell down on top of them.
It only took me a few minutes to fully settle on that decision, but getting away with it was a different matter. With my vision shot to hell and every image tripled, it was everything I could do to keep myself upright, let alone bob and weave through the throng of bodies to get back to the front door. I have no idea how long my attempt at escape took me, but I know it ended when I heard my name shouted across the room, the offending voice that of a young colt with joy in his heart and stale beer everywhere else.
“Diamond! Fu… hey, Sarge! Sarge, c’mere for a sec!”
I turned around slowly, praying—I wasn’t sure to who—that the soldier I’d just heard was just yelling blindly into the crowd. He wasn’t. “Sarge, c’mon, we got ya somethin’,” he shouted into my ear from about a foot away. Three other grunts stood behind him, all of them with the same bloated grins plastered on faces that were slick with sweat.
“I’m not in the mood, Private,” I told him to no effect. He slapped a surprisingly strong forehoof around my neck, his buddies chuckling and egging him on and assuring me I was gonna love this. No, damn you, I’m going to hate this just as much as every other idiotic thing we’ve done tonight, I wanted to say, but still I let him lead me back towards the fray and then through it, into a darkened hallway in back of the main stage where my hooves sank into the carpet and everything was colored a dark shade of maroon. The rest of the squad was waiting for us there, their voices slurred together in an echoing mess of slippery vowels, and consonants that pounded into my skull like nails.
“Sparks, you got ‘im?”
“The fuck did I say I was doin’?”
“I could use the practice.”
“Stars, man, he looks wrecked.”
“Sarge, check it out…”
“I’m not gonna bite.”
“Maize, shut the fuck up, he’s fine.”
“Sarge? Sarge, you with us?”
“If you insist.”
“What do you want?” I said to Sparks, the one who’d first grabbed me up at the front. His lips parted into his Cheshire cat smirk again. One of his front teeth was chipped.
“We got ya somethin’,” he repeated, just before another squadmate shoved him out of the way and shooed him back into the peanut gallery with a flurry of reasonably lucid expletives and a couple assurances of what a fuckin’ drunk he was.
“We figgered we’d kinda dragged you all over the place on your first night out with us, and that wasn’t cool,” my new guide said. “So we all pitched in and got you a room back here. Private show. Manager swears you got the best girl in the house back there waitin’ on ya.”
Ice spread through my chest, but at the same time I could feel something terrifyingly hot trying to fight through it. “What, you mean…”
“Yep. She’s all yours, Sarge.”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted, and it only made the question I couldn’t ask smolder even hotter. I had been steps from the door—I had felt the breeze from outside blow through my mane—and now my squad was telling me they’d “pitched in” probably everything they had on them to buy me something I could barely stomach a moment ago when it was free. All so there weren’t any hard feelings. All so tomorrow I’d want to do all of this again.
“Guys, you shouldn’t have.”
“C’mon, Sarge, you deserve this,” Sparks chimed in. The rest of the squad was quick to agree. “You don’t relax enough.”
A tiny tendril of fire burst through its cover of snow and seared straight into the center of my heart. I bit my tongue hard and said nothing. With the rest of the squad eagerly watching, I pointed myself towards the hallway and started walking, the walls billowing in and out with every step.
Behind me, someone shouted out which room it was, and some distant part of my brain grabbed hold of his words and crammed them into a tape deck set on repeat. I kept walking, and repeated the directions under my breath and inside my head until each syllable melded together into an incomprehensible, infuriating mess. Pride, misplaced gratitude, a fatalistic breed of misery kept me from turning around, so when I turned the corner and saw a thin slice of light peeking out from behind a door left just slightly ajar, I decided I’d go ahead and walk through it. Maybe it’d lead me back outside, where I wanted to go. Some ponies were born lucky like that.
I wasn’t.
The room was more sparsely furnished than I’d expected it to be: just a few candlesticks, a spindly side table, and a plush pile of cushions arranged into the general shape of a bed. The dark red fur and mane of the mare lying on top of them made her blend in almost perfectly, so much so that it took me a few moments to even notice her, to see the fascinated gaze in her ruby red eyes and realize that I recognized it. Somehow, it wasn’t even that hard to believe. One way or another, some part of me just knew I wouldn’t rid myself of that curious cat of a dancer that easily.
“Thought you said you weren’t going to pay me,” she said, rolling onto her stomach and stretching her legs luxuriously out in front of her. She was still wearing the black panties; the ruffled silk hugged her backside tighter with every inch longer her pose grew.
“I didn’t,” I told her. She rolled onto her side again and threw me a skeptical glance. Her knowing smile was back.
“Just begging for scraps, then?”
“My squad paid you,” I mumbled, the rest of the explanation dissolving into mush in my mouth. Every misplaced word made her smile grow, and soon enough I lost my patience with it entirely. “Let them deal with you,” I growled as I turned towards the door. “I don’t need this.”
“Stay with me, Diamond.”
But as I reached for the knob, something pulled me back. My name. How did she know my name?
“Why would I stay with you?” I asked. She cocked her eyebrow and licked her lips.
“Because I told you to.”
Curiosity mingled with shock inside my head, and soon after both halves transformed into a familiar whole, that same burning sensation I’d felt when my squad sent me back here in the first place. The mare drew in a long, deep breath, and as she pushed it out, she slipped her forehooves into the waistband of her panties and—once she knew I was watching—slid them down her flank, the elastic expanding so they could pass over her taut haunches and thighs. She let them dangle on the edge of her hind hoof for a moment, then with a gentle kick she flipped them over in my direction. They fell to the ground about a foot away from me. I kept my eyes on them for a moment, then turned my gaze back up towards her. I figured she must’ve been expecting my heart to skip a beat, but the blank, uninterested look on my face didn’t seem to surprise her in the least. Maybe she was building up to something else.
“You can start with my shoulders,” she said.
Or maybe I’d already missed that something entirely. “What?”
“You wouldn’t believe the number spinning around on that pole does on your deltoids,” she went on, as if I hadn’t even spoken at all. “My neck could use some work too.”
Once again, a combination of alcohol and incredulity blocks most of what I want to say from getting all the way out of my mouth. “Are you being serious right now?”
“Meant what I said and said what I meant,” she chuckled. “Hookers are honest, one hundred percent.”
“I’m not gonna waste my squadmates’ money sitting in here giving you a massage!”
The mare snapped her head around the instant I raised my voice, and the look she gave me was hard enough to cut through steel. “Then look me in the eyes and tell me you won’t,” she ordered.
My jaw dropped, the words teetered on the tip of my tongue, but for some reason it wouldn’t come out.
“It’s simple. Just two words. ‘I won’t’. Can you do that? Can you look me in the eye and tell me what you want?”
I clamped my mouth shut again, stared her down with all the force I could muster and pushed my tongue against the backs of my lips, but not one sound so much as squeaked out of my mouth. It was like my brain had shut down, like it was utterly paralyzed by the pressure of taking the initiative and extending my authority past where I knew it was allowed to go. I wanted nothing more than to tell this mare to go jump off the castle wall, and yet no matter what I did nothing could force that one simple command out.
“Are you going to say it?”
The breath I’d been keeping cooped up in the back of my throat rushed out in a huff. Red-faced and fuming, I shook my head.
“Then get over here.”
I let out another sigh and shuffled forward, climbing gingerly onto the pillows and positioning myself over the mare. She reached over her head and tapped a spot near the top of her spine, and as I started kneading there, a lazy smile began spreading across her face. At the same time, mine flushed with a fresh wave of heat.
“So obedient…” she whispered. “I bet the captain justadores you.”
My hooves paused in mid-circle, twitching with the sudden urge to wrap them around her neck. I sucked in a deep breath and smothered my anger like I was taught to do in Basic, and gradually the fire died down again.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked me.
“My hooves were sore,” I started to mutter, but she cut me off before I could even get halfway through my excuse.
“I meant why did you stop yourself from hitting me?”
I stopped moving again, though this time it was because I needed the extra brainpower to process what in Equestria she was talking about. “You wanted to,” she went on, staring up at the wall at front of me as intently as if it were my face. “You wanted to throw me off these cushions and stomp me into the ground just for sheer insubordination, but you didn’t. You held back.”
“I’m not the kind of stallion who’d hit a mare just because she talks back to me,” I told her. “Even if she is a whore,” I added a moment later under my breath.
“Oh, stop using that word like it’s supposed to offend me,” she snaps, “and stop ignoring the forest for the trees. You’re here for a reason. What is it?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Why are you in this room, with me, right now?”
I stared down at her, my mind too numbed by liquor to think beyond the simplest answer. “Because that’s what they pay you for.”
She shifted her head back against my chest for a moment, long enough to knock away whatever else I might’ve said after that. “I’m not talking about me,” she said, “I’m talking about you. Why are you here?”
“Because my squad…”
“Why are you here?”
“Because I didn’t want to disappoi-”
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t know!”
Finally, the mare relented, and her gaze softened as she turned it up towards me again. I, on the other hand, could barely stand to keep my eyes open, let alone look at her in return. “I don’t… I don’t know why I’m here,” I stuttered. “I don’t know why I came out tonight, or why I had all those drinks, or why I’m in this moondamned f…fucking room with a moondamned fucking whore. I don’t know… don’t know anything right now, just…”
Despair glued my tongue to my teeth before I could finish the thought, and I was left mute under the sickeningly sympathetic stare of a hooker I hadn’t even paid my own money for. “So this is what they’ve left you with,” she murmurs. “This is what you’ve become.”
I backed off the cushions with my chin still pressed against my chest. At the edge of my vision, I saw the mare shift onto her back, her hind legs lazily spread as if she were unaware of how exposed she was. Nothing stirred within me when I looked up and saw her nubile pink slit on display, nor when she moved a forehoof between her thighs and began rubbing it slowly down its entire length.
“You’re quite the enigma, Diamond Edge,” she said to the ceiling, her folds rippling and spreading around her hoof as she drew it back up towards her waist again. “Named for the hardest substance known to ponykind, a master sergeant in the toughest military organization Equestria’s ever seen… and yet when I ask you to jump, you’re in the air before I even tell you how high. Your father was a Guard, wasn’t he? And your grandfather too?”
With the way the conversation had been going, I was almost surprised she didn’t know that already. “Yeah.”
She blew out a sigh. Between her legs, her hoof started picking up speed. “That’s your story, isn’t it? A legacy of obedience, generation upon generation of service and duty and bowing to the orders of anypony higher up than you. Oh, you give orders too, I’m sure, but only if you have the authority. Only because you know they won’t…” She pressed her hoof down hard and arched her back, a tiny gasp stuttering out of her throat. “…resist.”
She fell back against the cushions, and lifted her head to look at me a moment later. “It’s not a choice for you, is it, Diamond?”
The fire in my gut was coming back, and now it was starting to feel less like charcoal and more like a bonfire. “It’s a habit,” I said through my teeth.
The mare smirked and shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s pathetic.”
The candles flickered softly in the background, and something that felt like molten lead began to spread through every inch of my body. I stood there silently, still as a stone even as my head began to ache with the strain of keeping my jaw clenched and my ankles locked, as the mare got to her hooves and walked towards me, staring me down even as she bore off to the right and began to pace in circles around me.
“Do you think it was bad luck that led you into this room with me?” she hissed. “Just coincidence that out of all the stallions in the house tonight, I chose the one I knew wanted nothing to do with anypony in it? I can see right through you, Diamond, just like the glittering little gem you are. You think you can hide it. You think no one notices the looks you give them and the shudder that rolls through your body every time you hear them speak, as if even your own body is disgusted with the way you sit there and drink their words in like a housebroken dog.”
She came back around to stand at my front. Her hoof found my chest and trailed up under my chin, even as I heaved for breath beneath it. “You hate them. You hate their orders, their recommendations, their insistence that they know exactly what you need to be happy.” The corner of her mouth lifted, ever so slightly. “You even hate me. You hate the way I can tangle your tongue up and burrow under your skin like a parasite, how there’s nothing you can do to force obedience on me. I don’t have any real authority over you, any real power. Hell, I didn’t even particularly want it in the first place. And yet all I had to do to get it was just… take it.”
Her nose was right next to mine, her breaths coming in slow, powerful bursts. Every time she exhaled, the heady scent of cinnamon burned in my nose. “You and I are different ponies, Diamond. With different minds, different skills, different goals we’re set on achieving with them. But right here, right now, you have something I want… and in return, I can give you something you need. Something you’ve craved your whole life but never allowed yourself to grasp. Something that’s burning inside you even as we speak, gasping for air under the weight of all the burdens you don’t know how to shift off your back.”
She leaned forward, her teeth brushing against my ear a split second before closing around the tip. The tiniest of groans slipped out of her mouth, and for the first time that night a spark of something altogether new shot through my chest, right next to that scalding ball of fire she couldn’t stop talking about. “You know what you want,” she sighed. “You know you’ve spent the whole night crushing it under your heel, trying to figure out instead what the world wants from you. What I want from you. So don’t hold back. Just…” She dragged her teeth off my ear and pressed her muzzle hard into my neck. “Let it out.”
And I wanted to. I wanted to so badly, if only to make the pain tearing at my gut go away, if only so for one second I could feel like I knew what I was doing. But even as I tried to dredge the right response up, the fire in my chest began to die down. A few moments later, it was nothing but ashes.
“What do you want from me?” I asked breathlessly.
The mare started, then her entire body sagged as every drop of energy in her body had just drained out through her hooves. She pushed away from me with a short grunt, and when she spoke, she almost sounded disappointed. But beneath that disappointment laid a smug sense of satisfaction, the same one I’d dripping off her face the first time I’d encountered her. “I wanted to see a real stallion show me just how much of a whore I am,” she said, slapping her tail across my nose as she headed back towards the cushion. “But I guess I chose a little filly instead.”
I had no warning, no sense of buildup before my vision went red and those smoky ashes exploded into a raging inferno. I was on top of her before I hardly knew I had moved, my snout an inch from her widening eyes and my forelegs pinning hers to the ground with a newly unleashed strength I never knew I had.
“You don’t want me to hold back? You want me to let it out?” I roared. The mare squirmed and strained against me, but she wasn’t going anywhere till I was done with her. I was the one in control now. I was the one with the power.
“I could’ve done this the second you first touched me,” I spat at her, my throat already raw from the words ripping through it. “I could’ve dragged you back here, pushed you down in the middle of these rags, bent you over and taken you like you’ve been begging me to do ever since you first laid those simpering little fucking eyes on me. I could’ve done it any time I wanted tonight, but I didn’t. And do you know why? Because you are worthless to me. I have respect for my soldiers and I have respect for my superiors, but you? You are filth, a shit-covered scuff on this country’s armor that I just can’t seem to buff out. I could do anything to you and think nothing of it. I could abandon you here, beaten and bloody, leave you begging for more of the punishment you’re so fucking desperate to receive, and wake up tomorrow morning with a moondamned smile on my face!”
The mare was heaving for breath, her forehooves pressed against the sides of my neck as if she thought she could push me off her. As if she thought I was somepony who could be pushed around that easily. “Or I could stay here and just have my way with you,” I growled, and when she sucked in her breath suddenly and let it out in one quick, dirty huff that sounded almost like a moan, a shudder ran down my spine that nearly knocked me off my hooves. “I could push you down into this cushion, bury your face in it, watch you struggle and scream for air until I decide you’ve earned the right to breathe again. I could beat you, tease you, draw out every moment I’m in contact with you, make every inch of your body know nothing but the pleasure of my presence, of my power. And then, when you’re so close that the slightest touch would send you careening, screaming over the edge…”
She was barely coherent by now, eyes squeezed shut in agony as her hooves gripped me even tighter. But as I paused to catch the breath I couldn’t remember losing, she opened her eyes and pointed them up pitifully up at me, and the pure, unbridled lust I saw radiating out of them was so strong that I knew, somehow, my eyes must’ve looked exactly the same. My mind spun as I realized it wasn’t agony, but overwhelming desire I saw etched into her face. That her hooves weren’t pushing me away, but pulling me down. Telling me that I had finally stumbled across the deeply hidden truth that this was what she had been waiting for all this time for. This was what she wanted.
This was what I wanted.
I broke my gaze away from hers and looked down. My cock, dormant the whole night up until now, was painfully hard, its tip poking into the mare’s belly and its length twitching with constant throbs of adrenaline. It’d been building up like this the whole time I’d had her pinned down like this, and when my mind went back to what I could to her, of how utterly defenseless she was to stop me, the hair on my back stood straight up and another wave of delicious heat rolled through my veins. Her hooves flew around to the back of my neck, and my mind went blank, overcome by sheer animal instinct. I braced my forelegs against her chest, and with a feral snarl I jerked my body downwards and buried myself inside her all the way to the hilt.
The heat, the pulsating tightness, the sloppy, wet sounds of her arousal meeting mine were nothing compared to the scream that punched out of her throat, its descent from a vicious cry to a desperate gasp to a mumbled, quivering moan. I drew back and slammed into her again, drawing out another screech of pleasure that I soon heard echoing out from my own mouth too. I’d been with a few mares before, had my share of one-night stands and ill-advised relationships, but this… this wasn’t as simple as love or lust. This was a defiance of physics, the creation of entirely new energy that made me feel alive like I never had before, that made me want nothing more than to thrust deeper and faster and harder. I was dominating her, taking complete and unyielding control over another pony for the first time in my entire life, and I loved it. No, more than that: I wanted more of it. I needed more of it. We were both lucky that she was enjoying herself too, because by the time all of that flashed through my mind, I couldn’t have stopped myself even if she’d fought me every inch of the way.
Just as quickly as it began, our tenuous connection came to an electrifying, draining end. I had barely been inside her twenty seconds when I felt a familiar twitch in my groin; I’d reached the point of no return faster that I could ever remember having done it before. The mare squealed as I bit down on her shoulder, and again as my seed flooded into her, its absence leaving me with a tingly sense of numbness that spread through every one of my senses. For what felt like hours, I just lied there on top of her, trying to force air into my lungs and feeling into my legs again. When I regained enough strength to push myself up and look the mare in the eye, the soft smile that spread across her face was too wide and too uncontrolled to be anything but genuine.
“Did I…” I tried to say. “Are you…”
Her smile twitched, and though I couldn’t be sure, I thought I saw a bit of the sincerity morph into something else I didn’t recognize. “It was a good start,” she murmured as she brushed the front of her hoof gently over my cheek. “Considering you’re out of practice.”
Too exhausted and too humbled by the truth in her words to argue back, I let my head fall back onto her chest as she moved her hoof forward to stroke the back of my neck. The loose tufts of fur brushing against my snout felt as soft as the cushions beneath her.
“Who are you?” I mumbled after a few minutes of immensely relaxing silence. The mare said nothing for another minute or two—so long that I’d already reasoned she hadn’t heard me—then gently shifted me fully onto the cushions and started backing towards the door. Though I could barely see her face in the dim light, I got the feeling she was smiling again.
“You’ll know someday,” she said softly. “We’ll see each other again before you’ve figured things out for yourself.”
All I could manage to do in reply was nod weakly and shoot her a half-cocked smile back. By the time I bent the other side of my mouth into shape, she was already gone.
I laid there for a while—probably almost half an hour by the end of it—before I finally felt up to getting shakily to my hooves and going back out to find my squad. The club was nearly empty by the time I got out to where a single private was on watch, waiting to proudly announce my successful conquest to the rest of the group still milling around with the off-duty dancers. The playful jibes and slaps on the back were great, almost enough to make my night worthwhile all on their own, but as we stumbled back towards to the barracks and even as I crawled between the clean white sheets of my bed, the only thing on my mind was a feisty little dancer with a cherry-red mane and a fiery attitude that I, all by myself, had miraculously managed to tame.
What the hell had she even been going on about? What kind of hooker talked like that, or knew not only how but when to infuriate her clients to the point where the act that inevitably followed was ten times better for it? Was it even possible that she really had put on that whole charade just for me, that I had only been the unsuspecting apple of her eye who she spent the whole night convincing to come after her in exactly the way she wanted?
No, that couldn’t be true. Regardless of whatever she’d said to me, I was the one who’d taken control. And that feeling, that sensation of total dominance over her mind and body… I liked it. As strange as it sounded, I couldn’t get enough of it. And deep down, I knew that one way or another, I was gong to make sure that tonight wouldn’t be the last time I experienced that strange, otherworldly pleasure.
As sand began to pile up over my crusty eyes, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Strange” didn’t even begin to describe what had happened tonight, nor did it come close to doing justice to the mare responsible for it all. She was nuts to do all that for me, and I was nuts to think it meant anything more than a Canterlot whore deciding her normal tricks just weren’t doing it for her anymore. Then again, she had said we’d see each other again, and whether she was telling the truth or just spinning another lie to get me to come back and pay my own money for her services next time, I was looking forward to finding out what she—and I—would do next.
She’s a crazy bitch, all right, I thought as I finally drifted off. But damn me to the moon, she sure does fuck good.