Chapter 360- Have Sex to Save Your Son
The small, comfortable friction of two people who know each other completely.
She glanced at Raven across the table. Her eyebrow moved. ’Go on then.’
He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, voice low enough that it stayed at the table.
"Ask him if he’s feeling a warm sensation in his knees and elbow joints. Like they’re heated from inside. More than normal."
Jennifer’s mouth twitched.
The look she gave him — over the phone, over the coffee, over the towel and its current architectural situation — was the look of a woman who has agreed to indulge something she’s already classified as nonsense, out of a patience she normally reserves for customers who insist their order was different.
"Son." Easy, maternal, the same warm voice. "Are you feeling heat in your elbows and knees?"
Silence on the line.
She was already rolling her eyes — he could see the motion beginning, the slow upward arc of someone cueing the ’I told you so’ — when Gareth’s voice came back.
"How do you know that, mom?!"
The eye roll stopped.
Jennifer went very still.
"What." Her voice had changed register without her deciding to change it.
"How do you — I didn’t tell you — it’s been two days, I thought it was just training—"
She shook her head. Small, automatic. ’Coincidence. Symptom could be anything.’
Raven watched her decide this and said, very quietly, "Ask him if he’s waking up exhausted. Like he ran a marathon in his sleep. Legs that won’t move. Muscle pain with no workout to account for it."
Jennifer’s lips parted.
She looked at him — not with the calculating cold of a moment ago but with something cracking slightly at the edge of it, the first hairline fracture in the wall she’d been building since he came through her ceiling.
"Gareth." Careful now. Less warm. More focused. "Are you waking up exhausted? Like you’ve been running all night. Your legs—"
"Mom." His voice had changed too. Slower. The teenage boredom entirely gone. "Mom, I’ve been exhausted for two days. My legs barely work in the morning. I thought I was getting sick. How are you—"
The phone left her hand.
Not dropped — released, the fingers simply opening, the object falling the six inches to the table edge and continuing.
Raven caught it.
One hand, easy, reaching across the table — and the towel’s relationship with his lap shifted entirely with the lean, the cloth pulling away from what it had been managing to cover, and Jennifer’s eyes went there in the half-second before she could redirect them.
She was still looking when he set the phone face-down on the table and disconnected the call.
Her lips were parted.
He stood.
Unhurried, the way he did everything — simply rising from the chair and closing the three feet of distance between them, stopping beside her, the warm morning air of the bakery sitting between them and nothing else, the towel now held entirely by his hand at his hip rather than by any structural logic.
He looked down at her.
She looked up.
The angle was what it was — her seated, him standing, her face level with the height that it was level with — and she looked up to find his face and the look between them was a kind of geography, a distance that was being measured by both parties simultaneously.
"Do you believe me now." His voice was low. Not cruel. Not soft. Just direct, the way everything he said was direct. "Aunt."
The word landed warm and strange and slightly wrong in a way that made her jaw tighten.
She was trembling slightly.
Not fear — not quite. Something adjacent to it, the trembling of a woman whose model of the world has been adjusted twice in ten minutes without her permission, who is still holding the form of her composure while the contents rearrange.
"Tell me everything." Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not entirely steady. "Tell me what is happening to my son."
He looked at her.
She looked up at him.
The towel held its position by one hand only.
He said nothing for a moment.
Then: "What do I get in exchange?"
She blinked.
The trembling stopped. A different kind of stillness replaced it — the flat, cold stillness of a woman who has just been surprised in a direction she didn’t anticipate.
"’What.’"
"What do I get," he said, simply, unhurried, looking down at her with the mild, patient expression of a man who asks this question and intends to wait for a real answer, "in exchange for telling you everything?"
Jennifer’s breath caught in the small space between them.
She blinked once, slow, the kind of blink that buys a woman half a second to recalibrate when the world has just tilted sideways.
Her dark eyes flicked up to his face—steady, unreadable—then dropped without permission to the place where the towel was failing its only job. The thin white fabric was bunched in his fist at his hip, but the rest of it had surrendered.
The heavy outline of his cock strained upward, thick and obvious, the swollen head pushing a clear ridge against the cotton. Lower, the soft weight of his balls hung heavy, the shape of them unmistakable through the stretched material, two full, rounded contours that shifted when he breathed. The sight hit her like a physical shove. Heat flared across her cheeks and down her throat.
She closed her eyes tight, as if that could erase what she’d just catalogued.
"What do you want?" Her voice came out lower than she meant it to, rough at the edges. She kept her eyes shut another beat, then forced them open and met his gaze straight on. "Just be frank with it."
Raven’s shoulder lifted in that same lazy half-shrug he’d used before, like none of this was particularly urgent to him. The motion made the towel slip another inch; the ridge of his cock twitched visibly beneath it.
"You see," he said, calm as if he were discussing the weather, "I am a sex demon. An incubus. My power comes from sex."
Her mouth twitched. The word hung between them like smoke. She opened it—closed it again—then folded her arms beneath her breasts in an automatic gesture of self-protection.
The movement only lifted the heavy weight of them higher, the soft valley of cleavage deepening inside the already strained neckline of her shirt.
She felt the air change, felt the bakery suddenly too warm, too small, the scent of fresh bread and coffee now undercut by something darker, something alive. Awkwardness crawled up her spine and settled hot behind her ears.
"As I said," she started, voice clipped, defensive, "listen—if you want, I can give you some money. You can get some hookers from the streets, do whatever it is you need to—"
He cut her off before the sentence could finish, voice low but firm.
"You would have to save your son yourself," he said. "And become strong enough to do that."
The words landed hard. Jennifer halted mid-breath, arms still crossed, breasts still lifted by the motion. She stared at him—really stared—searching his face for the joke that had to be there. There wasn’t one. Only that same patient, unhurried look, the one that said he had all the time in the world and she had none.
"It’s quite confusing," she said at last, the words coming out slower than she liked. She unfolded her arms, let her hands rest on the table instead, fingers pressing into the wood as if it could anchor her. "However... I am listening."