Free Something Wicked by Lisa Jackson

be.
    To hell with befriending animals, he’d decided; he wanted sex. One night he moved up close to his mother and said softly that he wanted her, and he let his own invisible power slide over to her. When she stared at his lips and the look of horror slowly fled from her face, to be replaced by something else, he knew he had her. He moved forward and pushed her unresisting form onto the couch, and he screwed her every which way but loose, and she clasped him to her and howled with her head thrown back and her spine bent in a U, her legs locked around his back, meeting his thrusts with a body that jerked and stiffened and begged for more. The next day she threw herself off a freeway bridge, but he was gone by then, starting his vagabond new life, where he lured women with a wink and a smile, and by the time he was through with them, they’d given him everything they had and more. He stuck with a professor’s daughter through three terms of college and then moved on to the professor herself. He could have gotten a degree in business without hardly trying, but he got bored with the whole thing and quit before achieving that goal.
    Which was why he was wondering if he should hook up with more of those academic types. Hmmm. He took another swallow from his long-necked bottle and saw a redhead checking him out. She was kinda swaying to the twangy country music—a come-on that he ignored for now. There was something desperate about her, and he didn’t need desperate.
    He knew his looks dragged them in. Of course he knew. But it was his power that really got them going, a power he struggled to keep under leash. Sometimes when he looked at the turn of a woman’s calf or the soft curve of her breast or the rounded lushness of her buttocks, he just couldn’t help himself, and he just let it out. They couldn’t say no to him. Sometimes they didn’t want to at first; sometimes he was just too impatient. But they couldn’t say no. He’d been trying very hard to put a lid on the whole damn thing, because he didn’t want to move anymore; he was still enraged over that last relo. He didn’t want to have to keep leaving just because some crazed husband or boyfriend thought it was time to take care of Good Time Charlie, so he’d had to put a lid on his power for a while. It was while he’d been in this state of weird abstinence that he learned what it felt like to kill.
    Mother . . . fucker.
    As he relived that last fatal encounter, his dick jumped up as if electrified, and he suddenly had the boner of all boners. He looked around for the redhead, but she’d disappeared, so he had to move up next to a chick wearing a short denim jacket and low-cut jeans, whose hair was bleached white with black roots, and he let a little of his power out so she wouldn’t object when he pressed himself into her butt and rubbed a little. She jerked away at first, then snapped around to look at him, a snarl on her lips, and he smiled and said, “C’mon, gimme some sugar,” and she said, “Fuck you,” a little breathlessly, and then she was all over him, twisting and squirming, and he had to put a stop to it right there or get thrown out on the street.
    â€œHey!”
    The guy coming toward him wore a black cowboy hat, nose-picker boots, a bronze buckle with, of course, a buckin’ bronco on it, and a scowl dark enough to blacken the western United States.
    This power Charlie possessed, unfortunately, did not seem to work on men.
    â€œGarth,” she protested as he bore down on them.
    He grabbed Charlie by the collar of his black shirt and got in his grill and yelled, “Get your fuckin’ hands off Tammie, or I’ll break every bone in ’em.”
    Charlie considered pointing out that it wasn’t his hands that had been on Tammie, but decided it probably wasn’t the time.
    â€œYou touch him, I’ll kick your ass,” Tammie