for tip show 3/15/19

How Falling in Love is like Owning a Dog
by Taylor Mali

First of all, it’s a big responsibility,
especially in a city like New York.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you’re walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain’t no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breathes
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn’t like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,
but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!
Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.
Love leaves you little surprises here and there.
Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
Sometimes you just want to get love fixed.
Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper
and swat love on the nose,
not so much to cause pain,
just to let love know Don’t you ever do that again!

Sometimes love just wants to go out for a nice long walk.
Because love loves exercise. It will run you around the block
and leave you panting, breathless. Pull you in different directions
at once, or wind itself around and around you
until you’re all wound up and you cannot move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.
People who have nothing in common but love
stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,
again, and again, and again.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.




Pollinate: Chapter 2
by: BirdsOfHermes

Letting a completely keyed up, eager-to-please Harry Dresden out of the handcuffs was like unlatching the padlock to a lion's cage.

The instant his arms were free, he snaked them around her and drew her up against his bare chest, trapping her between the wall of lean muscle and the hard cords of his biceps. It might have alarmed any other woman except for Karrin Murphy. She responded in kind with her own voracious hunger, seizing a handful of his dark hair and yanking him up to meet her hungry mouth. She took the kiss with unabashed aggressive pleasure, her tongue swirling circles around his, her plush lips nearly bruising as the two of them all but attacked each other.

Harry's long fingers trailed up the center of her spine and vanished into her hair, grabbing a handful and tilting her head back. He kissed the column of her throat, nipping marks into it, not hard enough for them to stick around, but enough to leave little pink spots of flushed skin behind. Karrin shuddered as his stubble grazed a ghostly line behind his kisses and didn't fight him as he came to stop at his intended target.

Harry lifted Murphy into his lap completely and held her above him, his hands hot and rough along her ribs. He parted his lips enough to take one of her breasts inside his mouth. Murphy's toes curled and her fingers found his shoulders, digging crescent moons into the skin. "Harry."

He traced the shape of her left nipple, circling it, then let the firm, sweet flesh of her breast inside the molten heat of his mouth, losing it inside over and over until he felt her trembling. He drew his calloused fingertips over her sides, tracing each rib, sliding them down over her hips and waist, the edges of her toned thighs, and then up to her back. He switched to her right breast and discovered the faint patterns of scars on her spine, not stopping until she breathed his name again.

"So fucking beautiful," he whispered hoarsely, kissing the center of her stomach, tipping her body back against his knees. He kissed a line of fire into her delicate skin from her breastbone to her navel before Murphy couldn't stand much more of his patient exploration.

She pushed him down into the bed, her hands on his shoulders, her gemstone eyes bright with challenge and wanton affection. Harry let her, stroking her thighs, staring up at her like she was Aphrodite herself. She kissed him and lowered one hand between their bodies. Harry's body arched upward as her fingers encircled his cock once more, stroking hurriedly, but not with the intent to finish this time, but to tease. He growled against her lips, bucking into it, straining against her, but she pushed down firmly with her own hips to force him to stay put.

"God, Karrin," he panted out. "You keep that up and we're not going to get very far."

She smirked down at him, haughty and glorious. "I thought you'd have more stamina, Dresden."

"Stamina's for round two, three, four, and so on."

She kissed his throat, not hiding the amused purr her voice had taken on. "I don't know; I kind of like watching you squirm."

Harry grinned wolfishly. "As long as we're on the subject..."

She jerked in surprise as he palmed her wet core, driving another gasp from her. He read her expression before carefully slipping two long fingers inside her, not stopping until his knuckles brushed her inner thighs. Murphy hissed his name between clenched teeth, her grip on his cock slackening as the pleasure assaulted her senses once more. She couldn't help pushing down against his arm, creating friction, lifting and dropping her lithe body again and again. Harry swept one hand up to cup one of her breasts as he pressed deeper, harder, curling his fingertips. Murphy bit her lower lip to stifle a scream and Harry chuckled darkly, drawing her down against his naked skin with his other arm.

"Oh, no you don't," Harry purred in her ear as he let his free hand drift southward towards the full, tightly sculpted curve of her backside. He pushed her hips down until her wet heat took more of his fingers and quickened his pace. Murphy's thighs quaked as she tried to hold herself over him, absently stroking his cock in a weak attempt to keep pace with him, but the fluttering in her belly told her it was all for naught. She lost it as he slipped her ear lobe in his mouth and sucked just barely. The climax burst free and she drowned under a tidal wave of pleasure. Harry hummed pleasantly as she rode it out, kissing her neck, her shoulder, enjoying the way his touch made her creamy skin flush.

Murphy rested her sweaty forehead against his shoulder, her voice mildly annoyed. "Low blow, Dresden."

Harry laughed. "The lowest of the low."

He punctuated the statement by drawing his fingers inside his mouth and licking them clean. The obscene gesture was somehow both an amusing and unbelievably arousing sight to her. He grinned and tugged her closer into his embrace, his dark eyes glittering. "I was right, you know. You do taste sweet."

Murphy rolled her eyes and kissed him so he wouldn't notice that she'd started blushing. "Smug is not a good color on you."
"Well, I can think of a thing or two that'll shut me up." He pitched to one side and rolled her beneath him, smiling down at her for just a moment and letting the lust fall away to appreciate the woman before him. In spite of everything that kept going wrong in his life, for just a moment, Harry knew he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right woman.

He scooted down enough to be level with her and kissed her passionately, running one hand down her shoulder, her side, over her thigh to her knee. He settled his heavy frame against her finally, heated skin on heated skin, eating the needy moans that spilled from her lips as she felt him resting over her entrance at long last. Something sudden struck him and he pulled back.

"Do you trust me, Karrin?" Harry whispered, risking a Soulgaze as he stared down at her.

She cupped his face between her hands and kissed him. "Always."

He nodded, and surprised her by lifting her hips enough to flip her onto her stomach. She settled on her hands and knees, startled, but not in a bad way. Harry brushed her hair over one shoulder and molded his tall, solid frame along her back, his lips brushing her ear. "Hold still."

Her breath shallow and excited, Murphy nodded and shut her eyes. Harry lowered his mouth enough to kiss between her shoulder blades. A full-bodied moan spilled from her parted lips, followed by a deep shudder. He'd found a weak spot.
Harry brought his hands up and gently cupped her breasts as he followed the elegant curve of her spine one kiss at a time, grazing her nipples harder with his thumbs. Once he reached the small of her back, he flattened his hands against her inner thighs and pushed them further apart. She shivered as he took two playful bites out of the firm flesh of her backside and slipped his tongue inside her again, tasting her until she gripped two handfuls of the sheets beneath them and muttered his name urgently.

Harry licked his lips and rose to his knees behind her, a hand on either side of her curvy hips. He let his gaze roam over the beauty, the realness of her, before he made that last final movement to complete them both.
He pushed inside her.

Murphy's head lowered to the bed and she moaned.

Harry shivered deeply as he heard that wondrous sound. The whole world seemed to fall away for a few seconds. Then his senses returned one by one and all they could focus on was Karrin Murphy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else even existed.
Murphy had fallen into short, excited gasps as soon as he'd entered her and he watched as her fingers curled the sheets into knots as she worked through the overwhelming crest of pleasure enough to say his name again.

"I know," he whispered back, his voice husky and raw. He could hardly put a word to just how damned good it felt. Nothing would suffice. All he could feel was heat and pressure and silken wetness surrounding his cock on all sides. Years of waiting, of longing for her, and the moment left him damn near speechless.

He drew out of her with exquisite slowness. Murphy's lovely, bare body settled its weight onto her knees as she gasped out her pleasure into the sheets. Harry had to remind himself to breathe because the sight of her pushed to the limit of her ever-present control was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen.

Harry steeled himself and sunk into her again, sliding his hands up enough to use her hips as a handle. He rocked her down onto his cock steadily, carefully, his dark eyes locked on her swaying, beautiful form on the bed. He stoked the pleasure one thrust at a time, savoring each groan, moan, sigh, muttered curse, that fell from her lips.
That was, until Murphy gathered her bearings.

He saw her shift her elbows to hold her shaking upper body off the mattress and then felt it when she began working her hips down onto him, taking him deeper inside her slick velvet sheath. Harry choked out a curse and something primal awoke within him at that one sensuous gesture. He pistoned into her and she rode him hard. The sound of their wet skin slapping together became the metronome of their union, driving the pace faster and faster by the minute. Sweat dripped down the runnels of his abs and onto her as he pounded into her soft flesh, a guttural growl growing inside his chest and threatening to crawl out of his throat.

Karrin gripped his wrist and dragged his hand up over her side until his hand cupped her breast. He squeezed it, kneaded it, his head lowering as he felt the telltale warning of her imminent climax. Her inner walls flexed and flickered along his cock with the sweetest pressure. He never wanted it to end, didn't want to stop, didn't want to let go, but he knew the center couldn't hold much longer.

Harry molded the hard plains of his chest and abs along her back, and slid his other hand between Murphy's thighs. He discovered her clit and stroked it in between the hard, almost punishing thrusts. Murphy cried out his name and it rang through him like a bell's toll, cajoling him to follow her over the precipice. She pushed her hips back into his pelvis wildly, her nails scraping over the mattress and its disheveled sheets; a poor attempt to cling to some semblance of control, but Harry wanted the opposite. He craved it. He hungered for it, for her, to please her in a way that only he could.

"Karrin," Harry whispered into her ear, nuzzling her damp golden hair. "Karrin...Murphy..."

An almost violent tremor flooded over her body from head to toe. He'd said her Name.

"I want you to come, Karrin," Harry murmured in a tone that was soft and dark and undeniably intimate. "Don't hold back. Come for me."

"Harry!" Murphy shuddered a final time and climaxed. Harry followed her not a moment later. A world of stars and galaxies burst before their eyes as the ecstasy swept them off into oblivion. They floated on for what felt like decades, centuries, eons, conscious of nothing but the comfort of one another's skin.

Harry roused some indeterminate time later and found he had flopped onto his side to spoon Murphy. She lay still beneath his arm, her expression sated and peaceful and lovely. He dropped a kiss to her temple and she stirred, her lashes sliding back halfway. She glanced at him over her shoulder and a sly smile formed.

"Still alive, I see."

"Not for lack of trying," Harry grinned.

"Amen," she sighed wistfully, licking her lower lip. "That was...beyond definition."

He rubbed the smooth expanse of her belly and propped his chin up on her shoulder as a slow smile worked its way onto his lips. "And I can't wait to break that record."

Murphy grinned. "Who said anything about waiting? Get to work, Dresden."

"Yes ma'am."