Chapter 1 - Episode: Building Bridges

Eric rocked on his heels. He wasn't going to be able to visit everybody tonight, probably. There was a feeling in his gut, or something near it, told him to pick his battles.

The Police Officer, Cornelia Woolrick, complained about a water leak and really that sounded like a 'first job' sort of thing; as for the Professor... Landry. A game night sounded good but, he remembered seeing students on the train, so she might still be doing paper work, unless they were summer schooling?

He yawned and shook his head. They all had invited him to something or other, but Maz, in 609? directly asked; once he got in. Might as well start somewhere. He passed by 612, the Amberly house and he could hear music coming from through the door. He was a little surprised he hadn't heard it while he was looking around his apartment, but maybe the double suites had thicker walls? 

Eric walked along and rounded the corner; reading the name on the plate, he nodded when he saw the Apartment with name Woolrick beside it. There was also a buisness card stuck into the name plate. He leaned in and saw it listed her name again, as well as contact information for her Police Department.

Eric added it to his phone, under the emergencies tab, before passing the Laundry Room. He peeked in and heard nothing. There were no machines going, and no water running. He pulled his head out of the door way and turned on his head when the soft ring of a single drip of water into water hit his ears. 

He turned, and walked back into the laundry room, counted to ten, and heard nothing. He went back out and stopped when there was another drip.

"Yeah, I can see how that would keep someone up." He sighed and continued on, another drip echoing loudly as he passed the empty apartment on the other side of the laundry room, and then he was at 609. A card for construction work was stuff in next to the name plate for a- Eric Blinked 'Maserati Bora'. Wait. That, that was a car name. He saw 'Maz' Written in thick black marker on the business card, shoved just under Maserati.  "Well, I gotta hear the story for this, now." He reached up and knocked on the door twice.


"Hold on!" There was a thumping of heavy feet as Eric stepped back from the door. There was a pause right before the door flung open and Eric was nearly bowled over when the towering woman scooped him up. "Welcome!" She cried loud enough for her voice to echo into the open space of the apartment structure. 

He skin was a soft golden brown, and as he was brought into a hug, he felt the powerful muscles work under a soft layer of blushing skin. A dampness clung to her and her black curls fell around her sharp facial features and deep green eyes. She picked him up from under his arms so he only felt a little soreness.

"My name's Maz; you're Eric, right?" She asked as she held him up, her pert breasts pushed against his chest as her pecs flexed firmly. His hands rested on her shoulders and he realized only the tips of his toes were touching the ground.

"Um, yeah." He blinked, "I got your, well all the cards."

"You find the booze I left you?" She smiled wide, her pearly whites gleaming and the soft smell of mint wafting on her breath.

"Booze?" He blinked again. "Those brass cans behind the apricots?" He had barely noticed them, but there had been some cans in the fridge. 

"Yup! I've got more in my place, so you can save yours for when your hosting. It's a brew that the old man on the Second floor makes." She set him down and pointed past him down the open space toward the lower floors.

"Wait, he's got a micro still?" Eric looked over his shoulder. Maz waggled her hand. 

"Technically, the building 'owns' the still, but he's the only one who uses it, and a bunch of people grow stuff for him to destill. The last batch was this nice darker ale kinda drink." She nods, "Come on in!" She steps back and offers the open doorway. 

Eric smiles and nods before entering, wiping his bare feet on the scratchy door mat before he enters, "Oh you pad like a cat too?" She balances on one foot, and a soft layer of dirt clings to the bottom of her feet. Eric does the same, the water from his shower giving more purchase. 

"Yeah, I just don't feel the point in socks and shoes around the house, plus we're mostly 'inside' as it is." Maz nods emphatically as she follows him inside and closes the door behind him.

"I'll get the beers, take a seat at the kotatsu." She hooked to the right into her kitchen and pointed on toward the living room.

"The what?" Eric asked, seeing only another of the skirted tables, only it had a different design.

"The skirt table. It's a japanese thing. Keeps you warm in the cold."

"The wind chill that bad in this district?" Eric asked as he sat down.

"It can be, winter itself sucks but whenever the rains come in its like the barriers aren't really trying. Where you from before this?" He heard a fridge open and several clatters of cans.

"Center districts, that's where I moved when..." He forced himself through, "after I moved from my home neighborhood,"

"Ooh, big money."  She came in and Eric had a chance to appreciate how little she was wearing. A white tank top that clung to freshly showered skin, and went transparent over her chocolate brown areolas they were already starting to harden, and as Eric's gaze worked its way down her body they stiffened to firm points. Maz coughed as she offered the first cold beer can.

"Eh, Half of it was the job." Eric looked up and into Maz's eyes, her face was flushed but she was still smiling. She took a seat opposite him and he waited for her to open her can before he did the same and held his out to clink against hers. "Cheers." He said with a smile.

"Cheers." Maz replied and they both took a drink. "And the other half?" She asked, the concern wasn't even hidden in her voice. Eric took a deeper drink and let the cool flavor rush over his tongue and down his throat. It was a fine brew. The old man knew what he was doing, and the building must have great gardeners. 

"My Now, officially, Ex-Wife." He growled and his thumb rubbed over the pale ring on his finger again. He took another drink and already felt the can feel light. "This stuff goes down easy."

"Yeah, but if you rush it, you don't get to enjoy it so much." Maz wagged her finger, before downing a whole can. "That's what the Prof says, anyway. I'm with you on the easy part though. Not a bad drink on a work night."

"Oh damn, you gonna be fine?" Eric asked, looking at the dozen cans already lined up. 

"That's my line, handy man." She smiled and flexed and arm as she crushed a can in her fist. "I've got the mass to out drink most guys in this building." She causally tossed the can into a recycling bin at the edge of the kitchen doorway. "I'll be fine for tomorrow, plus it's just a training day for the newbies there, too." 

"New workers?" Eric finishes his drink and tosses it into the recycling bin with a soft toss. Maz leans back and pushes her chest out.

"Yup. They're certified and all, but this is their first real 'in-city' job that isn't in the 'good' districts. There's a lot more safety issues to go over." She handed Eric a can before picking up one for himself, they opened them at the same time and drank the first sips in sync, though Maz took a deeper drink.

"Masks and Jackets?" Eric asked and punctuated his question with a sip. There was definitely a nice feel to the beer.

"Whores and Loan Sharks." Maz corrected him. "There's a couple gangs of street walkers 'round here. Self regulated, no pimps, but fuck if they aren't a brutal pack of cunts. You don't have the cash you'll be eating jizz out their snatches, raw, for a week." She drank deep and almost emptied her can. Damn she was putting them down quick.

"Holy fuck." He said after a drink.

"Yeah, I'll stick to Gynoid-Girls if I need to pay to get laid. Haven't met a 'metal' girl who wasn't as gentle as a lamb, or as wild as a ferret."

"There good girls around here then?" Eric asked more conversationally, and took a deep swig. The cans were narrow, after all so the portions were small. 

"Plenty, and I know most of 'em. Actually tomorrow night we're gonna introduce the single newbies to good girls so they know who to trust out there. Bitches dress up in costume to make themselves look like Gynoids but that's how they get you." She wagged her head, as if in experience. "Hows the beer?" She asked, smiling as Eric tossed another can easily into the bin.

"It's great," he nods, "I don't usually go for beer, usually it's... whiskey." He pops the top and drinks quickly, trying to drown the incidental memory with suds. Maz watches as she finishes her can, tosses it, and opens another. 

"Yeah, they're small though, so you end up feeling like a lush even when you've probably only had about half as many 'drinks' as you've got cans."

"Probably?" Eric asks, a smile back on his face.

"Well" Maz scratches her chin, the alcohol content might be a bit more than what regular companies put out for an 'ale'. Plus, the old man's got some tricks from 'his days' that lets the booze go the extra kilo."

"Right into the pisser?" He thumbs toward what he guesses is the bathroom, based on how his apartment was laid out. Maz laughs and Eric chuckles as he takes a drink. "Hm. So listen to me talkin'. What about you?"

"What about me." Eric nods in agreement. "Go on, ask away."

"Ex-wife?" Maz asks, a slight flinch in her eye.

"Going for the big one first, huh?"

"Get her out of the way, move onto the good stuff."

"Nice idea." He finished his drink, almost the whole can and crushed it flat between his palms. "So here's a story, about how my life got flip-turned upside down~"

"Oh lord, what decade is that from."

"Something my grandparents had on Dee-Vee-Dee."

"HA!"

"So, I meet her in high-school; I'm going for my degree and she's got her own thing going on, but we both are in the same building for our 'secondary vocation' training."

"Ah, high school love birds," Maz nods. "That's classic."

"Cliche and doomed." Eric shakes his head. "I jump a couple grades because I read ahead, do work ahead, try and do as much so I get as little debt as I can manage. It works." He pulled out his certification liscence, his old one, and slides it over. There's a clip hole in the bar code but his picture is still there.

"Oh my god," Maz laughs as she takes up the piece of plastic. "You look so adorable in this."

"This one is from about two years ago." He pulls out his valid card. "A year into the marriage."

"Whoa." Maz swallows her laughter, "That's um. Quite the face."

"I'd just come back from deployment, but that look wasn't from anything I'd seen there."

"You served?"

"Yup." He took a drink.

"So this expression,"

"I'd told my wife when I'd be coming back and she was 'out of town' for that weekend, mysteriously." He leaned back in his seat. "But as I was walking the block, getting used to the city again, I saw her car driving around with her and someone else in it."

"Oh well."

"Yeah."

"I called her out on it, and it 'turns out' she had been planning a surprise party for me, and the guy was one of the caterers whose car had gotten a flat and she was driving him to his shop to pick up his work van."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but as it also 'turns out', she getting a 'group rate' on the party."

"Wait, what?" Maz set her can down. Eric looked at her eyes, he hadn't lost her in the subtext, she just couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"I didn't realize it until I looked up the company and saw another face I knew. Our old neighbor from high school, a rich bastard with more free time and money than morals. Plenty of morning after pills and fancy booze for all the skanks." He shook his head and drank again. "I hadn't known she'd been a part of his crowd until I started looking through some of the other photos on the work site and found her in a lot of them, especially the ones taken while I was out of the city, once I got my day job."

"So, what, was she working for them as some kinda call girl caterer?" 

"It took me a while, and things with her got colder with each month, but I managed to dig deep enough. The whole catering job was a front for unregistered unlicensed call service, specializing in giving women with 'unfulfilling relationships' a chance to cut loose and have 'real men' for a change." He finished his drink. "No Two Routes Catering. Fuckers might have shown up in the news, but I think the bastard's old man is spending money to keep his boy out of the limelight." 

"Fuck, they're gonna have hell to pay once the Guilds get their claws in 'em."

"That's what my lawyer said. If I hadn't cut ties before the real legal shit hits the fan, I'd be legally bonded to her and her associates."

"Fuck. Gonna need a better Pre-nup next time."

"Ha!" Eric's laugh was bitter and angry, "No fucking next time. My family watched me go down the aisle with a back stabbing cunt. I'm not risking that again." He looked down at the can but could tell Maz's posture had shifted. "I find someone: great. But I'm not putting them through that again. Weddings are fucking expensive."

"How's your family taking it?"

"The told you so's were brief and I got like, half a dozen offers to move to people's farms and such; out in the countryside."

"Wait, you've got farming family?" Maz asked, Eric nodded. "Shit, why are you living here?" He shrugged.

"I'm not a... I don't react well to anger." Eric didn't reach for another drink when he realized his can was empty. "I, A couple weeks ago was when I figured out through the net what the caterers REALLY did and a guy who lost his wife to their schemes but got buried by lawyers helped me find out where one of their parties would be, and I got eyes on her and everything else. After that, the right calls to the right old friends got me police backup when I found them 'catering' in my own home, while I was supposed to be out of town."

"Fuck me." Maz swore.

"I might just," Eric half joked. The blush in Maz's face hit a peak and she set down her beer. "So I come home, after being able to 'strike a deal with my boss', when I walk in on them. Their 'guest' is three sheets to the wind so she sees me and is all like 'oh whose that nerd?' My Wife goes wide eyed, but when I see her and them IN HER."

Eric's hand crushes the can in his fist. "I guess she thought it was funny so she started laughing." He flung the can toward the bin and it struck against the side, right on the label. "I told the guys to get the fuck out. They started laughing and one guy grabbed me by the arm."

"That sounds like a mistake."

"I might have been in the engineering corp, but we still did our rounds in the ring on down time. I've fought Rangers and Marines and walked away with bruises and a better understanding on how to break a man without killing him."

"How many of them were there?"

"Eight," Eric said off hand, Maz's eyes went wide. "Well, Seven, that asshole from the old days ran off, and really the 'owner' was on his ass pissing himself and staining my good couch, well, more than it already was. So it was like, six on one."

"And you got out of that, alright?" Maz asked. Eric tapped his fingers on the co-tet, kotazu, SKIRT TABLE, before he pulled off his shirt.

There were bruises all across the front of his chest, and several marks from recent cuts where someone had gone after him with a knife, two someone's actually. Maz didn't say a word as she crawled around the table to get a closer look at him. Eric looked at her thick fingers and her strong hands. The calluses of a working life and lifting heavy materials every day gave the skin of her hands a rough and worn look, like well used leather. He didn't mind when she gently ran her fingers over the bruises.

Maz's breathing with short and heavy, her head caught up in a roulette wheel of emotions and decisions. She wanted to find the assholes who did this and break their faces, she wanted to find the bitch who betrayed her husband and knock her teeth out, she wanted another drink so she wouldn't do something stupid and get arrested, but the 'ball' landed on something else.

So she brought her hands up to Eric's face and kissed him on the lips. A gentle, almost chaste, sort of kiss that had the taste only good beer could add to a breathy lip lock. Eric's arms wrapped around her waist as he pulled her close and pushed his own lips against hers. Their tongues met over their teeth and pushed back and forth before settling into and over under sort of roll.

"Bed?" Maz asked, after a minute of tender tongue tango, Eric repeated the word and started to stand up, Maz was surprised at how much lift he had. He had lifted her almost to her feet before he grunted in strain, and she took over from there. Her lips were wet from their saliva and her eyes locked on his. "I'm gonna fuck you so hard." She promised and led him to the bed room.

She contemplated tossing him on the bed, but as she eased behind him, she say the bruises from punches, and at what looked like something large and wide: a chair? She decided against it and instead pulled off a comforter so the so sheets were exposed. As she turned, she heard the soft rustle around her waist, and saw her denim cut-shorts  go undone in Eric's hands. She blinked as he pulled them down and was level with her crotch. "Hold up," She asked, nervous, but Eric placed a hand on her abs. Her legs still in the loops of the shorts, she was off balance when he pushed her, gently, onto the bed, and slipped his head between her legs.

"That's wait, I showered, but I didn'eeeeep!" She squeeled and her toes kinked out as Eric ran his tongue up her swelling lips that were parted by the thin black g-string. "oh." She managed meekly as she looked down and saw the fire in his his eyes. What kind of idiot leaves a man with a tongue like this? That was the last tangible thought Maz had before Eric plunged his tongue into her and went to work. 

The beer had already given her body a slight taste to it. Maybe that was some of the 'spice' Maz had mentioned? Eric set it aside and began to explore Maz's most tender, private, self. he could hear, his ear against her thighs, the blood thudding away with her racing heart rate. He smiled beside himself; still got it. That alone was a point of pride.

He pressed deep and ran his hands up her chiseled abs. She shivered as his fingers crept under her soaked top and wrapped around her breasts. As he kissed his lips against hers and his nose brushed against her clit, from the underside, his finger tips squeezed and massaged her soft breasts and his thumbs rolled across her firm and tender nipples. 

She exhaled softly, even as her body shuddered with a throbbing build up.

"Please."

Her voice pleaded even as his tongue dragged along her vulva, "Please, let me," She struggled to find the words and he stood up, pushing her shorts off with his back before spreading her legs wide, and her marveled at how flexible her muscled body also was. She spread fully wide and clenched her toes as she did. "I want to make you feel good too," She brought her legs together around his back and pulled him close, "Why are you still wearing your pants?" She growled and sat up. The cold snap of his jeans brushed against her clit and she yanked him foward, over her, and onto the bed with a thump.

His pants stayed with Maz as she spun them by a leg before tossing them at the open door.  "Alright wise guy, lets see how high your totem pole-" and then she saw it, "goes?" 

Science had been kind to men. The same scientists who were quietly preventing potential prostate cancer before a boy could be born left certain 'gifts' for men to 'raise the bar' so to speak. "Hot DAMN." Eric's throbbing manhood, teased by the sight of Annabelle, and renewed by Maz's affections pushed past his boxers and stood tall and hard. Maz crawled on all fours as Eric spread his legs and gave her freedom to explore him like he'd done with her.

She took his cock in her hands as she drew close and pressed her face against the thick cock. Her nostrils flared wide as she drank in his scent and her head spun with a heady lust. She had to thank the old man; Asking him for some of the 'special blend' was a great idea.  She ran her tongue up his cock and he shivered as she curled her tongue into a 'u' shape to wrap around the shaft. 

Her eyes roll back and her eyelids flutter as the taste of brew and cock mix on her tastebuds and send shivers down her spine, and root themselves in her cunt. She wraps her lips around the head of his cock as she sneaks a hand down to feel her sodden lips. The G-string is no bar for her thick fingers and she begins to tease her clit as she sucks at the head of his cock.

Eric rests a hand on top of her head, stroking her lush curls and watching with one eye closed as Maz services, no worships, his cock with her tongue and lips. She laps along the scar from his circumcision, she sucks  at the base of his cock, she cradles his balls with the hand not fingering herself, she coats the length of his shaft with her hot spit, and kissed the head of his cock with such fervor that his toes are white knuckled from squeezing so tight.

When she pulled herself off his cock, it was throbbing thick and angry. He wanted to cum, and wanted to cum hard and fill her face with his nut. Maz licked her lips as she reached over Eric, her tits in his face. He didn't hesitate and pressed a breast into his mouth, sucking past the sodden and transparent material to further tease her breasts.

Maz gasped, and with one hand she held his head and pressed it deeper into her chest. She moaned as he rolled his tongue to press the texture of the fabric against her sensitive areola. She reached further, almost falling over and smothering Eric to grab something from her bedside table. She grabbed a loop of a silver material and rocked back onto her legs, her ass pressed against her heels as Eric's cock throbbed inches from her dripping cunt.

"Maz?" Eric cocked his head and then saw the ring, "Oh, good." He smiled, "I left mine in my apartment, sorry."

"Well I can't always rely on a guy bringing his, can I?" She pinched a portion of the loop and a filament spread along the inside, creating a thin barrier. She brought the loop down over Eric's cock and the filament wrapped around his cock and pulled snug against his skin. 

She crouched over him; his covered cock lined up with her cock as she spread her knees wide and put herself on display. Eric was silent as his eyes met hers and with a smile reached up to bring her hips down onto his cock as he arced his back to press into her. Even with the protective layer, Eric and Maz still felt each other's warmth. 

The thick, pulsing, shaft spread Maz's pussy as it pressed deep toward her cervix. Her walls hugged tight against his cock and pulled him deeper, her body ignorant of the barrier and clinging to him with the primal desire to rut.  She leaned forward, her hands on either side of his head as she began to rock and ride his cock.

"I told you," Maz cooed as Eric gasped at the pressure of her weight and the strength of her muscles as she flexed her abs and tightened around his cock. "So. Hard." She gasped as his cock swelled in response and he fucked her deeper with his thrusts. They kissed and as her hair fell around their faces, like a curtain from the light of the waning afternoon, a single streak of wetness ran down Eric's face. Was it sweat, or a tear? Maz didn't see. Her eyes were closed as they rocked their bodies and drew closer and closer to a climax that shook the bed frame and left them both shuddering, and in one another's arms. 

