Illicit Illustration (Masked Men of Sage Springs #2)
Chapter One
Hazel
“No. Just no. I’m not doing it.” While I was not exactly social lately, I also had zero desire to take part in this ridiculous experiment with modern dating. I had a hard enough time finding guys I clicked with face to face, much less having to flirt with strangers through an opaque screen.
“Come on, Haz,” Charley implored—staring at me from where she was seated on the floor sorting things she’d pulled out of her closet to pack—with what I knew was an intentionally pathetic expression. She knew I couldn’t resist the pouty face and was clearly not above using it to get what she wanted. “I need one more woman to balance things out. I promise none of the guys are creeps, I vetted them all myself. They even went through Hudson’s rapid fire asshole finder questions. All of them passed with flying colors.”
“Does Hudson know you’re asking me? I can’t see him being okay with this. He doesn’t like it when I try to date guys who come into the bar. Even though I rarely leave this place lately. Where else am I supposed to meet guys in this town? The grocery store?”
“That’s not a bad idea, but please try this first. Worst case, you don’t click with anyone, and you don’t have to give your number out. Best case, you meet a few nice guys, you flirt via text, and then at the party in two weeks you get to meet them in person. Won’t getting to know them be easier if it’s through the written word? It’ll weed out the disinterested ones.”
“Or I’ll get fricking catfished. You know I’ve been a creep magnet lately, Char. I’m going to be a forty-year-old virgin at this rate. ”
“Haz. Seriously? I doubt you’ll even be a twenty-five-year-old virgin. I think it’s admirable how you’ve managed to get two degrees and have yet to fall victim to the hook up culture.”
“Yes,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes at my formerly One-Night Stand Queen roommate. She may have been blissfully committed and moving in with my brother in a few days, but I remembered all the nights she brought home her various companions.
Spending the money from my first large commission had been worth it for the noise canceling headphones that kept me from listening to my best friend mid-climax with her headboard ramming into the wall.
“Because you had such a terrible time being fucked by all the random college guys who used to spend the night. Thank God you don’t bring Hudson back here. It’s bad enough watching the two of you flirt, I don’t need to hear that. At all. Like I’d need to bleach my brain if I knew what Hudson sounded like when he…”
“Hazel! Breathe, you’re spiraling again. Back to the blind speed dating. Please try. If you hate it, then you can make me sit in weird poses for hours so you can draw them, and I won’t complain.”
It wasn’t the female form that I needed a figure model for. And I was definitely not telling Charley about the kinds of commissions that now filled my ever-expanding waitlist. She would tell Hudson, and my brother would steal my tablet to keep me from being corrupted from the smutty side of Bookstagram.
“Only if you promise this is a one-time agreement. If it goes how I assume it will, then I'm never subjecting myself to one of your events again.”
“Yay!” Charley cheered. “I would say I’d help you get ready, but you could wear pajamas to the first night if you wanted to because you won’t be seeing any of the very eligible bachelors. But you will not be disappointed. There are a few I think are perfect for you.”
But I didn’t want perfect for me. I didn’t have mildly pornographic dreams about who should be perfect for me.
No, my stupid subconscious kept having shadowy sex dreams about the man who lived above the tattoo shop on the other side of the parking lot. The man whose surprised post orgasmic face had haunted me for almost two years.
The same man who I tried not to picture every time I needed to relieve myself after listening to all the smutty audiobooks I had over the past few months.
It was all a part of my job as an illustrator who worked with romance novelists. I’d been binge listening to each of the books to better understand what the authors I was working with wanted in their character art commissions. They’d all given me specifics of which chapters and scenes I was drawing, but with some of them I’d been so curious about the rest of the story that I’d listened to the whole thing while I worked.
Which was an epically bad idea when I had been working more nights. Going to the bar to watch Reid pick up women when I was horny from listening to word porn all day was literal torture.
“Are you even listening to me?” Charley laughed, taping one of the boxes that she was using for her move closed. Surprisingly, she was almost finished, even though she still had a few days left until Hudson was planning to transport the rest of her belongings to his house a few miles away. My brother did not know that his incoming girlfriend was just as much of a hot mess as I was growing up. “You’ve got a weird look on your face right now. If this really makes you that uncomfortable, I had a few alternates chosen in case we had anyone back out.”
Shaking my head and trying to banish the lingering image of a mostly naked Reid from my mind—again—my chest heaved with an exaggerated sigh as I sat down on the edge of her bare mattress. She hadn’t slept here in weeks, and I was going to miss her even if she was only going to be a few miles away.
“It’s fine. You’re right. I’m just being whiny. Maybe I will meet someone. Doesn’t hurt to try. It doesn’t count when I punch my own v-card, might as well find someone with a real penis.”
Charley laughed, shaking her head as she sat down beside me and pulled me into a side hug. “Don’t throw it away because you think you need to. If you’ve waited this long, you might as well have it be with someone you like. Someone you trust.”
“I’m gonna die a virgin,” I groaned dramatically, falling back on the mattress and covering my eyes with my forearm.
“You could always ask Reid to help you out.”
What…the…fuck…
A blush stole across my cheeks as she gave me a pointed look.
“That was mean, even for you.”
“Not saying it to be mean, Haz. I’m saying it because the two of you have been dancing around each other since Halloween and maybe banging it out would help relieve some of the tension now that you don’t flee the room every time he enters.”
“He’s my friend, Char. And Hudson would murder him. Like legitimately torture him in a slow and painful manner with his own tattoo needles.”
She rolled her eyes. “We both know your brother is all talk. He might threaten Reid’s dick if he hurts you, but if you two actually wanted to take things past your awkwardly tense friendship, then go for it.”
“He’s got a type, and I am not it.” Reid liked women who had much bigger assets than my smallish A-cups and slim frame. And I didn’t have any tattoos or piercings, despite always having been curious about them. Every time I was near Reid on Halloween, I had to fight off the thought of playing with his nipple piercings, since the attractive jerk had spent the entire night without a shirt on.
And every time I thought about what was hidden underneath his tight shirts, questions I would never get the answers to ran through my head. Like… If I tugged on one, would it make him hard?
“I think now that Hudson and I are moving in together, Reid is realizing that they’re not lost boys who don’t have to grow up. He hasn’t been picking up women here for a while. Coincidentally, he’s been a good boy since…you took a bat to someone’s twat and then flirted with a cute baseball player all night on Halloween.” Charley grinned, clearly laughing at the memory of finding out th at I’d assaulted my brother’s toxic monster of an ex. “Which he extensively told your brother about on multiple occasions, because Haz deserves better than some minor leaguer wannabe who won’t stick around, anyway .”
“Christian was just being nice to me. We texted for a few days, but then I never heard from him once their conditioning started. He’s busy with school and practice. And Reid’s right, even if he doesn’t play after he graduates, he won’t want to stay in a small college town in rural Colorado. All the students end up leaving eventually.” I shrugged, and she rolled her eyes at me.
The transient nature of living in an area heavily reliant on tourism was why a lot of locals never dated the college students or the tourists who flocked to Sage Springs and the surrounding small communities during the ski season. My cousin Colette was a ski instructor, and she’d warned me years ago not to fall for any of the smooth-talking tourists.
“Not all of them do.”
Yet another reason I wasn’t sure about this whole blind dating thing. Since I had no way of identifying the man on the other side of the screen, what if I ended up with someone who didn’t have plans to stay here?
Although that might be a good solution for my virginity problem. If I was terrible at it, he could just leave town, so I didn’t have to hide above my brother’s bar. I could just be the weird word porn illustrator who lived a life of seclusion with her dildoes and a collection of penis art because she was allergic to pussies.
The animal kind, not my vagina.
“You’re doing it again, Haz.”
Yet another reason I wasn’t sure I was cut out for blind dating. I had five minutes to pitch myself to someone as a date. With my ADHD, I’d probably end up getting distracted, go off on a tangent with weirdly specific knowledge about what was supposed to be a conversation starter topic and then get flustered and clam up from mortification that I couldn’t have a conversation like a normal person .
My friends and family may tolerate my social quirks, but I knew my tendencies to interrupt and have rapid-fire topic changes during a conversation annoyed most people. I irritated myself regularly, but no matter what medications I took, how much I tried to mask it, or how often I attended cognitive-behavioral therapy, it happened anyway.
Sometimes my ADHD could be a blessing. I had hyper-focus when I was working on commissions as long as I stuck to my usual routine, but it also meant I forgot to do things like feed myself, drink water or check the clock so I wasn’t late for my shifts at the bar.
“Just… Fine. I’ll do it. But I swear to God, if I get any dick pics during the texting part of this whole experience, then I’m printing it out and plastering copies all over Hudson’s garage door with my craft glue like a phallic collage art master batory piece.”
“Sounds reasonable, but I think we managed to weed out the unsolicited peen pic posters during the vetting stage. Pretty sure Hudson made some of them hand over their phones so he could scroll through their camera rolls.”
He’d better not ask to look through mine. Because it was currently full of source photographs from my various ‘research’ sources. Some illustrators used 3D models, posing diagrams, and illustration textbooks to help them capture realism in their work.
I also used Pinterest, Instagram, and porn.
The last one hadn’t been helping with my dirty fantasies about Reid. No matter what they looked like, every man in a video I watched—for purely research purposes, only… obviously —turned into him.
And every time I got myself off thinking of him, it made it harder to resist the urge to run away from him when we were forced to be in the same room.
“I promise you’ll have fun. Or you’ll at least have funny stories to tell me afterward. Since you’re debriefing me about the entire process so I can improve things for next time. If Hudson is convinced the experience was a success, he’s more likely to let me make it an annual thing.”
She grinned at me, and I felt terrible that I really did not want to support my friend. But I also knew she’d thrive off my embarrassment when I inevitably did something cringeworthy.
“If no one texts me the next morning, I’m going to never speak to you about this again.”
“Fair enough,” she laughed. “But I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about. You’ll probably have a few guys fighting for your attention, if not all of them. You’re funnier than you give yourself credit for, and some guys find humor sexy. Everything will turn out fine.”
Spoiler Alert: Everything indeed did not go fine.