Chapter 24
twenty-four
Girls Only Thrifting
“Why not?” Renee whines as she holds up a fantasy painting of a woman riding on the back of a dragon.
I check the price tag, then direct the painting into our cart. “Because, I told you, if it goes bad, we’re stuck together.”
I’d told her the whole story on the way over, as well as the bit about maidens being sacrificed to him and how old he probably is, and now she’s even more rabid at the idea of Bastian and me being together.
“You won’t even give it a chance?” she asks, showing me a miniature statue of Excalibur in a slab of sparkly granite. I pull on the sword hilt and a letter opener emerges from the stone. The tag on the handle says four dollars, so I put it in the pile.
“I don’t know,” I say, pushing the loaded shopping cart forward through the crooked, overflowing shelving.
The shop is bursting at the seams with amazing finds, but most of it is little knickknacks and wall art for decorations. I do want to get some nice seating, preferably well-cared for if they’re going to be refurbished.
“I think you do know,” she says, showing off a trio of colored glass orbs.
“I’m not ready for a relationship, and I’ve never just fooled around before,” I say.
“Fooling around is great, and super low risk if you have boundaries. Just let him know it’s playing around and nothing more. Get this sexual energy out of your system, then you can go back to business as usual, until you’re ready to boink again,” she says, setting the orbs in the cart.
I groan. “Please, not boink. I don’t want to boink.”
“Fine,” she says with a leer. “Take him to pound-town. Show him your bone-zone. Let him grind his axe in your guts.”
“Ew, please,” I whisper, clenching my eyes shut as I try not to envision him axing my guts.
“Come on, Cait! You read smut! I’ve seen your book stack,” she says.
“Yes but, that’s fiction!”
“It could be reality,” she says, pulling the cart by the front.
She guides us to the back of the huge building where the furniture is arranged like faux sitting rooms. There are a few good pieces that I take pictures of as we go by.
There’s even a beautiful, antique chaise.
I lift one end of it and confirm it’s super heavy, made of real wood.
I run my hand over the fabric and feel the fresh, velvety fibers tickling my palm.
It’s blood-red, with dark wood polish, and absolutely gorgeous.
I grab the tag fluttering off the back and flip it toward me. “A hundred!” I shout, elated.
“Is that too much?” Renee asks.
I grin. “No, it’s awesome!”
“Yay! Rip off the bottom of the tag, that signifies it’s spoken for,” she says.
I tear off the end where the barcode is and stuff it in my pocket.
“Thanks for bringing me out to do this.”
“Of course!” She pats my shoulder affectionately. “The boys are fine on their own. Probably talking about how Bastian can get even bigger biceps, sleeping routines, creatine, etcetera.”
I snicker. “He seems really passionate.”
“He is. And so driven,” she says, her black-rimmed eyes practically going starry.
“And you?” I ask.
She smiles. “I love running the inn. I get to meet new people, bartend and listen to my favorite tunes while shooting pool. We go out on the lake when it hits the mid-sixties and do some fishing—mostly catch and release. Anyway, it’s slow and I like it slow.
There’s peace in every day, and I want for nothing. ”
I nod. “Sounds perfect.”
“Stop trying to deflect from the subject at hand,” she says, leading me to a rug that’s hideous.
We both cringe down at it, then at each other, and laugh.
“I’m not deflecting,” I say. “I’m just trying to get to know you better.”
“While avoiding the idea of having sex with Bastian,” she says bluntly, and my brain latches onto the words.
He’s looming over me, his claws digging into the door frame as his hips slap against mine. The look on his face is pure bliss, sending a surge of heat to my core.
I shake my head. “What if he doesn’t even want to have sex with me? He said many women tried to seduce him and he turned most of them down.”
She rolls her eyes. “He jizzed on you.”
An older woman gasps nearby and when we both look at her, she hurries away, her cheeks red. We share another laugh.
“I’m just saying, it’s pretty obvious he’d be into fooling around,” she says as we move on to lamps.
Just fooling around…
Could I?
But seriously, the risk of things going wrong and then being stuck with a very grumpy, very hot dragon who doesn’t want to fuck me. That would really suck.
What would go wrong though?
We’re already living together and that’s not going to change no matter what. He helped out with Oscar. He gave me a rose and said I was the quintessence of lovable…
My heart hammers in my chest as Renee sets a pretty, stained-glass lamp into the cart.
What if what goes wrong is me? What if I just can’t? What if I stop wanting to fuck around and he gets mad that I don’t want to have sex, just like Jeremy? Then he’s trapped in the hoard with a cold fish. And I’ll get resentful, of him and me, and it’ll just be a mess. A miserable mess.
“Hellooo,” Renee says, waving a star projector into my eyes.
I blink and shield my face. “What?”
“What are you doing in there?”
“Thinking, ever heard of it?” I snipe, and then immediately wish I could reel the words back in.
She grins overwide. “I knew you were starting to like me.”
“I’m sorry, that was—”
“Funny,” she says, cutting me off. “So shut that apology right up. You can take the broomstick out of your butt every once in a while, Cait, I promise it’ll be okay.”
I scoff. “Broomstick?”
“Yeah, big one, too.”
She plops the projector into the cart and steers us forward.
I wince. “I’m not really that uptight…am I?”
She turns around, putting her hands over mine.
“I get it. You put all your money into this business and you need to make it work. But you’ve got a hot, magical being living with you who demanded you continue masturbating so he could masturbate to the sound of it and you’re being really close-minded about the possibilities.
“You said he didn’t hurt all the other women, and he hasn’t done anything that would be a red flag—”
“Other than breaking that trash guy’s wrist,” I blurt out.
Her eyebrows shoot up. “He what now?”
“I totally forgot but when I first got in the men who came to take away a bunch of the garbage, one of them was flirting with me. He got kinda pushy, and I was a little scared. Anyway the guy reached out to touch me, and Bastian grabbed his wrist and snapped it.”
Renee seesaws her head. “On a normal day I’d say that’s kinda red-flaggy, but he’s a dra-gon.
I think he probably showed restraint. And in any case, he didn’t hurt you.
It doesn’t seem like he would resort to violence with you over a slight, or if you told him to fuck off for a night, or even if you told him to fuck off forever. ”
“I don’t want to tell him to fuck off forever…” I mumble.
She smiles. “So then, pull the broom out of your butt, and go have sex with your feral, handsome, magic dragon.”
She pulls the cart along, dropping in another lamp that’s base is a rearing, silver unicorn.
Could I do it?
We do another lap of the ornamental rows as my brain whirls on the possibilities and the probabilities. If I don’t have sex with Bastian, I’ll be passing up a very real fantasy come to life. And this is my second life fantasy, isn’t it?
“Okay,” I say as we get to the checkout. “I’m going to do it.”
Renee smirks. “Oh, do what?”
I take a deep breath. “I’m gonna bag a dragon.”
She sings the song all the way through checkout, adding lyrics and making the cashier blush deeply as she rings us up. She sings it all the way home, too, and my stomach fills with butterflies at the thought.
How do I approach this?
Hey Bastian, want to come on me again?
Ugh…
How do you become friends with benefits?