13. The Fantasy
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FANTASY
With nothing better to do once Riel stormed out, I elected to take a long bath. With any luck, taking some time to relax and mull over the events that had transpired in the last hour would clear up the clouds of doubt that were gathering on the horizon.
As I turned on the tap to begin filling the tub, my thoughts drifted back to him. Given the way that he talked about his family, I’d been able to discern that there was some tension there. Were things going to be even worse now that his father was back? I needed to find something to do in case Riel was busy with family stuff for the next few days. If I couldn’t leave my room, my options were limited.
I tested the water temperature with my hand. Scalding—just how I liked it. I had spent some time wondering how they did all their plumbing, and if magic was involved with that too. But if humans could figure it out, it made sense that other worlds would have similar things.
After stripping off my clothing, I climbed in and settled against the side of the tub. Ah, shit, the soap. For a split second, I debated just soaking for a while without bothering to wash.
Grumbling my displeasure, I pulled myself up and made an effort to wipe some of the water off before stepping out of the tub. I grabbed my soap, shampoo, and towel and put them to one side. As I washed, I returned to thinking about Riel. It was wrong to think so, but I was grateful for the peep show. I recalled the striking planes of his upper body and that smirk he gave when he caught me watching from the doorway. Hell, if I looked like that, I’d be arrogant too.
But then when he showed up at my room, things had gotten too real too fast. I was still reeling, in all honesty. Part of me was relieved we didn’t cross that line, but the other part of me wondered… Would it really be that bad if something happened between us? My hands trailed down my chest, soap bubbles scattering along the water’s surface.
He was tall; it was one of the first things I’d noticed about him. Not that it was unique—all the fae I’d seen so far were model height—but it was a different experience when he was right in front of me. It felt like his body had taken up the entire doorway. What had he thought when he saw me? Did I seem short and plain in comparison to everyone else he knew? Due to my illness, I had been skinny when I first arrived, but I was filling out now. Did he notice? Did he like what he saw?
I called his smirk to mind again. My hands journeyed down to the junction of my thighs. Would he look at me like that if I stood naked in front of him? What if, when I opened the door, instead of just standing there… he had grabbed me? I wouldn’t have stopped him. My imagination took hold of that thought and ran with it, the scene playing out in my head:
He slowly leaned against the doorframe, filling the space, and oxygen fled from me. “Good evening, eseri ,” he murmured. I looked up, up, up into his eyes. It was the wrong thing to do. A predator looked back at me, one that had decided I was to be its prey. My breath caught.
Before I could react, he pushed into the room, the door slamming shut behind him. I quickly backed up, but he didn’t let me put space between us. In an instant, he wrapped an arm around me and brought his body flush against mine, the heat from his hand scorching my lower back. He walked into me, forcing me to stumble backward until I hit the wall with a gasp of surprise. I was caged in by his body, at his mercy like a butterfly pinned to a bug board.
His eyes appeared to glow in the low light of twilight. They were set on my parted lips. He was transfixed by them, like he was already lost in imagining their taste. My heart pounded in my chest. We shouldn’t , I wanted to say. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop him—I wanted it as much as he did. Instead, I found myself pushing up on my tiptoes at the same time he tilted his head downward, and our faces met in a clash of lips and teeth.
Whatever awkwardness there was at our first kiss faded quickly, replaced by desire for each other. His lips teased mine from edge to edge, as though learning their shape so that he could identify them even in the dark. His leg came between mine and applied upward pressure, calling my attention to a spot down below that had begun to throb with every heartbeat.
Swallowing my whimper, he took the opportunity to slip his tongue inside my mouth. My hips jerked of their own accord. In an effort to ground myself, I fisted a desperate handful of his shirt. He responded by adjusting his grip from my lower back to my hip, his touch searing a line across my skin where my clothing rode up.
In the bath, my left hand drifted upward to grip the opposite side of my hip, imagining Riel’s broader hand in place of my own. My right hand slipped in between my legs.
I didn’t notice his other hand until I broke off our kiss to come up for air. He caught my jaw as I turned away. “Look at me,” he ordered. Struck dumb by the authority in his tone, I could only crane my head upward to meet his eyes. His lips curved in that familiar cocky smile, and he started trailing kisses from my jaw down the expanse of skin now bared to him. “Good girl,” he said against my neck. My cheeks flushed in response to his praise.
A euphoric giggle escaped me, momentarily interrupting the fantasy. Maybe that was taking things a bit too far. But a girl could dream, couldn’t she?
“Shouldn’t we go to the bed?” I whispered, eyes half-closed in pleasure as his lips made love to my collarbone. He straightened without a reply, bringing his hands around to cup my rear end. With an unexpected shift of his powerful body, I was lifted up and away from the wall. He was depositing me on my bed before I could panic. My hand still gripped his shirt, and as I fell back, the fabric came with me. Buttons scattered throughout the room.
“Oh my God, I’m so ? —”
He claimed my lips again, cutting off my apology and making it clear that the shirt was the last thing on his mind. I melted against the bed as he set a toe-curling pace, attacking my lips and tongue with expert technique. Any thoughts I may have had died before they had the chance to form. Eventually, the throbbing between my legs became insistent, and I squirmed beneath him in an effort to ease the ache that had developed there. His body lifted away from mine to put space between us—enough for his hand to play with the waist of my pants.
A desperate sound arose in my throat. He chuckled in response and slid his fingers between my skin and the fabric. Impatient, I wiggled my thumbs into the waistband and twisted until it slid down enough to reveal my underwear. At that point, Riel batted my hands away and took over, ignoring my indignant huff. Once my legs were bared, he tossed the piece of clothing aside and reared up to remove the remains of his tattered shirt. I took the opportunity to lift my shirt over my head as well, letting it join my pants on the floor.
His hands drifted down my body the moment I settled back against the bed. I responded in kind, reaching up to learn the lines of his torso. His skin was smooth and hot to the touch, and I imagined that I could feel his power shivering underneath the surface as though it were alive. My thoughts were consumed with wanting to feel more—his weight on me, his presence between my legs, that power inside of me.
“Touch me,” I begged, my voice breaking with need. His hands hadn’t left my body, but he understood what I meant. He resumed worshiping my neck and shoulder with his mouth, trailing kisses down toward the swell of my breasts. I reached between us to yank down my bra, unwilling to wait a moment longer, and didn’t miss his sharp intake of breath as my chest was bared to him. He wasted no time in giving me what I wanted, as his hand snaked between us to tease one of my nipples. I moaned my encouragement.
I brought my hand up to grip one breast, releasing a shuddering gasp as the motion sent an electric signal straight down to my clit. My other hand moved faster between my legs, seeking a climax that rapidly approached. Everything but the fantasy fell away, nothing but my craving for release mattering at that moment.
He attended to my other breast with his mouth. The combined sensations from his tongue and teeth on my nipple sent a jolt of pleasure throughout my core, and my thighs rubbed together in answer. Finally, his fingers drifted where I needed him the most, skirting across my ribs, over my abdomen, and past the waistband of my underwear. My body was already primed, and when they found the place I ached most, a sound escaped me that would have been embarrassing under any other circumstances.
“You respond so sweetly to my attentions, eseri ,” Riel marveled against my breast, “Had I known you were this desperate for me, I would have come to you sooner.”
I couldn’t formulate a response, captivated as I was by the movement his finger was making inside me. It was somehow perfect and not enough at the same time. As a second finger joined the first, I was brought that much closer to the brink of relief. He barely thrust them, somehow applying slow and steady pressure to a certain spot in a way that would have made my legs weak had I been standing.
“Yes, yes, yes.” I arched into his hand. It was almost enough, but his mouth was too gentle for my liking. “Bite it,” I demanded breathlessly. Riel didn’t hesitate, nipping my flesh hard enough to make me gasp. My hand shot up to find my lonely clit and rubbed insistently, amplifying the sensations tenfold. The multi-pronged assault on my senses brought that elusive pinnacle of pleasure within reach, climbing, climbing until ? —
“Oh, shit!”
I bit my lip to stifle a whimper and jerked against the wall of the bath as the tension in my core at last hit its peak. Handfuls of lukewarm water sloshed against the floor below. A haze of gratification flooded my brain, leaving me limp and pliable, and the next few moments were spent trying to collect myself. As the thinking half of my brain caught up to the horny half, the residual pleasure from my orgasm began to morph into a queasy mishmash of horror and shame.
I stood abruptly, ignoring the splash as I did so. Setting the tub to drain, I collected my towel, wrapped it haphazardly around my body, and sprinted into the bedroom. Two thoughts yo-yoed back and forth in my head while I wrestled pajamas onto my wet limbs: “Did I seriously just do that?” and “What the fuck was I thinking?”
Cheeks burning with shame and hair soaking the back of my shirt, I collapsed face-first on the bed. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I was plagued with inappropriate thoughts about a foreign dignitary when my nation depended on me, now I actively transformed those thoughts into full-blown fantasies. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I touched myself to them like some kind of degenerate pervert. Then again…
No, it didn’t matter how attractive he was! There was no excuse for that kind of behavior. I needed to get a grip. God… what was this place doing to me?
The noise continued clamoring around in my head until finally, mercifully, exhaustion carried me away into dreamland.
Unfortunately, the mercy was short-lived. That night, my tumultuous thoughts inspired a familiar nightmare, one I’d been lucky enough to avoid for the past few weeks. While my subconscious took certain liberties, it always began and ended the same way. First, I saw a series of memories from my teen years, which included a girl with long chocolate-brown hair, rich bronze skin, and an athletic build. Although she never revealed her identity in the dream, I knew who she was: Marcia, the Brazilian girl with changing magic.
We were both fourteen when we met. We were complete opposites, but we were kids, and kids didn’t need to have anything in common to be friends. I saw snippets of our time together, as I always did: the day she showed me her abilities for the first time, becoming one of the Secret Service dogs in an instant. The day we gorged ourselves on a platter of tuna salad sandwiches that she’d stolen from the kitchen. The day she taught me how to float in the White House swimming pool. And finally, the day we decided to sneak out.
I saw her back in the crowd, silhouetted by the sun. It made for a beautiful picture. Her shirt was cornflower blue, with ruffles along the sleeves and neckline. Her hair hadn’t been trimmed in a while—the split ends caught the light. She walked with her shoulders back and head held high ahead of me. People passed by, oblivious to our identities. To them, we were unremarkable, just two more people on the street going about their day.
When the nightmare began, the sunlight coalesced into three blurry faces surrounding me. There was laughter, then darkness. The smell of stale air and dirt. Cold stone against my back. My tears wouldn’t stop coming, and my throat was hoarse from shouting. I was alone and terrified, trying to stifle my trembling so that I could rest my heavy head on my knees.
Muffled voices filtered in from somewhere up above me. They scarcely managed to drown out the growling of my stomach, which cramped from hunger. Had it been hours? Days? Weeks? The terror was my only companion in the dark, along with a single thought that repeated itself over and over again until it was all I could hear: Am I going to die here ?
At some point, I had the unnerving feeling that the dream had ended long ago, but a part of me was still there in that cellar. She was still a lonely, terrified sixteen-year-old girl whose sobs echoed in the darkness. No matter how long she waited, no matter how much she screamed or how hoarse her throat became, help never came.