Chapter 8
?
Boundary? No thanks. I prefer my lines crossed. Like t’s.
Kyran
Bad Kyran. Shame on Kyran.
Tsk, tsk.
Someone slap my wrist.
Grazing my finger across my lips, I sit at the kitchen table, half my body splayed across it, and watch Morana pretend last night didn’t happen. Sweeping the kitchen floor in this rare moment when Clara isn’t coating every surface in flour, she keeps her head down, eyes off me.
I relive our fall in my mind.
Over. And over. And over.
What decadence.
What mercy.
Everything that happened last night swallowed every corner of my brain, and for the first time in what feels like years, I slept well.
“Mistress?” I say.
She flinches, but does not look at me.
Feeble, I repeat, “Mistress?”
A weak breath enters and leaves her. Very obsessed with her sweeping, she puts her back to me.
Reaching into my pocket, I obtain the card I stole out of the grass last night when Morana was preoccupied with her racy thoughts of wanting to kiss me forever. Putting the slip of cardstock in front of my eyes, I say, “What’s a FrostPlays life-size plushie, mistress?”
Morana makes a sound very near both suffocation and choking as she spins around, dark hair flying. Her eyes zero in on the little card betwixt my fingers, and another deeply concerning noise escapes her soft-as-clouds and sexy-as-sin body.
I straighten myself in my seat and open my arms to her. “Am I not life-size enough for you? Or…do you just love me so much that you want two of me?”
Dropping her whole broom with a clatter, she stomps over and snatches the card from my hand. “This was private,” she hisses, in a manner that suggests I…didn’t know?
“I know,” I inform her, in case she wasn’t aware.
Frantic, she searches me, on edge. “What has come over you?” Her lips tremble as she opens her mouth. “L-last night, and now this? How exactly is any of this supposed to help me trust you?”
I lower my arms. “You can’t trust someone you don’t know, right?”
She hardens. “Right.”
“I’ve spent the past seven months watching myself around you as I fell in love, as I came to trust you.
Now, I’ve decided that I love you and want to marry you.
I’ve also recently learned that you do happen to be attracted to me.
You like me well enough that you want to keep me in your life.
Furthermore, I’ve had some glorious moments of clarity between yesterday and this morning, and I’ve come to a realization about your trust issues.
They’re a bit more specific than just problems trusting.
You said that the person you trusted left you, and you’ve mentioned several times now that you think you aren’t interesting enough to keep me invested for long.
That’s not a trust issue. I could even argue that telling me that truth placed an amount of trust in my hands.
These, mistress, are abandonment issues. ”
She flinches.
“I will always love you. I will never leave you. And, starting now, I’m going to be a little bit more reckless than I have been. I might ruin everything, or this might be exactly what you need. So.” I stand.
She stumbles back a step.
“Here are the rules of the game…” I advance as she retreats, persisting until her back hits the wall of the kitchen and my hand plants flat beside her face.
“If it gets to be too much and you decide that you don’t care for me at my worst or want me to continue pursuing you openly, text STOP to me in all caps. ”
Her brows knit, and her lashes flutter. “Wha… Like a freaking automated text line?”
“Yep. Like a freaking automated text line. That’s how you’ll opt out. Make sense?”
“No.”
“Yeah, it does.” I coil a lock of her hair around my finger. “Terms and conditions…”
Her eyes rocket skyward. “You cannot be serious.”
I’m so serious. Obviously. I’ve got her in a kabedon, for crying out loud.
This is peak masculine seriousness if ever I’ve witnessed it.
“I’m going to cross lines. I’m going to invade space.
I’m going to poke boundaries and likely flat-out bulldoze them.
I’m going to give you so much of me, it might make you sick.
And…I’m going to take as much of you as I can.
I’m going to fill my hands and lungs with you, day in, day out.
I’m going to push you to a point where you might wish I’d abandon you as I work to sew us together into a single creature. ”
“That’s…”
I tug on her hair, and her eyes close. “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put you inside my bloodstream and make it painfully clear that leaving you would kill me… Because it’s not a trust issue at all, is it?”
“Of course it is,” she exhales. “I can have both trust issues and abandonment issues. I can at least be that complex.”
“Sure.” I let my free hand taste the shape of her hip, then I move my touch back, to her rump.
Sliding my fingers into her back pocket, I get her phone and touch it to her chin.
“In that case, what I’m suggesting is a horror film.
Text me STOP before you’re running upstairs while a monster chases you and can’t. ”
Her glass green eyes hold to me, full of deadly promises.
She, noticeably, does not reach for her phone.
Her lips part. “What is the limit of how far you’ll go in this idiotic scheme of yours?”
Dark pleasure rises as I put her phone back and leave my fingers against it, in her pocket.
Dropping nearer, I brace my forearm against the wall by her head, then I offer her the basest truth I can, “I will not—” I swear.
“—you.” I let my lips hover near hers, so close it’s agony.
“That means, I’m going to be careful with any and all touching…
because I cannot express how badly I would fall into all that is you if given the chance.
” I close my eyes, consumed by the scent of her shampoo wafting around us.
“Everything else? Mine for the taking…the teasing…the torturing.”
“You’re touching me right now,” she says, and I revel in the sensation of her breath against my lips.
My fingers twitch against her phone. “I am being very careful.”
“You’re going to hurt me.” She swallows. “You’re going to get bored, or tired, or frustrated, and I’m going to get hurt.”
“I’m going to fall harder than I think is possible right now.
I might hurt you, but I can promise it won’t be because I’m leaving, and it definitely won’t be because I’m wanting or loving you any less.
It’ll be because I’m pressing on a bruise without restraint as I try to reach a deeper understanding of who you are. ”
“These are empty promises,” she whispers.
“Then kill them now.”
“This is a bad idea.”
“Then end it.”
“This—”
I touch my mouth to hers, just like I did last night. A mere presence of my lips on hers, then—just like last night—I jerk myself away and end it before I’m liable to grip her so tight my fingers bury themselves in her flesh as I work her mouth open and taste her tongue.
All of her own accord, her mouth opens, a protest on the tongue I have—so graciously—not nipped. I cut whatever she might have said off, “Text me to STOP.”
Her face scrunches, and her hands close into fists. “Not this again.”
“Yes, actually, this again. And it’ll keep being this again until you tell me, somehow or someway, to stop. Unless you do, I’m not going to.”
“If I tell you to stop, what then?”
“Then, things go back to how they have been for months. I’ll pine and pester.
You’ll likely continue your delusions of a siblingship between us, and I’ll let you, and I’ll probably hope that you get sick of it, that something I do might change your mind.
Who knows? Whatever you choose, no, I’m not going to leave you alone or behind.
Even if you stop my advances, you’d have to stop my heart to keep me out of your life completely. ”
A deep breath fills her, and there’s fire blazing in her eyes when the seafoam hits me so hard I’m nearly knocked off balance at the sight. “I don’t believe you.”
“That’s fine. You’re going to. I’m going to make you.”
She sneers. “As if.”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re cute when you’re furiously denying your very big, very real desire to kiss me?”
Her eyes roll, and she stomps past me, back to her dropped broom. “I do not have a very big, very real desire to anything you, e-boy.”
I yawn. “Oh, so now you’re just straight up lying to me?”
“Maybe you should go take a nap.”
I shake my head and approach the island counter, melting against it so I can watch her sweep. “Can’t. I’m too busy daydreaming about you doing indecent things to me in very big, very real shows of uncontrollable affection.”
She thrusts a dry, disapproving look my way.
She does not, I note, reach for her phone.
“What’s your favorite color?” I ask.
“My favorite color? What are we, toddlers?”
“Mine’s blue.”
She pushes her dirt pile into the dustpan. “Let me guess, ice blue?”
“You’re so intuitive.” Ice blue is only the shade of my eyes, my car, many of my clothes, and my entire FrostPlays brand. Shocking she managed to figure it out. “Are you going to make me guess yours?”
She thinks for a moment as she dumps the dust in the trash. “Sure.”
“Black.”
Offense wrinkles her wittle nose. “No.”
No hints from her extremely colorful wardrobe then, huh? Are there any other colors I’ve seen her gravitate to? Her FrostPlays plushie reward card was in my brand’s shade of blue…but whether that’s because she also likes the color or was just embracing the topic of said card is…anyone’s…guess.
My Morana-clouded mind recalls that it spent much of last night remembering soft accidents, sweet lips, and FrostPlays plushie. “Morana?”
“What?”
“Why do you want a life-size doll of me?”
Heat skates up her neck as she shoves her broom into the kitchen cleaning closet. “Stress-relief.” Her eyes narrow, and she dares me to challenge her. “Without all the felonies.”
I hold her daring gaze. Then I find myself smiling.
Because, okay. Yeah. I guess we are just straight up lying to me now.
As her cheeks blossom bright red, I get the feeling that she likes me. Loads. Loads more than I thought, even. And not just because I spend the entire rest of the day pestering her, while she not once reaches for her phone.