Chapter 32 Dimitri
DIMITRI
I woke with a gasp, dragging air into my oxygen-starved lungs. I waited for the typical nausea and dizziness to hit, but my racing heart slowed. It took a few moments to feel it—the caress of fingers against my hand. Soft. Soothing. Everything my life wasn’t.
I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to let go of this moment.
Sienna’s sweet vanilla scent swirled around me and my body sank into the mattress, savoring the peace that didn’t belong to me.
She must have known I was awake, but she didn’t move away, didn’t speak.
The world narrowed to the feel of her fingers against my skin, my anchor in the storm.
The need to look at her grew until the intensity of it forced my eyes open. She was sitting next to me, her laptop casting a blue glow on her face. She used the trackpad with one hand while the other trailed up and down my arm. I squinted, trying to make sense of the colorful blobs on the screen.
“What are you doing?”
Sienna didn’t jump at my rough voice. “I’m trying to turn around this ice cream shop. Sales have been down, so I’m scheduling a promotion to get more customers.”
“What?”
A smile played on her lips as she met my gaze. “I’m doing a week-long retail challenge against my nemesis and I have to win.”
“Nemesis?”
She nodded. “C0zyBrODeezNuts is the number one CozyScape player in the world, and I must destroy him.”
A shocked laugh rattled up my throat. “What the fuck?”
“What part of that was confusing? C0zyBrODeezNuts is going down.”
Amazingly, that was not clarifying.
My eyes finally adjusted and the screen came into focus. An animated brown-haired woman was frosting a long row of cupcakes. Sienna clicked furiously, but the frosting kept coming out lopsided.
“I thought adding another specialty item would give us an edge,” she explained. “But Mary Margaret apparently doesn’t have the fine motor skills required for piping frosting.”
I grunted, but soon I was immersed in Sienna’s virtual world and when C0zyBrODeezNuts pulled ahead in their challenge, my competitiveness rose to the surface until I was suggesting strategies Sienna could use to get more people to come to her ice cream shop.
The entire time, we didn’t acknowledge my nightmare or the fact that she was in my bed or that we’d fucked two nights ago. When I woke the next morning to an empty bed, something stirred inside me. A longing to have her in my arms, her soft curves melting into my body.
A longing for what I could never have.