Chapter 12
chapter
twelve
SHAY
I watched my sister’s jumping spider play invisible bongos.
The week passed without word from Void. Which shouldn’t be surprising, as we’d agreed to this ahead of time. One night, no strings attached. Not to mention that while I’d gotten an orgasm, he’d gotten traumatized.
After the spider cockblock, Void walked me back to my car. And that was it, the last time I saw him.
For the most part, I’d let it go.
Really, I had.
I didn’t check my stories to see if he’d watched (he hadn’t).
The memory of me lying in the graveyard after getting the best orgasm of my fucking life totally didn’t haunt me at night.
I didn’t start reading a book only to replace the hero with his gravelly, mechanical voice then spend the rest of the night unable to sleep.
Nope.
That was not me.
By Saturday, and yet another book club, I’d tried very hard to banish the memories to the same part of me that imprisoned the time I bled through my pants in junior high. I didn’t do it. Some younger, uncooked version of me did.
“Something in the book world died the day we stopped getting half-naked men on the cover,” Eames said.
“Objectively insane, because half of them never even matched the hero,” Lithie said.
I tried to focus on the current bookish argument heating up Eames and Lithie. Something about illustrated book covers versus the man-chesty covers.
It was weird to go from talking to someone every night to total radio silence. Impossibly, I’d gotten attached to the stranger at the end of the line.
Maybe he’d thought I was all bark and no bite. Saying I wanted all this stuff, then chickening out.
“It’s a half-naked chest, it doesn’t need to—”
“I have something to confess,” I said, cutting off Eames’s argument.
They fell silent, waiting for me. I picked at my lip, trying to figure out where to start.
I think I’m catching feelings for my stalker. Who, by the way, has now decided to stop stalking me.
“I met someone,” I said, and reached for a sparkly aquamarine margarita—an homage to the blue aliens we were reading—and downed it one gulp. Then I reached for another. They shared a look. “Off the app.”
They all sat up.
“Oh my god!” Olly sat forward. “Who was it?”
“When did it happen?” Eames asked. “Was he hot?”
“Why didn’t you fucking tell me?” Lithie asked.
“Yeah, that,” Eames and Olly said at the same time.
I swallowed, taking another drink. Then, after a deep breath, I said, “I met him in a graveyard without ever meeting before and I was planning on fucking him. I didn’t know his name or his face.”
Eames froze, a jalapeno popper between his lips. Olly’s mouth dropped. Lithie looked to be short-circuiting, eyes blinking, mouth opening and closing. The soft hum of sad white-girl music, as Olly called it, played in the silence.
Lithie was the first to break the silence.
“You met a stranger in a graveyard? Oh my god.” Lithie ran her hands down her face. “Oh my god.”
“You always do this shit!” Eames said, dropping the popper back to the plate.
“Remember in college when her professor had been sexually harassing her and she just showed up one day. and was like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve been in a months-long litigation while still being forced to go to class with my abuser. Do you want mushrooms on the pizza?’”
I grimaced. “You didn’t need to be burdened with it.”
“Stop,” Olly said.
“This is my fault.” Lithie sighed. “It’s so obvious. It’s like what Clarissa Pinkola Estés said in that book—”
“Women Who Run with the Wolves,” Olly supplied.
“Right, that—anyway, she says the feminine energy can’t be suppressed, only repressed. And if you repress it too long—”
“You fuck strangers in graveyards?” Eames asked.
“You explode in a ball of uncontrolled sexual chaos.” Lithie threw her hands out at me, the uncontrolled ball.
“I’m not a ball of uncontrolled sexual chaos,” I said, a little too meekly.
Was I?
I’d agreed to meet not just a total stranger, but someone who had been stalking me.
They all gave me a look, faces twisted like, um, ma’am.
I settled into the couch, folding my arms. “Maybe I’m a bit chaotic,” I conceded.
“Okay, so you’re alive and unharmed,” Lithie said. “Right?”
“Yes.”
“And we’ve learned our lesson, right?”
I shrugged, like, yeah. Void had been silent for days and, despite my history, I couldn’t imagine doing that again with someone else.
Didn’t want to.
Insane as it was, there was something about him that made me feel safe enough to be reckless.
“Okay, so…” Lithie leaned forward. “How was it?”
“It was…”
Amazing.
I didn’t know it could be like that. Unhinged and feral and passionate and so safe. Was that how it was supposed to be?
And we didn’t even have sex.
“Good,” I said.
Lithie’s face fell, and she tilted her head, like, Are you fucking kidding me?
“Good,” Olly deadpanned. “She drops a nuclear bomb on us and we get good.”
“But you didn’t fuck?” Eames asked.
I shook my head, reaching for a jalapeno popper—I hated jalapeno, but I needed something to do with my hands.
“She’s lying,” Olly announced. “There’s more.”
“I swear to god, Shay—” my sister started.
I cut her off. “He put me on top of a coffin, and there may have been a knife involved.”
Another stunned silence fell.
My sister rubbed her eye, sighing. “This is fully what happens when you try to shove a kinky bitch into a prude.”
“I’m not a prude.”
“Obviously!” she said.
Another silence, then Olly asked, “Was the knife sanitized?”
I laughed, remembering my same fear. “Uh. Yeah.”
“This is wild,” Olly said. “I love these books, but I couldn’t imagine doing that in real life. Like one time a guy tried to tell me what to wear and I nearly throat punched him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was…” I didn’t know how to explain it, because it didn’t fully make sense to me either. He’d spent the month asking me everything under the sun, learning my wants and dislikes, but more than that he listened.
Void had even sensed when I was starting to perform. He’d made me stop. He could have easily sat there and watched, gotten off, but it was like it was all for me. Everything. I’d never felt so fully taken care of.
He didn’t control me.
He dominated.
“But you didn’t sleep together?” Eames asked again, incredulous.
I shrugged. “I guess I got in my head.”
“I need to know at what point you got in your head,” Lithie said. “Was it before the knife or after?”
I glared. “Funny.”
“No, because at no point were you in your head about running through a graveyard with a man who may or may not kill you. Are you going to see him again?”
I shrugged. “Probably not.”
For the next couple of hours, book club was forgotten. They dug in, asking me question after question. Only after I’d promised, on threat of never reading smut again, to let them help me pick my next date did we go to sleep.
Eames and Olly didn’t leave the apartment, and we all fell asleep in the living room despite it being a workday. The next morning Lithie had to head out to the desert, and Olly and Eames had to go in earlier to finish up an experiment, so I waited in line at Tropes alone.
Limerence, that was all this was.
Infatuation.
From years of being sick and stuck in bed, I’d developed a bad habit of maladaptive daydreaming. I worked through most of it in therapy, but maybe so many years stuck in bed stuck it into my bones.
There was nothing between me and Void save limerence.
That was the entire point: avoid attachments, have fun without pain. No relationships, because that would only end badly.
I’d never see him again, and that was a good thing.
“Are you in line?” a voice asked, drawing me out of my thoughts and into the moment.
His voice was deep, deeper than I’d ever imagined a voice could be, and rough-edged. It brought to mind dark, mysterious caves and cragged mountain cliffs. Angry, white-water waves crashing against those cliffs.
Things that were innate, powerful.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Just waiting.” As I stepped more clearly out of line, someone rammed into my back. I fell forward, my phone jolting out of my grip. The mysterious man with the hot voice steadied me and, with insane reflexes, caught my phone before it fell.
Whoever had bumped into me didn’t notice. A group of guys who couldn’t be older than mid-twenties, with frat-boy hair. They were laughing at something one of them said when, still holding my elbow, the deep-voiced man grabbed the person who’d bumped into me by the collar.
“What the hell?” Frat Boy exclaimed.
“Watch where you’re going.” His voice was edged.
Frat Boy’s brows caved, looking at me. “Sorry, man.”
After a moment, jaw clenched, he let them go.
I blinked up into his eyes. I was only five-four, so pretty much anyone was taller than me, but I had to crane my neck all the way back to see his eyes—a deep, dark blue.
“Um…thanks,” I said.
I couldn’t stop staring. There was something oddly familiar about him. But I would remember someone who looked like that.
His features were aristocratic. Angular nose with a slight bump, high cheekbones, and a square jaw. Dark stubble shadowed his jaw, making it appear even sharper.
“Have we met?” I asked.
He arched a brow. “I think I would remember you.”
As if realizing he was still holding me, he stepped off. He gave me a peculiar, almost knowing smile, then went to order his drink. I stared after, stunned.
“Morally Gray?” the barista called out.
I blinked back into reality, pulling out my card and heading up to the counter to pay.
“Oh, no worries,” the cashier said, waving me off with a smile. “The man before you paid it forward.”
I turned to find him to say thank you, but caught only the glimpse of his dark, tailored suit disappearing into the morning.