Page 154 of Forced Vows

But if we aren't, what are we? Because the woman who just climbed off my bike and walked into her home without saying a word to me, is more than just a means to an end.

That twenty-one-year-old college student makes me feel things I thought I could no longer feel. The heart that I would swear had atrophied in my soul, is beating again.

Black it might be. Stained with sin. But it beats.

Róise is more than my sweet flower. She is sensuality wrapped in innocence. She is a conscience I thought long dead. She is a smile when everything around me is pain and destruction.

She is a hope. My hope.

I swore I would never fall for a woman like my brother and my cousin.

But only a weak man denies the truth when it stares him in the face.

Róise doesn't just give me her body, she sparks tendrils of expectation for the future. New eyes to look at the world, even this dark one we were both born into.

She is not my light, because that implies she could be turned off.

She is everything good that infuses the center of my being.

And she thinks I'm an asshole.

Which? Is the truth.

But she will learn to love this asshole. Because I will not be in this obsession alone.

Chapter 51: RÓISE

I review the same page of notes for the fifth time and none of it sinks into my brain.

I can't sit still. Honestly, sitting at all right now is not in the cards. I'm lying on my side on the bed with my tablet propped up so I can study for my Performance Theory final.

Only, very little studying is getting done. Every time I shift, I feel the movement in my stretched sphincter muscles and something decadent flutters deep in my belly.

Flashes of what happened in Miceli's studio keep interrupting the words on the screen.

A loud pounding on my door startles me and I sit up, accidentally putting my hand down on Pusheen's tail.

I don't think I hurt her, but she yowls and leaps from the bed in protest.

Before I can even call out to ask who it is, because that is not the knock of one of my cousins, or grandmother, the doorknob starts to turn.

Screeching, I jump to my feet a lot like Pusheen, but I'm diving for a robe to cover the stretchy tanktop that barely reaches my thighs. I'm not wearing underwear.

I'm halfway into the robe when Miceli bursts into the room looking around like he thinks I've got someone in here with me.

"What are you doing?"

His eyes lock on the half of my body still exposed and lust he makes no effort to hide kindles in their depths.

What the heck? "What are you doing here?" I amend my first question.

But really, I'd settle for an answer to either.

"You cannot entertain visitors dressed like that," he says in full bossy mode.

I let the robe slide right back off and put my hands on my hips? "I can't? Only it looks like I can."

"I am different. You can entertain me naked, but not if you don't want to mess the sheets up on that princess bed of yours."

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