Page 120 of 10 Days to Ruin

ARIEL

The morning light makes the gold shopping bags in my living room glow like radioactive waste. I press an ice cube wrapped in a dish towel against my inner thigh—which is bruised all to shit, courtesy of Sasha’s teeth—and stare at the mountain of silk and lace spilling from yesterday’s haul.

The image swims before my eyes and turns into something else: memories of my own face dissolving into one never-ending moan while Sasha fucked me from behind, his belt black around my throat, his hand clamping over my mouth…

Snap of it, for God’s sake. I keep having these unholy sex flashbacks. My body has not forgotten the damage, either. I barely made it from bed to bathroom for a midnight pee, because the first two steps had me bowlegged like a cowboy.

Ruinis too clean a word for what Sasha did to me in that dressing room.

Not that I’m upset about it. It’s pretty hard to get upset when you lose track of how many times you orgasm. There’s maybe a tiny tinge of shame bubbling in me, if only because remembering how easily I begged for him to destroy me runs counter to my Greek Orthodox upbringing.

But that pales in the face of how good it felt to bewithhim. To beforhim. To offer my body up to Sasha and have him claim it—not to use the way he’d use an object, but to consume like an offering at the altar.

I wanted so badly to be something that made him feel good.

Judging by the ring of bruises around my throat, I’m fairly sure I succeeded.

I leave my cup of tea in the kitchen to steep so I can go shower. But I’m barely two steps into the Naked Limp through my living room in that direction when keys jangle in the door (which, somehow, Feliks managed to fix in less than a day).

My heart swells. Is Sasha?—?

“Honey, I’m home!” calls Gina as she butts into the door and pirouettes inside, her Doc Martens clomping on top of last week’s unopened mail. “I brought you goodies, too. Cinnamon roll from Mazzola’s and— Oh, sweet Jiminy Cricket.”

She stops to ogle me. I can only wince, because I know exactly what she’s seeing. I’m crouched in a bare-ass half-squat like a nudist hobgoblin, with a frozen dish towel cramped between my legs, as more than a million dollars’ worth of haute couture forms a golden mountain on top of my couch. The sex-crazed hair, numerous hickeys, and lukewarm, Jell-O-like quality of my facial expressions are all self-explanatory.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I lie shamelessly, if poorly.

Gina raises a brow. “That walk of shame’s looking more like ahobbleof shame, girl. Did you evenpretendto play hard to get?”

“It’s not that! I, uh… fell.”

“Mhmm. Onto his dick, maybe.” She sets the baked goods down on my coffee table and scowls at me. “Ariel, you look like you just rode a Clydesdale bareback through Central Park. If you don’t unload every single detail right this damn second, I’m going to scream.”

“Gee, I?—”

“I swear I will, so help me God. Three, two, one?—”

“Okay! Okay! Okay, I— Shit,ow.” Trying to lunge to stop my best friend from yodeling at the top of her lungs is even more painful than anticipated. I end up getting less than halfway there before collapsing in a wheezing pile on the couch.

Fortunately, Gina takes it as the sign of surrender that it is and sits next to me. She’s even nice enough to drape a blanket on top of my body, so I’m not both nakedandhumiliated at the same time.

“The people are waiting, Ariel, and they want to know. Details are gold.”

I bite my lip. “We… we… well, we had sex.”

Gina rolls her eyes hard enough to alter gravitational fields. Then she plugs her ears and opens her mouth to start screaming again. “Ahh?—!”

“Stop!” I snatch her wrist and drag her back to reality. “I’m going to tell you, I promise. But you really cannot scream like that. My neighbors all already think I’m into some very bizarre shit.”

Gina eyes me warily. “Judging by the hickeys, I’d say they’re not so far off.”

My face reddens. But there’s nowhere else to go from here, so I take a deep breath, then start to tell her everything.

“So this whole plan of ours…” Gina licks a whirl of cinnamon roll frosting off her fingertip. “Total dumpster fire, huh?”

“It’s bad.” I take a savage bite of croissant. “Call the fire department. Evacuate the city.”

“Ari… I’m worried.” Gina sighs and cups my hand between both of hers. “You’re playing tag with tigers, babe. Very cute stripes. Very sharp teeth.”

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