Page 3 of The Deer and the Dragon
The electric current of his touch coursed through me.
“Holy fuck,” I murmured, falling to pieces.
His fingers began to work their way up the hem of my dress, nudging it up over my hips. My stomach clenched. My lips parted in a stifled gasp, eyes closing as he came up behind me. His mouth sucked gently on the tender place where my throat met my shoulder. Every sense in my body homed in on the delicious sensation. His mouth moved to the back of my neck, hands dropping from my hips to urge me forward. I leaned into the floor-to-ceiling glass, letting the cold seep into me as his hand slid from my inner thigh, higher,higher.
“Oh god,” I gasped when he grazed the soaked evidence of my black-lace panties.
“You know better than that,” he chided softly at my choice in words, a teasing warmth in his voice. He relaxed his body into mine until I was pressed wholly against the window. “Now, are you going to let me in?”
My face betrayed the battle going on in my head and heart. My body ached for him. My breasts peaked against the thin dress. The pulsing in my chest extended into every piece of me, and I felt my heartbeat in my greediest places. My fingers clenched against the glass. He chuckled lightly.
“Nothing without your permission,” he said, fingers still grazing me with tantalizing slowness. The tingle of the water between my legs trickling onto my inner thighs elicited a low groan of approval. His fingers continued to move over the thin fabric.
I gasped against the sensation, and he leaned into my throat once more, smiling through my pleasure.
“You know I’m…” Words felt useless.
“You’re what?” he pressed me into the window with more force.
“I’m trying to stop.”
His fingers quickened as he said, “As if I don’t know you, Love. We both know it’ll never make you happy. But if you’d prefer mundane restaurants and forgettable men over what I can offer you…” His hand stilled.
My lust, my greed, my denial came out in a single, short sound. My eyes opened as I turned back to the shadows, but I knew what I’d see before I turned.
Despite the bandage-tight dress around my hips and the puddle of evidence on my legs, I knew he wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there in a long, long time.
Chapter Two
Thank god I always slept with my phone on silent.
Josh had been busy after he’d left the restaurant. I’d missed seventeen drunken texts and had two voicemails all anchored around the theme of how we had something really special, and we could go the distance, before pivoting into how I was an ugly slut. I skimmed the first few before deleting the voice messages without listening to them. I blocked his number but didn’t bother to hide my social media from him. Allowing old dates to see how much better I was doing without them was a favorite pastime of mine, and I would hate to rob him of that opportunity.
One of the best features in the apartment was its heated floors. The moment my toes touched the twinkling black marble, they were greeted with the warm kiss of walking on obsidian sunshine. I turned on the tea kettle and scooped the ground coffee into the French press, just as I did every morning. My eyes drifted to the smudges on the window and I frowned. The morning light reflected beautiful shades of yellow and orange off the warehouse’s floor-to-ceiling glass and snaking river, illuminating the imprint of my face, forearms, and hands. Pale yellow light caught the streaks where I’d clenched my fingers into fists. My toes curled at the memory, thoughts longing for the scent of moss. NormallyI’d wait for the maid, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted her seeing my near-perfect outline.
But cleaning was a post-coffee task.
I pressed a few buttons on my phone, and it connected to the apartment’s sound system. In the mornings, I kept the music happy and easy. I toggled over to a beachy playlist that I’d loved while lying poolside in the tropics. My therapist had agreed that veering away from the lyrical tragedies of soulful ballads had done wonders for my mental health.
The happy beats pulsed through my apartment, loud enough for me to twirl while quiet enough not to disrupt my slowly waking soul. The apartments had been blissfully soundproofed, so even if the owner of the penthouse had owned a buffalo, the reinforced floors never would have let on. I didn’t worry about the volume as I let the music carry me to distant memories of ninety-degree weather, to sand between my toes, to sunny days, to smiling faces, and to a life far, far from this one.
I grabbed the oat milk from the fridge and stared back at the small pieces of sentimentality I’d allowed myself. I had a magnet with the cover of my first book that had sent me into hysterics the first time I’d seen the trinket in a bookstore. A second magnet of the Columbian flag secured a picture of Nia and me grinning in the autumn sun while Kirby held a bucket of apples over their head like it was a UFC belt. It was one of the few bits of evidence that I had friends. Beside it, a small, grainy, black-and-white photo of my great-grandma holding my infant grandmother on the shores of the Norwegian fjords was one of my only tokens of sentimentality.
The kettle clicked and the spell of ruminations broke—both of sensual hands on my hips and of joyful, tropical days. Memories and fictions wouldn’t serve me, at least, not unless I was writing.
I let the coffee steep in its French press while I did the laziest form of my morning routine: skin care, messy bun, and a slouchy T-shirt. Having my own place meant no one couldforce me into the tyranny of pants. I grabbed my laptop, my coffee, a spoon, and a jar of farmer’s market honey before settling onto the couch. I liked my coffee dark and sweet and had once read that local honey had healing properties. It wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to fact-check, as I didn’t want anything interfering with what may or may not have been the placebo effect that lent itself to my clean bill of health. Plus, living alone also meant no one could judge me for spooning in honey every few gulps.
He’d made fun of my questionable combination once, though he’d amended that he certainly didn’t mind. My caffeine abuse made sleep harder for me, and if I was awake in the dead of night…well, one thing often led to another.
I combed through thirty new emails and idly wondered if the staff at Inkhouse ever rested. There were always new edits, rewrites, legal documents, proposals, marketing needs, or strings of panicked messages over bootlegged copies of my books circulating. I scanned to see if anything sounded important but only clicked on the messages from Allison. She’d been my beta reader since my firstPantheonnovel and exclusively sent love letters. My mouth quirked up at the soliloquy regarding my brilliance and attention to detail and describing how she’d nearly killed her dog by chucking her tablet across the room after the plot twist. I bit my lip at the dose of serotonin that coursed through me.
I closed my email tab to see what the group chat had sent in the overnight hours. They’d shared a handful of short, thirst-trap videos of hot girls, screenshots of various memes, and Nia had waxed poetic about her husband bringing her breakfast in bed. I clicked out of the chat without responding. They knew I was behind on my deadlines. I had work to do, people to please, asses to kiss, and changes to make. ThePantheonseries wasn’t going to write itself.
I’d focused on a different world region for each of the novels. My debut had followed a valkyrie as the protagonist. It had revolved around the Nordic gods, Valhalla, and the Vikingwars of the first century. It had taken the world by storm, debuting at number five on theNew York Timesbestseller list.Inkhouse signed the series for five books in total, giving me a king’s ransom for an advance. The second book was a conflation of Greek and Roman gods and deities—a sequel that had outsold the debut novel ten to one.
When asked what had led toPantheon’sjuggernaut success, I told them that my mythology novels had something that glittery vampires of yesteryear lacked: kinky, gratuitous sex.
I was now struggling through the third installment. My main character was a Brazilian wilderness guardian on the cusp of the colonization of the late 1500s, and my only editorial note was that I was coming on a little heavy-handed on my stance on deforestation. As much as I loved elementals and their lore, I struggled to connect to the lush jungles, sheer mountain ridges, and flooded lands near the Amazon. Perhaps I could convince my publisher to fund a trip to the rainforest and write amid the toucans and jaguars. I was relatively confident that anything that could be written from my apartment in the city could be written in a hammock amid tropical greenery with a cocktail in hand.
