Page 37 of Nightmare's Dance

She nodded. “I know. So, your prince tell you a good story?”

I shrugged and sank down at the table, sipping my coffee. “I fell asleep before he got very far. Something about a ghost and a mirror.”

“Well, sounds like it did the job. Are you feeling any better?”

“I don’t know, Ash. This is all so crazy.”

“Where is Nic, anyway?”

“Asleep, I assume. He said he doesn’t really sleep at night, but he stayed up to guard against anything that might bother me.”

Ash smiled, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret her expression. She remembered I was with Geraint, right?

“What’s the plan for today?” I changed the subject.

“Robby will be here any time now. So, make sure he’s okay? Get your equipment unpacked? Figure out how we’re going to rescue Knight?”

“Okay, sounds good. I’m going to get breakfast and see if I can manage some time in the lyra.”

“I’ll join you.” Ash grabbed a couple of bowls and set about making her semi famous doctored instant oatmeal.

Once we finished, we headed for the gym. The sun had been up long enough to heat the day and bring the humidity up. Fortunately, the gym was air-conditioned.

Ash rigged two hoops while I stretched. I deliberately didn’t watch what she was doing. I just couldn’t think about it, or I might freak out again.

Then, once I felt limber, I walked over to the lyra, still staring at the ground. I hadn’t spent much time in one in the last few months, so my hand callouses were gone. I might get blisters, but it wasn’t like my hands were soft, so it wouldn’t be too bad.

Ash stepped to the other hoop, mimicking my motions. It was a game we’d played together for years, seeing if we could match the other’s movements.

“I’ll follow.”

My cousin just nodded and put her hands on the hoop, setting up for a basic straddle mount.

Letting my mind blank out of everything but following the shapes Ash moved through, I gripped the lyra, flipped upside down and hooked a leg in the metal hoop.

Ash came up to a basic seat and watched as I mirrored her. When I didn’t panic, she flowed through the simplest moves we knew, and I loved her for it. The basics were exactly what I needed. I braced my back against the bar, my feet on the opposite curve, and flipped upside down, inverting my man-in-the-moon pose. My breath caught and my heart sped, but when I didn’t fall, and the hoop didn’t vanish, I moved into the next shape.

As we transitioned to more complicated sequences, my brain let go of some of my fear, at least where the metal hoop was concerned. It had never betrayed me by vanishing. My confidence grew, and we hooked our knees on the top of the lyra and moved up into the spanset—the strap that held the hoop in the air.

Ash slipped through the middle of the straps, and I tried to follow. The move was simple, but my muscles locked up and I just couldn’t do it. It was too much like being suspended in the silks for my traumatized brain to handle.

“Hey, Spark, remember that time I caught you and Knight trying to have sex in your lyra?”

For a moment my brain stuttered with the change of subject, but then the memory surfaced, and I clutched at the lifeline it offered.

“We weren’t trying. We were succeeding,” I replied hotly, pulling my leg down from the strap and safely back into the metal hoop.

“I really hope you sanitized your hoop after.”

I snorted. “You wouldn’t use it, anyway.”

“Well, no, not after seeing Knight’s tight ass perched there and you riding him like you weren’t six feet in the air.”

I shivered, remembering the combination of pleasure and the burn of pain from that experiment. My knight had kept himself perched carefully on the thin metal hoop, legs dangling, one arm gripping the lyra above. Geraint’s rock hard cock had rubbed me all over on the inside, filling me, keeping me firmly in place while I provided most of the motion. We’d ended up in a spin, and finding a position that worked had been giggle inducing. The ultimate answer had been rocking the lyra kind of like a swing. At least until Ash had interrupted, warning us we were about to get caught by eyes far more innocent than hers. My parents hadn’t told me about an extra class they’d scheduled. Really, Ash had saved us, but unfortunately, we’d not gotten around to repeating that particular experiment.

Now that time we’d hung two sets of silks in our apartment at one of our contracts…

I shivered again. We’d gotten a lot of use out of some easy suspensions, not to mention Geraint was as good at the splits as I was.

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