Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
And once that’s done, and the flood of overwhelming pleasure has died down to rolling waves of satisfaction, he kisses me there. A promise not to hurt. A pledge to respect my trust.
It’s a promise and a pledge I didn’t need.
Or so I thought, until I was given both.
Given another moment to coalesce, it’s a longing. The pledge becomes a hunger and the promise becomes a lust.
We are next to each other now.
My back against his chest.
His arms around me.
My eyes closed.
His mouth at the nape of my neck.
My body flooded with peace.
His lips still kissing me as I fall asleep.
Redefined.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - EROS
I wake to a song. But not the song that’s been haunting me for thousands of years. It’s birds. And the tune is something you hear in the springtime when love is in the air.
A long breath comes out of me and with it comes every bit of tension I’ve been holding in.
This is when Callistina stirs next to me.
It’s her, I realize. She’s the reason for the sweet song and the sense of solace that comes with it.
My arms are wrapped around her middle, my face pressed into the back of her neck, and I’ve got one leg hiked over her hip.
She’s breathing even and deep, so not yet waking. But I find myself wondering how she would interpret our entanglement at the moment. Would she find it possessive? Or would she find it obsessive? Would she assume the leg was placed carefully so as to cage her in? Or would she see it as a show of affection?
Hard to tell. A couple days ago I’d predict cage. But things have changed between us. So this morning I would want it to be affection.
I don’t give her a chance to wake up and have an opinion on that. I simply untangle us and carefully get out of bed so as not to wake her.
Naked, I go out onto the terrace and breathe in the morning air. It’s dry and even though the sun is just barely getting ready to peek up over the horizon, I can already tell there’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s a desert, this place. Though not the kind with sand dunes and shit. And there’s a grand, glorious city built on top of it, so as far as my eyes can see right now, it’s nothing but two and three-story sandstone buildings climbing up every side of every hill. And right in the center is the Sphere of Science and Glory.
The fountain in that courtyard shoots up taller than most of the buildings in this city. But when you build seven thirty-story buildings in the sandy valley like they’ve done here, you need your central courtyard to make a statement that carries impact.
Just as I think this, a wind blows up, stirring up sand in the road down below. Suddenly, a feather comes flying right at my face, hitting me in the cheek. I bat it away like a bug. Then step back and watch as it floats to the ground at my bare feet.
Don’t pick it up, Eros. Don’t pick it up.
But of course, I do pick it up. And it doesn’t take a trained eye to see that this is the exact same kind of feather that I found in my bed that morning after Callistina stormed out. It’s eight inches in length and golden in color.
The wind kicks up again and I take the feather and place it back out into the breeze. It catches immediately, as feathers are wont to do, and goes fluttering on its way.
Gross.
“What are you doing?” From behind me comes a low, sexy, I’m-a-queen-and-I-just-woke-up voice.
I turn, smiling, and find Callistina in all her lioness glory, standing naked a few feet away. The sun appears in this same moment and the beams of light shine on her, making her golden, velvet fur turn an electric yellow.
“Just taking my last look at this piece-of-shit city.”
It’s clearly too early in the morning for Queen Callistina to argue the merits of Glory Rome, because she yawns and practically crawls onto the sofa, stretching her body out in the newborn sunshine.
I wish I had a camera. One of those phones that all the humans carry. They are constantly snapping pictures of the monsters back in Savage Falls. I never understood this hobby. But being in this moment and having no way to capture it changes my mind.
She opens one eye and catches me staring at her. “What?” Her voice is still lazy. Even though I’ve woken up next to Callistina a few times over the past two months, she’s never had a conversation with me until now. I don’t even think she barked a single ‘You shall call me queen!’ when we woke up in the same bed together.