by Ren Benton
He clawed through his memories of the night he met Gin, looking for other gaps, pieces of her that alcohol had stolen. They were all there, or at least they made sense like they were all there. She might be right that he didn’t remember because it mattered as little as what he’d eaten for lunch that day, but if Gin cared enough to remember, he wanted to remember with her, not listen as if hearing a story about a stranger.
Ethan rested his head against Olivia’s shoulder with a deep sigh. “Rock-paper-scissors to decide which of us retrieves Simone for dinner?”
“Don’t be silly, darling. Alone, we are strong. Together, we are invincible!” She linked her arm in his and led the charge.
They took all the air with them when they left.
“Hey.” Gin’s hand bumped his, an insignificant point of contact that cracked him open along a fault line.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry for all the times I wasn’t present for you.
A hand curved around the back of his neck, heavy, but the weight compressed him, made him more solid, less prone to falling apart. Fingers squeezed rigid muscles.
The heat of shame flared up his face. Shit, he hated this. What did he have to panic about, a fucking salad?
She inserted herself into his downcast gaze. Her eyes were green, like spring and the power to bring the barren and withered back to life.
No. He’d written too many overwrought lyrics in tribute to those eyes and trashed them all. He had a thousand words for their beauty, none for the terrible power that shone through them, the power to bestow happiness or devastation with the direction of her gaze.
That gaze held him suspended now, steady, reserving judgment. “Breathe.”
She commanded him to breathe, so he did, though the air burned through his chest. The pain sharpened his focus. He wasn’t going to die of regret, after all.
More importantly, Gin didn’t hate him enough to stand aside and watch him die.
Her thumb massaged the base of his skull. “Okay?”
He released a ragged breath. “Okay is a strong word.”
She smiled, pretty pink lips stealing his attention. “Been there.” Her hand slid lower, rubbing soothing circles on his back. “Do you want to blow off dinner?”
If he thought she meant sneaking off together, he’d tuck her under his arm and spirit her away, but she was only offering the opportunity to run away alone — and he wanted to make as many memories with her as possible while he had the chance, even if they only revolved around food.
He lowered his head another inch and touched his forehead to hers. “Meeting you made everything that happened before irrelevant.”
Her eyes grew wide and liquid. Those pretty lips softened, parted.
She used to let him kiss her when she got tender, and made him tender, too.
Then she sucked in a breath and smiled brilliantly. “Great line,” she rasped. “Make sure you let that slip to the press.”
Gin spent another hour staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt her thigh pressed against Lex, the short hairs at his nape under her fingers, his breath against her cheek. She’d thought for a moment he would turn that intimacy into a kiss. Because he was vulnerable, recovering from acute anxiety, and needed a safe place to rest, not some avaricious woman lifting her lips to his, she’d pretended her knee-weakening yearning was all in the spirit of Olivia’s PR scheme and staggered away.
Her avaricious lips intended to punish her all night with a full-sensory retrospective of Lex Perry’s Greatest Kiss Hits. The same way he never wrote a bad song, he never delivered a bad kiss, so it promised to be a long, squirmy night.
Particularly after the selection moved on from mouth-to-mouth kissing.
She threw off the blankets. Screw it. She might as well not-sleep staring at her empty computer screen. Perhaps she’d be inspired to write porn. Movie producer hires composer despite budget shortfall and must resort to alternative means of come-pensation. The exploitative element of the employer-employee relationship, if it didn’t fly right over the target audience’s heads, would only enhance their titillation.
Film 101: Understand the market.
She’d been asked to release Perry-Greene sex tapes often enough that she knew exactly what the people wanted. This way, she could give it to them without the unsightly scars and violations of privacy.
Lex’s door was wide open, the room dark and quiet. Flickering light summoned Gin down the hall toward the living room.
He sprawled on the couch, a game controller in his hands. The only light came from the television, where his character dual-wielded swords against a spider the size of a sedan. The volume was muted, subtitles on, so the grunts and randomized battle cries wouldn’t disturb anyone with the enviable ability to sleep.
He glanced at her, and the screen’s glow glinted off his glasses.
Did he get bored being a sex god and decide to dabble in adorable to see how many new worshipers he could collect? All he needed was a puppy and an Instagram account, and women everywhere would be rioting in the streets in his name.
He tapped a button that paused the game. “What are you wearing?”
She plucked at her gift from Ethan — a custom-ordered powder pink tee that shouted BAYOU PUSSY VOODOO in rainbow glitter paint. “Ethan’s starting a clothing line.”
“Damn. I wanted to use it as the name of my side band.”
“I’m sure you two can work out a licensing agreement.”
He patted the cushion beside him. “Have a seat. Watching me dungeon dive will put you to sleep in no time.”
Sitting that close to him would nullify any sedative effects of Skyrim, but there was plenty of upholstered real estate outside the neighborhood of temptation.
She wedged herself into the corner of the sofa farthest from Lex and watched as he resumed the arachnid fight.
He finished off the spider and offered the controller to her. “Loot for me, rogue.”
The most remote corner of the sofa was nearly within arm’s reach for him. Fortunately for her inappropriate urges, all he wanted to reach was whatever gold, weapons, and rancid food previous occupants had left lying around the dusty barrow.
She accepted the controller. Temporarily relieved of his warrior responsibilities, Lex took a break and left the room.
Collecting goodies was Gin’s favorite part of any video game. She looted the spider’s remains, cut desiccated carcasses out of giant webs and looted them, picked the lock on a chest and looted it, and then, because it wasn’t her game so she didn’t have to give her character a moral compass to make it more engaging, she smashed all the urns in the tomb and looted the money that had been left for the dead.
Lex returned with a blanket and draped it over her feet. He collapsed onto his sofa sector and let her continue exploring. “This is my greatest achievement in life: getting you to play video games like a twelve-year-old.”
“I would play sometimes with Ry, but he was so competitive, it was no fun.” Her brother had no patience for looking for hidden caches, talking to NPCs, or petting dogs when he had a quest to complete. “If I go after a chest and trigger a trap that sets the whole party on fire, you just want to go hug our enemies in our flaming embrace.”
“The enemies were mummified,” he grumbled, obviously bearing a grudge about how the incident in question ended. “They should have lit up like tissue paper, and what happened instead was bullshit and entirely due to lack of logic on the game developer’s part.”
“Yeah, everybody knows the reanimated remains of the ancient dead are vulnerable to fire. Where’s the realism?”
“Exactly!”
She slipped through a crack in the wall and found herself on a ledge, a prime vantage from which to rain fire upon the undead below. Since Lex hadn’t equipped his character with such an ability, she handed the controller back to him. “You’re up, Sir Hacks-A-Lot.”
He cleared the path and returned the c
ontroller so she could find more booty. “Remind me to never tell you about all the people who refuse to play with me online because I’m a shouty asshole.”
“I get special treatment because I’m a girl?”
“You get special treatment because we are a team. I support your dream to achieve financial security, which enables us to buy gear that keeps us from dying the next time you set off a trap that torches us and wakes up a tomb full of cranky mummies. The crybabies who can’t handle a forthright evaluation of their performance inadequacies—”
She muffled a snort of laughter.
“—are nothing but lackeys and need to get their shit together and do my bidding.” He took the controller from her, since she was about to be besieged by draugr, who were understandably pissed off about their afterlife retirement funds being robbed.
She hitched up the blanket, the better to huddle under for warmth when not tasked with virtual thievery. “I always enjoyed being the CFO of Team Lex, so I occasionally download a game, turn the difficulty down to ‘for babies,’ and spend a couple hours stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.”
“And shopping for the prettiest armor.”
She shoved his thigh with her foot. “That’s you! I can’t even count the times I’ve seen you walk away from armor with better stats because it didn’t look as cool as what you had on or you didn’t have the whole matching set.”
“Do you think it inspires confidence when the guy responsible for saving the world can’t even coordinate an outfit? I do it for the people.”
“Mighty big words from a man with your collection of sweatpants.”
“Anyone relying on me to save the world in real life therefore should not be surprised when they’re screwed. The visual cues were there all along.” He brushed an imaginary speck of lint from the knee of his unheroic attire. “So what’s keeping you awake this time?”
“The usual. Racing heart, whizzy brain.” Deprived lips doing their damnedest to rally other body parts to their cause and stage a coup that ended with sweatpants flying in the breeze above the conquered.
“That’s been bothering me, too.”
If they shared even a few symptoms, there was likely a common cause. “Maybe it’s food poisoning.”
“Your faith in my cooking is touching.”
“Your cooking was great.” Tomorrow’s lunch would suffer for the absence of leftovers. Even Simone raved about the meal — after Lex took credit. “Pesticides from inorganic peppers?”
“If only it was that simple. Guess again.”
She shifted uncomfortably. She knew what her problem was. She didn’t want him to know what her problem was.
“In the interest of openness — and feel free to kick me in the teeth if this is more openness than you ever want to hear, because god knows my sense of boundaries with you has been wrecked by lack of maintenance on my side — since I got here, I’ve only slept worth a damn the two nights I jerked off in a boiling shower.”
He patted the side of his mouth to mark a prime target in profile.
“I’m not going to kick you,” she said faintly. It would be physically impossible while squeezing her knees together as if that could hold onto the image of his wet body leaning against the tile with his hand wrapped around his cock — just in case she found a use for it later. Clearly, she wasn’t the most qualified candidate to enforce boundaries, whatever those were. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because it’s a surface solution to a deep problem, and you like plans that aren’t doomed to fail sooner rather than later.”
She couldn’t stop staring at his hands, and he was calmly lauding her forethought. He didn’t even look at her while he did it, more interested in slaying the giant stomping through a villager’s garden. Maybe she had fallen asleep and this entire dream conversation was a natural extension of her frustration about the kiss that never happened. “It didn’t work tonight?”
“Didn’t try. Thinking about it made me irritable, and that’s a bad starting point.”
It might take a little more work to reach the destination, but anything was possible with a positive attitude and sufficient dedication.
And, if necessary, a little assistance from a friend who had more than helping hands to lend to the surface of the problem, as well as other options to explore in greater depth.
She’d have no shortage of inspiration for masturbation after all this, but the current living arrangements afforded no privacy in which to do it. The studio where she bedded down was Lex’s office; the shower he was letting her borrow also fell under his domain. Rubbing out an orgasm in someone else’s space was the sort of thing stalkers did so they could get a lasting thrill out of turning that personal space into their own sexual space without the knowledge or consent of the other party.
Lex had been extraordinarily accommodating the past five days. If she asked for clearance to finger herself to sleep within his realm, he’d probably tell her to knock herself out, but submitting the request would be more agonizing than simply keeping her hands out of her pants and another week of insomnia. He’d already said the relief didn’t last, anyway. “What’s the deep problem?”
His finger wagged back and forth between them.
Her heart jittered in accord. “I thought we were getting along okay.”
“I’ve been faking it.”
He might as well have jabbed a sword between her ribs and let the air out of her lungs. She’d spent an entire day weeping on him, confiding things she wouldn’t even say to Ethan and Maisie, when he’d only meant to be polite. “We don’t have to be friendly. I’ll stay out—”
“Bear.” He gave her a look dark and heavy with admonishment. “You known I can’t play nice to save my life. My acting skills are limited to pretending I don’t care half as much as I do.”
Then they were getting along better than okay. The time they’d spent together the past few days rivaled the best parts of their relationship, minus the physical component. “So how are we a problem?”
“That was a mystery to me, too, until you explained it in excruciating detail earlier. We’re suffering from sexual tension.”
He’d missed the whole point of the lesson if he thought that. “We’ve been down that road often enough to navigate with our eyes closed. There’s no mystery, no tension.”
“A lot can change in five years. Side routes. New scenery. Bridges collapse. Don’t even get me started on the new toll booth.”
She didn’t care for where this metaphor was going. “What kind of road do you think I am?”
“It could be my toll booth. See? There are plenty of questions to puzzle over until the wee hours of the morning. We’re not the same people we were.”
His dramatic, positive changes were undeniable, but she’d been stuck in her ways since long before he came along. “I’m the same.”
“It may be the shift in my perception, but you feel brand new to me. Liv resents me because I got to you first, and I know the feeling. I would give anything to be meeting you now for the first time without the specter of Drunk Lex lurking in the background.”
Between that and Meeting you made everything that happened before irrelevant, he was making it awfully difficult to care about boundaries.
Even if given the option, she wouldn’t erase their entire history to start from scratch. The alcohol, though ever present, had mostly done its demolition in the background while she reaped the benefits of being wanted by a man who never did anything halfway. “If we’d just met, would Sober Lex be talking to me like this?”
He exhaled and shrank into the sofa. “No. You’d have to put another whole year of work into making me acceptable because I’d be oozing charm and substituting lavish gifts for emotional connection, just like old times. I ordered you a space heater, by the way” — he shot her a quick scowl of reproach — “since you don’t seem to be following through. It should be here Tuesday.”
Her legs twitched with the instinct to pounce on
him.
She’d been the recipient of many lavish and emotionally null gifts, especially in the early days of his courtship. He meant well; he’d simply been led astray by people willing to accept stuff in lieu of quality expressions of affection. She’d never trained the habit completely out of him, but they settled on a compromise: if a grand gesture made him happy, she would accept it graciously, but she wanted words to explain what the gesture meant to him, too.
What knocked her feet out from under her, tackled her to the ground, and wrestled her immunity until she was too weak to resist were the small gestures he dismissed as boring practicalities.
Such as buying a space heater because she complained about a cold office.
The King of Over the Top never did fully understand how much it meant to her when he noticed what she liked or needed, cared, and did something about it, even if he did scold her for not making self-care her top priority. When her comfort was at the distant, mist-shrouded bottom of her to-do list but made it to the top of his, she felt like the most important thing in the world for much longer than it took him to click a buy button or make her a cup of tea or cook a meal she could eat.
This new Lex was all the best parts of him she’d known and loved, in a new package that was less brittle and barbed. It was a dangerous combination, baiting her to come take a bite.
She still had one ironclad defense, and she held it up desperately. “You work for me.”
“I quit.”
Alarm jerked her up onto her knees. “You can’t!”
“I don’t have a contract that says I have to give notice, so you’re no longer my boss. Tomorrow, you’ll be desperate after your last composer left you in the lurch, so you’ll hire me when I submit an application, but until then, there’s no conflict of interest.” He looked at her again. “I’m not trying to wear you down. That was an obstacle I hadn’t considered, and it was easier to fix than mine, so I did. ‘No’ is all the explanation necessary if that’s where we stand.”
