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Deep brown eyes with streaks of gold. And long dark hair pulled back off his handsome face, which came into sharp, horrifying focus in my brain as he slipped his fingers into his mouth and hummed deep in his throat at what he tasted there.
I slammed my laptop shut and shoved away from the table. My heart lodged in my throat, and my skin coated with a million goose bumps.
“Ohhhh shit,” I whispered. “This is not good.”
Chapter 11
Harlow
I did what any sane, mentally balanced woman would do in that situation. (The situation being that I’d just unwittingly written my closest friend into a sexual fantasy, in which he was finger-banging the hell out of me under a blanket and dirty talking next to my ear while people walked outside the car and could’ve caught us at any time. Yeah. That one.)
Before he could leave his bathroom, my ass ran upstairs and slammed my bedroom door like it was an iron wall separating me from what had happened downstairs. I flopped onto my bed, face-first, and made a pathetic groaning sound into my pillow.
It didn’t help, not that I thought it would. Slowly sitting up, I ran my hands through the hair falling into my face and looked around the simply decorated room like it might give me answers.
It didn’t, the asshole. Because everywhere I looked, I saw hints of Ian. The artwork he’d hung for me. The bedframe he’d assembled. The desk he’d tucked into the corner even though I said I didn’t need one.
My chest was tight and achy, and I rubbed furiously at it.
Then I had a thought, and I reached for my phone. She’d told me once she worked most weekends because of her client base, so I shot off a text.
Me: Any chance you’re around today? I think one of the writing prompts broke me.
Bea: Oh my. Didn’t think it could possibly make things worse, but sure. Call me anytime in the next hour if you need to talk something through. After that, I have back-to-back meetings.
In my haste to start the call, I almost dropped my phone.
“That didn’t take long,” she said, a smile evident in her voice.
I very much wish I could’ve laughed, but nothing about this was funny to me. A panic attack hovered at the edges of my vision, curling in on me like a black, heavy cloud.
“So the prompts,” I said. “I did my first one today.”
“Okay,” she answered slowly. “And what happened?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I focused on the pattern of my breathing. A little rapid. A lot uneven. “I got almost two thousand words in a very short amount of time. I didn’t even know I could type that fast, if I’m being honest.”
“That’s great, Harlow. Based on your text, I assumed this was a bad kind of breaking.”
Was I rocking back and forth? A little. The tiniest whimper escaped my mouth.
Bea, with her bloodhound-level hearing, did not miss it.
“Uh-oh,” she added quietly.
“It started in third person, which is fine, right? I wasn’t overthinking what was going on the page, I wasn’t even, like, conscious of what I was writing as it came out.” I paused to blow out a hard exhale. Bea stayed quiet. “Then it shifted to first person, which I normally don’t write. And it was … intense. I don’t usually write sex scenes, you know? I thought I’d need to study them more, pay attention to the choreography of how a good one is laid out and think more about my word choice to make it impactful.”
“But it flowed,” she said.
“A little too well.”
At my sulky tone, Bea laughed. “This all sounds positive, Harlow. Maybe I’m missing a piece of the story.”
I lowered my voice a bit because muffled sounds of Ian’s movements downstairs filtered up. I’d have to move back across the country if he ever found out about this. “When I went back to read what I’d wrote,” I sucked in a breath and said it all in one big rush, “I wrote the man as Ian and didn’t realize it.”
The immediate silence was a deafening boom, only the thrashing sound of my pulse in my ears filtering through it.
“Oh,” she said meaningfully.
