I grab the book, hands shaking. The pages are heavy, silky, and my thumb automatically fans them open to the first line.
“A woman like her didn’t belong in the woods, not unless she wanted to meet a man who elevated all her senses.”
I slam it shut, pulse thundering in my wrists. It’s definitely him. The author photo is on the inside jacket—Talon, looking even more wolfish than I remember, hair a little longer, face a little leaner, the smile small and private, like he’s laughing at the photographer and at you and at himself, all at once. I press my thumb into the photo, half-expecting it to bite.
I consider leaving the book on the table and running, but the damage is done. I clutch the copy to my chest and sidestep toward the window, planting my ass in the battered leather chair that faces the street. I drop my bag to the floor, turn the book over in my hands like it’s going to explode, and flip to a random chapter.
The page falls open on a scene that is word-for-word my first roleplay at the cabin. There’s a girl—he calls her Kit, which is so transparent that I gasp aloud—dressed in a plaid skirt, no panties, her blonde hair falling over one eye as she sits acrossfrom the “professor.” He describes her in such detail that for a moment I think he’s invented a surveillance camera for my memories: her thighs, the nervous tick in her left cheek, the way she looks everywhere but his face until he tells her to. I scan down the page, and it’s all there—the dialogue, the way he leans in, the way he lifts her onto his lap, the exact words he whispers just before pushing his hand up her skirt.
It’s not just the specifics. It’s the way Talon gets the feelings right: the shame and the thrill and the sense of being the only two people on earth. My stomach flips, and I keep reading, even though I want to throw the book across the room. The scene ends with “Kit” coming—my god, the man even describes it as “a sudden, helpless flood, as if her body were built to overflow at his command”—and then there’s a cut to black, a section break, the next chapter titled “Whiskey and Honey.”
I close my eyes, breathing through my nose until the dizziness fades. Every cell in my body is trying to decide if I’m angry or turned on, or both. I flip to the back, searching for something worse, some proof that I’m not just a character in his not-so-fictional narrative.
In the third act, I find it: a scene where the heroine tries to leave. She discovers the man’s betrayal—he’s been using her as “research,” he’s paid for her companionship, he never meant to keep her. But in this version, he chases after her, confesses his love in the rain, offers to burn every manuscript if she’ll stay. I feel the tears welling in my eyes, stupid and involuntary. In real life, Talon let me go without a word, his expression cold.
I slap the book shut, feeling my cheeks flare with heat.
“Everything alright, hun?” says the bookstore clerk, a girl with blue hair and cat-eye glasses, who is maybe two years youngerthan me but already exudes the weary confidence of a middle-aged therapist.
“Fine,” I say, trying to sound normal. I set the book on the checkout counter, my hands leaving sweaty prints on the jacket.
She rings it up without comment. “You want a bag, or are you gonna read on the go?”
“Bag, please.” I keep my eyes down. The card machine beeps. I jab my pin so hard I nearly crack the screen.
“Have a good one,” the girl says, but there’s a glint in her voice. I realize I am still visibly shaking.
I walk out, the book in a brown paper sack under my arm, and duck around the corner of the building before I let myself breathe again. The wind is cool and sweet and full of pollen, and I stand there for a second, letting the noise of traffic and the distant shouts from the quad wash over me.
I think about throwing the book in the nearest trash can. I think about lighting it on fire in said trash can as a performance piece. Instead, I clutch it tight and make my way home, every step an argument between what I want and what I can never have again.
When I get back to my apartment, I lock the door behind me, toss my bag on the futon, and drop the book onto my tiny kitchen table. For a moment I just stare at it, daring it to blink first.
I don’t know what’s worse: that Talon wrote me so perfectly, or that he changed the ending for the requisite romantic happily ever after.
I pour myself a shot of whiskey from the bottle I bought for “special occasions” and set the glass next to the book.
Tomorrow, I will read it cover to cover.
Tonight, I let myself imagine that I am still in the cabin, that the story could still end any way I want.
I devourthe book in one sitting.
It starts innocently enough: I curl up on my unmade bed, the brown paper bag discarded on the carpet, my laptop already powered off and face-down on the pillow beside me. The lamplight is cheap and yellow and bathes everything in a light flicker. I wear a hoodie and flannel pants, feet digging into the threadbare quilt Simone gifted me when I moved in. On the nightstand is a mug of cold, bitter coffee, half a bagel with a bite taken out, and a stick of cherry ChapStick, which I use every few chapters as if it’s going to keep my lips from dissolving into nothing.
I tell myself it’s just research, that I’m reading the book as an anthropologist, a scientist, a writer dissecting the enemy’s tactics. I even grab a highlighter, pink, and a sticky note pad to mark anything particularly galling. But by page ten my hands are shaking so hard I nearly highlight my own damn thumb.
I come upon the billionaire-secretary role-play scene. Talon doesn’t call her “Kitten” or “Kitty Kat” in the novel, he uses “Angel,” which is both transparent and somehow more humiliating. I scan the paragraphs, the phrases like “barely legal” and “her innocence was a dare, not a defense.” I remember every moment—how he backed me up against the kitchen counter, how his hands felt on my ass, the exact second he realized I was a virgin and the way his cock got so hard it actuallyhurt him. He wrote that detail in, too, except in the book, the male lead is even crueler, teasing the heroine about her lack of experience, making her beg for it in ways I never did.
Next comes the BDSM club scene. In the real world, it was just the two of us in his cabin, snowed in, the windows sweating from the heat of the wood stove and our bodies. In the book, there’s a whole crowd, other doms and subs watching, and the heroine is strapped to a Saint Andrew’s cross, her wrists bound with blue silk, her eyes covered with a velvet blindfold. He writes her whimpering, moaning, coming so hard she blacks out. The scene with the ass-licking is there, word-for-word, except he makes it dirtier, more taboo, the man calling her a “slut” and “Daddy’s little anal princess” in print. My cheeks go hot, then cold. I run my palm over the line, as if I can erase it.
I keep reading, devouring the book in animal gulps. The hours melt. There’s a knock at my door—probably my neighbor wanting to bum a cigarette—but I don’t move. The world outside my blanket fort ceases to exist.
Every chapter is a mirror: the glimmer of the moon at night, the long hike to the Hermit’s hut, the bowl of soup on the porch. I see my own hands in the way he writes her, see my laugh, my clumsy retorts, my crooked teeth. He even gets my scars right: the white nick above my knee, the faded cigarette burn on my thumb. It’s all there, more real than I ever felt in real life.
Then comes the stepfather-stepdaughter roleplay, where Talon claimed my innocence. In the book, it’s the most intense chapter yet. The heroine begs him to fuck her, says “Please, Daddy, claim me, make me yours,” and he does—on a fur rug, with a fire in the hearth roaring in the background. I want to hate it, but I can’t. I read the scene twice, then three times, and with every pass Ifeel the ache growing in my gut, a need so old and deep that I’m almost panting Talon’s name in desperation.
By three a.m., I am exhausted, starving, and emotionally raw. My eyes burn, but I can’t stop. I finish the last fifty pages in a fever. The ending is not what I expect.
