I squeeze my eyes shut, flip to a steamy part, and scan for the most mortifying lines.
“Okay,” I say, deadpan. “He calls her ‘Angel’ instead of Kitten, but otherwise: ‘Angel sat across from him, legs pressed tight, her skirt rucked so high he could see the blue stripe of her panties. He made her confess to every dirty thought, every time shetouched herself thinking about him. Then he made her kneel, and she did, trembling, waiting for permission to touch him.’”
There’s a silence. I can hear Simone’s breath, a little shallow.
She recovers first. “Wow. You guys did this stuff? Hot damn.”
I skip ahead, scanning for the next scene. “In this version, he’s dominant, bordering on cruel. He tells her, ‘You think you’re special, but I could break you with one hand. Is that what you want, Angel? To see what I do to good girls who can’t obey simple rules?’ Then he puts her over his knee and…”
I break off, suddenly unable to say it out loud.
“Is this, like, sexy to you?” Simone asks hesitantly. “Or do you want to throw the book in a river?”
“Both,” I admit, slumping back onto the pillow. “I hate that he gets it so right. Yet it’s so wrong that he knows me this well! I want to set the book on fire, but also I want to crawl inside and live there for a while.”
I can hear my buddy scribbling. “Kat, babe, you know I love you, but take this in the nicest way possible when I say that we, as women, aren’t always so unique. Men write about women all the time. You probably just had a super-typical reaction to the alpha-male thing, and now you’re embarrassed he noticed. It’s normal.”
“Yes,” I say, voice cracking. “Talon noticedeverythingabout me. Stuff I never said out loud. Stuff I didn’t even know I wanted.”
“Like what?” Simone asks, softer now.
I crack open the book again. My hands shake.
“In the stepdad role-play, he writes about her wanting to be owned,” I say, words rushing now. “Not just her innocence taken, but claimed, ruined, like she’d never be clean again unless he decided she was. It’s so wrong, Sim, but reading it is like?—”
“Like he’s in the room with you,” she says. “Like he’s making you say it, even now.”
I laugh, but it comes out as a shudder. “Yeah.”
The silence stretches. I picture Simone, pen behind her ear, hunched over her laptop in her tiny, cramped apartment, the window open to the neon-lit night.
“You said there was a happy ending,” my buddy prompts. “What does he do in the book that he didn’t do in real life?”
I open to the last chapter, lips moving as I read.
“He comes after her at the end,” I whisper. “He runs out in the rain, and he apologizes, like, three times. He begs her to come back, tells her he’ll never write again if she won’t forgive him. He says, ‘I was lost until you let me ruin you, Angel. Please let me ruin you again.’”
Simone lets out a low whistle. “And in real life…?”
I picture the day I left. The silence, the set jaw, the way Talon let me go without a word.
“He just watched me leave,” I say. “Didn’t even call a cab. Didn’t speak a word. It was like I never existed, and that he didn’t care.”
There’s a moment where neither of us says anything. The book is heavy in my lap, but lighter than the ache in my chest.
“Simone, I think he wrote this whole thing just to toy with me,” I say, voice wobbling. “Like, as revenge for not being what he wanted.”
“No, that’s not true,” she says, but there’s no meanness. “It’s the opposite, babe. Talon McKnight wrote it because he couldn’t not. The man’s obsessed with you.”
“That’s not healthy,” I say, but even I can hear the hope hiding under my sarcasm.
“Kat, you’re never going to be normal. None of us are. But if a man writes you as the main character in his bestselling romance novel, the least you can do is go to his reading and see what he has to say.”
I snort. “Or I could egg his car.”
“Or you could wear the plaid skirt again and see if he combusts on sight.”
I flush. “It doesn’t even fit me, not really. It never did.”
