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And waiting…
When it rings, I answer it almost immediately, my body trembling with desperation. I almost drop the phone twice before I manage to place it to my ear.
“Ry?” Ellie’s sweet, lyrical voice washes over me in a soothing torrent, like standing beneath a waterfall in the middle of summer. The rest of the world sweeps away, as does the weight on my shoulders. The muscles in my chest loosen incrementally until it feels as if I can breathe again.
“Baby,” I rasp, reaching into my sweatshirt pocket and smoothing out a picture I printed using the hotel’s printer.
Ellie’s sweet, beautiful face peers back at me. It’s a candid shot—I’m not even sure if she realized it was being taken—and shows my girl backdropped by a spindly forest of tall pines blanketed in snow. Ellie’s smiling at someone in the distance, her face tilted upward, and a few snowflakes catch on her beanie. Both her cheeks and nose are red, but that doesn’t quell the happiness radiating from her eyes.
“How are you feeling?” she asks softly, and I know what she’s referring to.
I glance down at the cast on my arm and instinctively find my three favorite words etched across the side.
I heart you.
Ellie wrote that as soon as I was released from the hospital, and every time I see it, warm tingles explode in my stomach.
I still can’t believe that she loves me.
She. Loves. Me.
Me.
Asshole extraordinaire, who wants to covet her like a rare, expensive jewel.
And I can’t even be with her, thanks to the fucking Divine One and his followers.
“Better.”
Better now that I’m talking to you.
But I don’t say that out loud. I don’t want to scare her away once she understands the full extent of my depravity concerning her. My obsession. She’ll run screaming if she ever discovers that she occupies every spare inch of my mind. That I can’t function without knowing exactly where she is. That I can’t breathe unless I hear her voice and know she’s okay.
My emotions threaten to strangle me, but I manage to keep my voice calm when I say, “Tell me about your day, baby.”
And she does.
She tells me about the test she took in her history class and her homework assignment for English. She describes her latest dream in vivid detail—apparently, she had been turned into a unicorn—and about what she ate for lunch.
I talked to her only yesterday, yet it feels like it’s been forever. I’ll never get tired of listening to her speak.
“—a party tonight,” she continues.
Her words have my hand clenching around the phone. Anxiety beats through me like a drum.
“A party?”
“Yeah, it’s at the swimming pool.” She giggles, and I swear the sound travels straight to my dick. Fucking dammit. Now is not the time to be walking around with a hard-on. “Apparently, it’s a tradition or something.”
“I can’t say I’m a fan of traditions at this school,” I grumble, my voice just slightly too loud. Frodo—a stray chihuahua we found and adopted—lifts his tiny head from where he’s been sleeping on my bed. He releases a tiny, pitiful yip, and I practically hear Ellie melt into a puddle of goo.
“Is that my little man? Awww. Can I talk to him?” she coos in a high-pitched voice.
A familiar feeling arrows through me at the way Ellie addresses our shared pup.
I never considered myself to have a breeding kink, yet the thought of Ellie with my child…
Of being tied to me in every way imaginable…
