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How many drunken losers hit on her every night?

  Why did that thought make me want to punch one of them? I curled my fist.

  “I don’t expect you to understand my reasons, Z.” I smirked when her eyes went slightly bedroom on me at the use of her nickname. “But I’m not leaving tonight without doing it.”

  Planting her hands on her hips, she lifted her chin. “Fine. Far be it from me to kick out a paying customer. Even if he’s stupid and gonna regret it tomorrow morning.”

  “I won’t.”

  “We’ll see.” Hooking a finger, she turned around. “Follow me, frat boy.”

  What the hell? Did I just scream frat, vanilla, loser to her or what? Somehow I didn’t think her nicknames were meant to be cute at all, but I wasn’t arguing.

  Tipping my head at the guy standing next to me who was still ogling her ass, I sprinted around the counter and followed her into a private room with a black curtain in front of it.

  The room was dark inside, with only a blue glow coming off the lamp in the corner. A body table was pushed up against the wall.

  “Get on,” she said, pointing.

  Pulse thundering, nerves strung a little tight, I hopped up on the table.

  Her movements were brisk and efficient as she walked to a medicine cabinet and pulled out a pair of latex gloves, snapping them on her hands a second later. Pushing her fingers together to get the gloves down properly, she lifted a brow at me. “So, what’ll it be?”

  She was calling my bluff because she knew as well as I did that I didn’t have a clue.

  Why the hell had I decided to listen to a sheet of paper anyway?

  I scrubbed my face. “What do you like?”

  The way she nibbled on her lip, I had to take a deep breath and try to inconspicuously adjust my straining cock.

  Walking toward me, she placed her hands on either side of my legs and I swear I was trembling like a freaking virgin. Even with me sitting, she still wasn’t taller than me, but it didn’t seem to faze her at all.

  Her hair was in my face as her warm breath caressed the side of my ear.

  “You really want to know?” she purred, voice throaty and decidedly wicked.

  Was it possible to explode from just the sound of a voice? My heart was racing like a rabbit on crack. I licked my lips as her hand worked torturously, slowly, up my thigh, and then I squeaked—like really squeaked… like I want to die because that girly sound just came out of me kind of squeak—when she cupped me in her hands.

  “I’ve always thought the Prince Albert was hot.” Then she nibbled the lobe of my ear and I couldn’t speak.

  My entire body was quaking and trembling so hard I knew she saw it.

  Then she pulled back and laughed and the sound was a brush of bells against my sensitive flesh. “But it’s totally up to you.”

  It took two times of throat clearing before I trusted myself to speak. She’d touched me… touched me. Down there.

  Fuck.

  I was so turned on that if she’d kissed me, I would have come. That would have been it. Mortifying? Hell yeah, but I don’t think I would’ve cared, because it would be worth it. My balls ached and I knew tonight was going to be a twofer, at least. Unless I could convince her to come home with me.

  “Don’t think I’m ready for a cock piercing,” I finally managed to say.

  She only smiled and I knew what she was thinking: vanilla. It was written all over her face, but even I had my limits for this mysterious girl.

  “Then what are you ready for?” Her tone was teasing, but carried an edge of steel beneath the velvet. She was testing me again and something in me didn’t like the thought that she found me as lacking and vanilla as she accused me of being.

  “Nothing below here.” I flattened my palm above my belt.

  She was back in my space again, filling my head with jasmine and the sound of her throaty voice.

  Both palms flat on my stomach, she ran them up my abs and then across my chest before rubbing my nipples between her fingers.

  I hissed as my nerves danced and shot fire straight down to my already aching cock.

  “Nipple piercings then?”

  “Ungh…” I’m not even sure anything intelligible dropped from my mouth, but I couldn’t think straight. All I wanted was to throw her down on this table, hike her skirt up, and find that hidden piercing.

  “But,” she said, and her nose moved up the line of my neck, “I’m not sure the girls could handle seeing that much eye candy at the lake.”

  No response. Nothing. I just panted, gripped the edge of the table and tried to remember this wasn’t a sex parlor.

  “There’s only one other piercing that really does it for me. Do you know what that is, Alex?”

  I shook my head.

  Fuckmefuckmefuckme… I was going to implode, I knew it.

  Her thumb ran across my lower lip and I couldn’t help myself, I nibbled it. The taste of latex was disgusting, but I didn’t stop because I had to touch her.

  “A lip ring.”

  Her mouth was inches, mere inches, from mine and I knew it would take nothing for me to lean in and take it, slip my tongue past her teeth and drown in her.

  “Think you can handle that, vanilla?”

  “Ungh…” There went that stupid crap out of my mouth again.

  I was not prepared for how quickly she pulled back, how bereft my body felt without her heat crawling all over me, or how down to business she suddenly became. I was still panting, still sweating under my collar.

  “Shit,” I grumbled as she walked back to the medicine cabinet and started pulling out packets of instruments.

  “Rethinking this already?” she asked as she worked, her back to me.

  How could she act that way? Like she hadn’t just been about to make me come in my pants, like she hadn’t made me pant and moan like a dog in heat.

  Sick and slightly mortified, I breathed through the tension twisting my gut in knots. She’d played me like I’d played so many others, and being on the receiving end of it sucked ass.

  Thankfully, by the time she got her stuff together I’d pulled my shit together too. She flipped on a switch by my head and flooded the room with bright lights.

  She had a pair of what looked like baby tongs in her hand. “I’m going to pinch your lip with this.”

  “Does it help numb it?”

  When her lips twitched again, I knew I sounded like an idiot.

  “No, not really. It’s just for placement and so I can hold your mouth still.” Bending over, she opened my mouth, and it wasn’t nearly as sexy as what happened before because this time she was purely professional about it. “Okay, I like it right there. Now, when I tell you, take a deep breath. It’s not going to hurt, not really, just pinch a little. Vanilla, one last time, you sure you want to do this?” Her brown eyes were suddenly serious and intense like she expected me to jump up and run away, and the thought was like a bucket of ice water in my face.

  I was a fucking man, whether she believed it or not. And just because a sheet of paper told me to be opposite didn’t mean I was going to turn into a baby about this afterward.

  I didn’t answer, just lifted a brow.

  “Fine. Here we go.” Grabbing a long-ass needle, she touched the tip to my lip. “One, two, breathe.”

  I was just inhaling when she shoved it through. It did bring tears to my eyes, that couldn’t be helped, but I’d be damned if I’d let them fall.

  “Okay, almost done.” Attaching a cork to the bottom of the needle, she then grabbed a small silver hoop. In the next breath the needle was out and the hoop was in. “Doing good?”

  “I’m not gonna faint if that’s what you’re wondering,” I muttered, beginning to get edgy. She didn’t know me, didn’t know anything about me.

  I wasn’t some punk-ass frat boy with too much to drink and no sense of reality. So okay, maybe I’d had the stripper twins in a bathroom earlier, but that wasn’t really who I was.

  Taki
ng a pair of pliers, she twisted on the metal in my mouth until she was satisfied with it.

  Then her full lips curled into a crescent moon, and my heart started thumping again. Cranky or not, I could still admit the girl was hot when she did that.

  Handing me a handheld mirror, she lifted a brow. “So what do you think?”

  I thought it didn’t look as bad as I’d feared it might. It didn’t really alter my appearance by much—the ring wasn’t huge. But something inside me felt different, not like a sheet of paper tossed in the wind, but anchored again somehow.

  “It’s good,” I mumbled, and hopped up.

  Snapping her gloves off, she tossed them into the waste bin. “Cool. Fifty bucks, frat. Let’s go pay.”

  I didn’t get to ask her for her number, and honestly after the stunt she pulled with me in there, I had no desire. Not to mention Billy Badass kept eyeing me like a dog eyeing steak, and I knew it was time to head home.

  Later, lying in bed, hands behind my back, I stared at the ceiling and played with the metal in my mouth. It tasted weird, but I liked it. I liked what it symbolized, what it made me feel.

  Somehow my thoughts drifted to Z. I wished I knew her name. No matter that she’d made me look like a pathetic boy toy back there, the girl had turned me on. My cock was still heavy, my balls aching.

  Grabbing hold of myself, I hissed as the tremors immediately racked my sensitive nerves. All I had to think about was her tats and hidden piercing and in two strokes I was coming so hard it bowed my back off the bed.

  Panting, I blinked and started to make my way to the bathroom to clean up when it suddenly dawned on me—she’d called me Alex.

  I’d never given her my name.

  ~*~

  Zoe

  Exhausted, every muscle in my body ached as I opened my apartment door and shooed Xian (pronounced sigh-an, because nobody ever got it right) out of the way. A Russian Blue housecat with the thickest gray fur I’d ever seen and the biggest and brightest green eyes, I’d known the moment I walked into the pound she was mine.

  She purred, rubbing herself through my ankles before trotting off to my bedroom.

  “Aww, how sweet, X, you actually waited up for me. You love mommy, don’t you?”

  Her tail waved as it disappeared behind my bedroom door and I smiled, but my hands hadn’t stopped shaking since leaving The Garage.

  Alexander Donovan.

  The walking golden Adonis.

  The boy that’d made every heart at J.J. Baines’s High School melt, including my own. Growling, I yanked open my fridge, grabbed a beer, and tossed myself back into my purple paisley couch. He hadn’t even remembered me.

  I’d waited for a flicker of awareness, a hint of a something… anything… to let me know I wasn’t as forgettable as I’d always feared, but nope, not a hint of recognition in his gunmetal eyes.

  But oh my God, the way his eyes had undressed me. I huffed, unzipping my dress and shrugging out of it the best I could with one hand. Which wasn’t much. I was only able to slide my top off, but that was enough to at least breathe. The cool air wreaked havoc against my heated flesh, and my nipples were two sharp little points.

  I glanced down at the rings piercing them and chuckled—for a second I’d wanted to give him a matching pair. Not that he’d ever know, but jeez… what were the odds in a city as large as Austin that I’d bump into the boy I’d fantasized about all through high school?

  I popped the top on my beer, then chugged it.

  Jamie wasn’t home to bitch and whine at me about drinking in the living room, and I was so grateful. I loved her, I really did, but the girl was obsessively neurotic about cleanliness being close to godliness.

  Not that she was even remotely close to being a saint in any way, shape, or form.

  Sitting in the middle of my bohemian-chic living room—which was really just a nice way of calling it eccentric with all the gauzy drapings hanging everywhere and beaded curtains dividing the living room from the kitchen—I leaned my head back and thought about the boy who was no longer really a boy.

  Alex was a man.

  And a tall, really tall, one at that.

  The moment I’d seen him walk through the door, my heart had constricted. Painfully. It’d taken me a second to catch my breath. I’d dreamed about him all through high school, watched as he took one girl after another out around town.

  I doubted he remembered the girl working the popcorn counter at the theater, but every weekend there was always a new girl on his arm, a new girl kissing him and rubbing her horny little body all over his, and it was a miracle my teeth hadn’t become filed points as much as I’d ground them together.

  And maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that he didn’t have a clue who I was; I no longer looked even remotely similar to the girl who’d graduated valedictorian of J.J. Baines High.

  My fingers twitched as I remembered the feel of his body in my fist. He was big, and so damn hard my thighs had twitched.

  Fire and static and electricity and whatever other chemical combustion had detonated inside me. I’d gone from zero to horny in two seconds the moment he’d walked in.

  His hair had glinted so many different shades of blond, from white to burnished bronze, and I’d become possessed by the lust monster.

  One look into eyes that made me think of a sky right after a storm and I’d been all over him.

  Thanks to my antics, Ryko had noticed and so had probably the rest of the shop.

  Alex probably thought I was just some nasty ho that did that to anything walking around with a dick.

  I groaned, because the truth was I was the Ice Queen. Completely cold. That’s what Ryko called me, and it was cool because I knew in his own twisted way he loved me, but it was also totally true.

  At least when it came to men.

  They just didn’t inspire me. Not that I didn’t love sex—I did. I was a red-blooded, twenty-one-year-old woman after all. Sex was as much an adventure for me as my monthly sky diving trips with my friends, but that’s all it was. A way to let off some steam, not all-consuming, crazy passion.

  And seeing him tremble under my touch. Mr. Vanilla Super Jock, writhing and panting over me… I’d almost forgotten myself. I’d almost let him see the real me. The one I worked so hard to keep hidden, the one I tucked behind my badass tats and flippant attitude.

  Very few people I knew now remembered the old me. The girl who loved to read because it was fun, the girl who got a kick out of deciphering a wicked-hard math problem, the one who’d stayed up all night to complete an English lit assignment because she’d just had to know why Anna Karenina would choose suicide over a stupid man.

  Not that I was ashamed of that side of me, but for so long that part of me had dictated who I’d become, what I’d become… that the whole me had been lost.

  My mother was the typical tiger mom—compliments on dress and appearance never happened, compliments on academics were the only way to know for sure she approved of the lady I was becoming. Dad was an urbane oilman, old money, and didn’t seem to give a crap one way or another what his daughter did, so long as it didn’t land her ass in jail or embarrass his good name.

  I loved them and appreciated all they’d done for me, but in so many ways they’d also made my life hell.

  I could never date unless I dated someone my mother approved of. My life had been mapped out from the moment they’d learned they’d conceived me. And I’d broken their heart when I’d told them I wasn’t going to university, that I was going to be an artist and pierce my body and ink my skin and fall in love with whomever I wanted to fall in love with.

  Being what they’d wanted me to be had almost killed me. I didn’t regret it then, and I don’t regret it now. Though a part of me does regret the pain I caused them.

  Xian came back out my room, meowing softly.

  I smiled and heaved my body off the couch, flicking off all the lights. My head swam with dizzy thoughts of me and Alex. The second I walked throug
h the door, X wrapped her tail around my leg, tugging me toward the bed.

  She had a weird thing about not being able to sleep until I was under the covers.

  “At least you still love me, right?” I baby talked, running my finger down her spine and smiling as she purred deep in her throat.

  Noticing a blinking light on the message machine, I clicked it.

  “Frosty. What up, sexy?” Jamie’s normally high-pitched voice rose an octave, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out she was smashed. “So I know what you made me promise you last week—no more Angel…” I rolled my eyes, knowing exactly where this was headed. “…but he’s apologized, and I really think he means it this time.”

  “The hell he does, J,” I muttered and shimmied out of my dress, letting it drop to the floor in a heap around my ankles before stepping out of the pile.

  I hearted J, I really did, but as smart as she was, she was totally clueless when it came to her own personal love life. Angel had been dragging her around by a noose for the past four years. Off and on—off when he was ready to try a new fling, on when said new fling didn’t pan out. And J was always there to pick up the pieces.

  I sighed. I’d had this same conversation with her too many times to count, and at this point I was stepping back. Jamie was a big girl, and she was just going to have to learn this one the hard way.

  Jamie squealed into the phone, and then there was the shuffling of bodies before she got back on the line, more breathless than earlier. “Anyway, he wants to… Ahhh, Angel!” She squealed again, and I so did not want to know what he’d just done. Gross.

  “Okay, tell X-an I said hi!” Click.

  “It’s sigh-an, and I’ll do that.” After three years of me owning the cat, you’d think she’d remember how to pronounce her name, but I think she just did it to piss me off. I rubbed my head, plopped down onto my bed spread-eagle, and wiggled my toes into the purple-and-white, leopard-spotted mink blanket.

  Another message followed. “Misaki…”

  I groaned. Only a few people in the world called me by my birth name.

  “This is your mother. I expect to see you Sunday at noon, prompt. I’ve made reservations at the Jade Palace downtown. Wear something nice, cover up your shameful body, and bring a boy, if only to prove to your grandmother that you’re not gay. I keep telling her you’re not, but the last time we’ve seen you with a man has been a year, so at this point I’m not sure I even believe it anymore. If you are gay, bring your girlfriend—the family is beyond the point of being surprised by you. Good-bye.”