Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
“Shhh,” Zayne purrs softly. “I’m here. You’re okay. The surgery went well, and they say you’ll be back to your old self in a matter of days. The bones are already knitting, and your flesh is well on the way to regenerating.”
I reach for him. I want him to scoop me up and hold me, but I don’t know if he can. My arms remain outstretched anyway, begging him for forgiveness and comfort.
There’s a cast on my leg, but it’s not as heavy as I expected it to be. Alien medical technologies are vastly superior to human tech.
Zayne scoops me out of the bed and into his lap. He’s careful not to pull the IV that is running into my hand. I’m trying to ignore that. I feel sick and gross and sorry and so very needy. I bury my face in his neck and shoulder, breathe in his strong alien scent, and feel tears pricking at my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m going to apologize to everybody. I need to make an announcement to my fans. Now. Do you have a holophone?”
“I don’t think now is the best idea,” he purrs softly. “You’re barely recognizable without all those performance cosmetics. And there’s no need to make any official statements now. Simon has taken care of everything.”
There’s an odd edge to his voice when he says Simon’s name. I’ve noticed that before, a slight inflection of something like loathing. But he works for Simon and seems to have worked for him for a very long time. They get on, or they seemed to at first.
“What’s happening to me?” I whimper. “I never used to be this much of a mess.”
“You never had this much pressure on you before,” he says, his arms wrapped snugly around me, and his tail acting as a third limb, stroking up and down my back.
“I think I want to quit,” I cry.
“You can’t,” he says. I hear a certain cracking in his voice, as if he wishes we could both quit, but it can’t be done. Simon Scowl’s contracts are notoriously air-tight. Even death isn’t enough to get me out of my obligations for the next three years.
All we can really do is hide away in these brief moments of true intimacy, when we’re real with each other because I’m broken and raw, and he doesn’t have any prying eyes forcing him to act the role of professional protector. I feel a surge of need for even more intimacy, a drive for sex, but not filthy debasing, punishing sex. I want him inside me, so I don’t have to be me anymore. I want to be the Lyric I am when he holds me and makes me his. I want to hide. I want to run away. And I want him to be the one I run to always.
“Take me,” I whisper, lifting my eyes to his beautifully elegant dragon features.
“Where do you want to go?”
I answer him as if I wasn’t begging him for sex. “I want to go to where you come from. I want to stay with you. I want to be good for you.”
“The drugs must be very effective,” he says with some amusement.
“I mean it. I need to be someone else, somewhere else. I need for…”
“My world is a desolate, destroyed place. It was sold to Scowl’s tribe many generations ago. It is for that reason I serve him. My service to him provides my people with the right to live in their ancestral lands.”
He speaks haltingly, as if he is trying to pick his words carefully. I don’t think he wants to sound weak, or oppressed, though he is obviously telling me the story of oppression.
“But you are so strong…”
“Yes. We are. My kind is strong. And it is that strength which has seen us repeatedly exploited by those who have advantages that undermine strength and decency.”
“What advantages? You mean like better tech? More advanced weapons? Huge invading forces?”
“I mean the complete and utter lack of honor, underpinned by the belief that winning is acceptable at all and any costs.”
“Oh. That kind of advantage.”
“I send the money I earn in this position home to my family, and my family is able to maintain the rents they must pay in order to continue to occupy our ancestral homes. The Scowl family possesses the title.”
“Wait. So Simon is your mom’s landlord? And you have to work for him, or your whole family gets kicked out?”
“Yes.”
“That’s bullshit,” I frown. It upsets me greatly to hear that a creature like Zayne is reduced to looking after me basically at the risk of his entire family becoming homeless. It makes me feel ungrateful, and spoiled, two things I always prided myself on absolutely not being. Maybe it doesn’t take as much as I thought to stop being grateful. Maybe becoming spoiled is more insidious and inevitable than I thought possible.