Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
“The first one was interesting,” I said, frowning at the weird look on her face. “Are you going to be sick or something?” I asked, feeling a strange tightening feeling in my gut at the idea. But not disgust or anything like that. What was that? Concern? It felt like concern, like her health or sickness impacted me in some way.
Which was fucking ridiculous.
“What? No. Sorry. I’m just… surprised is all,” she said, reaching for the book. As she did so, her head dipped toward her shoulder and she kind of rubbed her eye area then.
It wasn’t until she took the book and glanced at me again that I noticed a little wetness clinging to her lower lashes.
“Thank you, really,” she said, rushing to turn around, but that didn’t stop me from catching the fact that she reached up and rubbed her other eye when she thought I couldn’t see.
She was… crying?
Over a book?
She was sad about a book?
No.
No, that didn’t make sense.
And it wasn’t the only reason you sometimes saw women cry, right? I mean, Lenore had been crying as she held her baby one night. When I’d asked about it, she said she was “just so happy.”
Maybe that was it? Charlotte was so happy about the book that she was crying.
Sure, that seemed a bit over the top.
But maybe she just… never had someone buy her shit before? That could be it, right?
Which was pretty fucking pathetic.
What kind of shitty-ass men had she been dating in her life?
Not that we were dating. We weren’t. But I could only assume a woman as beautiful and intelligent as she was would had to have had a couple of men in her life in the past. And that they knew about her love of books.
It was crazy that none of them would have thought to buy her one before.
“Do you, ah, like Chinese?” she asked, digging in one of her kitchen drawers where she kept a stack of menus. “Or Italian? Don’t worry about what I want. I like everything,” she claimed. “Pizza, lo mein, either or, and I am a happy woman.”
“I’m not picky,” I said since, well, food wasn’t necessary for us. And I found it was usually pretty bland. I only ate if one of the guys insisted I had to because one of the women had cooked something. “Whichever one you want most. And get me whatever you’re getting,” I added. “I will go pick it up.”
“Pick it up? In the age of apartment-door delivery? I think not,” she said, then quickly called to place our order before coming back into the living room where I was still standing.
She’d changed out of the pajamas from earlier. From the smell of her, she’d taken another shower as well. Some of her hair was still a little damp, actually.
And that fucking white silk pajama set? Yeah, it was doing nothing to hide those curves of hers.
She didn’t even put on a bra under it, so as she moved, I could see the swell of her breasts sliding across the fabric, could see the outline of her partially hardened nipples against the barely-there material.
“Okay. So. Questions. I’m assuming you have them,” she said, dropping down on the couch, and bringing one of her knees up against her chest, wrapping both her arms around it, shielding most of her body from view. Which seemed to make it possible for me to actually fucking think straight.
“Questions,” I repeated.
“About the gods,” she clarified.
“Right. The gods,” I said, moving over to the couch and dropping down on the other cushion, trying like hell not to think about what we’d done on that couch just a few hours before. “I guess we could talk about the lesser gods and heroes,” I said, pulling my notebook out of the bag I was carrying, glad to have something to focus on other than the way her breasts rose and fell with each breath she took, or how her finger kept sliding up and down the spine of the book I’d given her, and the way I couldn’t help but imagine her finger tracing up and down my cock instead.
Fuck.
I was losing it.
What was wrong with me?
Sure, I fucked around in Hell. But one fuck could last me, I don’t know, a solid ten or so human years. Which, to us, was hardly more than a couple of blinks.
Was I more insatiable because I was acclimating more to human concepts of time? That was the only logical reasoning I could come to.
I couldn’t come up with any explanation for the way I seemed entirely to… aware of her. The way she moved, the faces she made, her breathing, the way her hair fell, even her damn scent.
Sure, our senses were a little bit better than the average humans, but we weren’t like some fucking scent hounds or anything. Why could I suddenly smell the sort of strawberry scent to her hair and the coconut smell of her lotion, giving her a tropical scent? And under all of that, yeah, I could somehow smell her natural scent.