He didn’t know how many people had seen the video his assaulters had taken. He wanted to believe none. But it still made him sick to his stomach, so he was left to erotic books and his own imagination.
Unfortunately, his creative brain felt like it had atrophied over the last two years, and that left his balls full and his body frustrated.
“Fuck,” he groaned, rolling up to his feet. He decided on a shower instead, and he stood under the hot water until his fingers wrinkled and the tops of his feet turned pink. He felt a little better after scrubbing the day from his skin, but it was still too quiet and too lonely. He shrugged into his pajamas, thengrabbed a bottle of water and stepped out onto his balcony, but even the city sounds didn’t make the feeling any better.
It was very dark now and getting colder as the month inched toward autumn. The air felt good on his overheated skin though, and he leaned against the railing as he peered over onto his neighbor’s balcony.
The place was dark, which probably meant he was imagining things, but then—after a second—he saw movement. A flashlight that clicked on, then off.
His heart jumped in his chest, and he pressed himself against the wall, peering over again to see what he could see. There was another click of the flashlight, and then he heard something loud—like a box was hitting the floor.
Oh fuck! What if his new neighbors had gone out, and now they were getting robbed?
Without thinking, Gage rushed in through his back door, grabbing the aluminum ogre’s club he’d gotten at the game shop, and darted out his front door. Taking a deep breath, he stepped to the next door over and pressed his ear to the wood.
THUD! BAM!
His heart began to pound in his chest. When he tested the knob, it turned all the way, and then the door slipped forward. It wasn’t locked. He inhaled deeply, held his breath, then shoved the door all the way open and let out a sharp cry.
“Don’t fucking move!”
He was immediately blinded by a flashlight, and the intruder started to scream at the top of their lungs. As he attempted to shield his eyes, something smacked into his forehead so hard his head swam, and he hit the floor.
The club skittered away, and then he was hit again. Whatever it was made a loud smacking sound, and his world tilted sideways.
And then it was silent.
Or had he just lost his hearing from the head injury? His retinas were bright with a burn from the flashlight, and he tried to blink through it until he heard a very small, very familiar voice say his name.
“Oh my God.Gage?”
CHAPTER FOUR
FALLON
There werea thousand ways he expected to spend his first night in his new apartment. He imagined sitting on his new couch, wrapped in two of his weighted blankets, eating chicken tenders with ranch and buffalo, and binge-watching true crime documentaries on his streaming account.
He imagined maybe even crawling into his bed, curling up in his nest, and sleeping without interruption until the morning.
Hell, he even thought maybe he’d meet a neighbor and be able to practice his small talk without fumbling over himself. That would have been a miracle, but still.
None of that happened.
Instead, his power went out. He thought it was a fuse, so he called Frankie to walk him through finding where the box was, but none of the switches were flipped. Then he thought it was a building-wide thing, but no. All the other units had their power.
In the end, it was a system issue with the power company. They didn’t process his deposit, which meant at 7:00 p.m., his power was shut off, and it wouldn’t be on until they could correct the account error in the morning.
And just as he was accepting that he was going to spend the night in the dark, praying his phone and laptop didn’t die before morning, someone opened his front door and tried to kill him.
Which, in the end, turned out not to be the case.
It wasn’t justsomeone. And they weren’t trying to kill him.
But since his eyesight was shit on a good day, and tragically awful in the dark, he hadn’t realized the intruder was Gage. So he did the only thing he could do to stop himself from getting murdered, and he reached into the nearest box for some kind of weapon.
He hadn’t even realized what he was bludgeoning Gage with until suddenly, the lights all went on with an obnoxious hum, and he looked at his hand to see it was holding his largest dildo that normally went inside his least favorite strap-on. It was a very bright TARDIS blue with lots of veins, and it weighed at least two pounds, which meant it had to hurt.
Shit.
