The other girls nodded, clutching their hearts, features twisted, as if moved by the Holy Spirit.
The men between us had already gone back to talking about cryptocurrency, uninterested in Jayne’s heavy-handed spectacle, but Archer was still watching me. Hungrily. Like I had something he wanted, needed, and he would get it by any means necessary.
“I feel it too,” Wes said softly, taking me by surprise.
I looked up at him, and the rest of the room faded away. When Wes said it, it meant something. He smiled at me, the storm in his eyes no longer a mystery to solve.Hewas the catalyst of my profound change, not The Circle. He was the destroyer of my old ways and harbinger of the new. But I wasn’t ready for him to know this, for him to see himself reflected back to himself page after page.
I wasn’t ready for him to know he was my muse.
What jolted me out our moment was a sudden grip on my arm from the right, followed by breathy gasps and pleading. My head swiveled, and the woman next to me quickly dropped her arm, mouthing a silent apology. Her eyes rolled back.
The men across from her snickered. One placed a small, sleek black remote beside his whiskey, and the woman writhed in her seat next to me, as if possessed by demons.
“You better stop being so fucking disruptive, or I will shut it off, and you won’t come for a month,” one of the men said. “Come silently like a good girl or not at all. Your choice.”
The woman orgasmed, panting like she was lifting some insurmountable weight, but she didn’t make another sound. And when a server re-entered the room, the man pressed a button on his remote and went back to talking about tax evasion with his friend as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, the woman next to me came back down to earth, skin flushed and forehead beaded with sweat. She smoothed her strawberry blonde hair and took a sip of her drink.
I slowly panned to Wes. Mouth close to his ear, I whispered, “Is it too late to sneak back downstairs?”
The server placed one of our starters between us, and I had my answer. I looked down at our artfully arranged scallops with a deep sadness.
Wes’s lips brushed my ear next. “If I had it my way, we’d be in a different restaurant by now. Say the word, and we’re gone.”
He wanted me to tell him to get us out of here. But I didn’t want to be wasteful, and like an old woman at a slot machine in Vegas, maybe I also hoped Lorelei would drunkenly stumble into the room any minute now.
Could any of these men be her mystery man? The unnamedHimLorelei served as a stay-at-home girlfriend?
I tried my first bite, barely aware of Jayne and Archer speaking quietly, perhaps tensely, across from us.
When I made an appreciative food moan, Wes watched my lips. Something in him shifted, and his hand crept higher on my thigh.
“So good,” I said appreciatively. “Thank you for saving me from my menu paralysis. It’s a serious affliction.”
“Mmm. How strange.” Wes shifted even closer to me, one of his long fingers so close to my core, the dull ache had become a cacophony of neediness. “It’s almost like we were made to fit perfectly together.”
The innuendo felt cruelly intentional, especially as his finger skated just an inch below the apex of my thighs.
“Open,” Wes ordered, raising a fork to my mouth.
The delicious tamarind sauce and scallop hit my tongue, and Wes’s other hand continued to slowly tease at the very edge of my center.
I was ready for the check. What did movingslowlyeven mean anyway?
The conversation beside us had devolved into discussing the new gym with a ten-thousand-dollar a month membership fee that used AI and biometric tracking to optimize training and recovery. One of the girls bravely said it was stupid, triggering the men to mansplain the future of personalized health and fitness.
Wes lifted another forkful of food to my lips, and I tuned back out of the conversation. He smiled as I obeyed him without either of us speaking a word. His approval warmed me from within. When he took his next bite with the same fork, I watched his throat bob, tracing the mirrored snake tattoos framing his Adam’s apple.
Fuckslow. A week of torture was long enough. I was ready for Wes to?—
“Nova?” Jayne said, snapping me out of my descent into erotic madness. “Care to join me for a lady’s room trip?”
In my periphery, I saw Maisy stare at us with wide, puppy dog eyes, pining for an invite.
I did need to pee—and I perhaps didn’t want to make an awkward scene even more than that.
“Yes, okay,” I said, placing my napkin on the table.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said to Wes, whose lips turned down with displeasure.
