I slowly glanced over my shoulder.
My tattooed humiliator strolled right in, his eyes dancing with humor. All his other features were rigid, smooth, and revealed absolutely nothing.
The receptionist cleared her throat softly, clearly as unimmune to the man’s looks as I was. “Hello, welcome.”
The waterboy returned.
“Are you here for orientation?” she asked the man, seeming to forget about me altogether.
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Wes.”
The woman stared at him the way she had with me, but instead of caving and giving her his last name, Wes stared right back.
“Just Wes,” he said.
She exhaled and started typing on her laptop again.
“Damn, I didn’t realize that was an option,” I mumbled.
Wes chuckled, and the sound of it was so warm compared to his intimidating appearance, it startled me. It made me want to hear it again.
He was standing next to me now, close enough to touch. “You can take a do-over with me, if you want. I only need your first name.”
“Need is a strong word.”
I could feel his gaze hot on my cheek, so consuming I nearly forgot the context of where we were and why we were here.
Slowly, I met his intense hazel green eyes. My voice dried up, my stomach plummeting. I was disoriented when he finally spoke again.
“Please,” he added, low, taunting.
“Ma—” my heart skipped a beat, realizing what I’d almost said. I course-corrected in a split second. “Nova.”
“Manova?” he repeated slowly, and the receptionist lazily covered her laugh with a cunty cough.
“Nova. Just Nova.”
“Just Wes and Just Nova, if I could have your attention for a moment longer, I will take you to the others,” the woman said, her clipped tone indicating she had been set free from Wes’s spell.
Wes seemed reluctant to shift his attention from me back to her, but I was grateful for the release from his intensity. I couldn’t let some random man distract me, not when I was only here for Lorelei, and he must’ve been here for… his perverse sexual appetites.
The realization sobered me, and I quickly looked back to the receptionist.
“In this space, yes means yes, no means no, and maybe means?” she asked.
“No,” Wes answered for us.
I lamely echoed his answer with a nod. Okay, so he knew the bare minimum concept of consent. That meant absolutely nothing. He was one ofthem.Or, at least, he wanted to be.
The woman rattled off a similar speech as the one listed on the website, talking about The Circle as a sanctuary for bold seekers, people who wanted to live authentically without fear, suck the marrow out of life, fuck a bunch of random people and call it sex positivity, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, she didn’t say that last bit, but I picked up on it via context clues.
When I realized Wes was watching my face again instead of paying attention to the woman’s impassioned cult intro, I glared up at him.
