“You smell like sex,” Saskia says, pulling out one of the barstools that is tucked beneath the kitchen island. “You’re making me horny.”
I take out a bottle of juice from the stainless-steel fridge, pouring it into a tall glass. Saskia was different when she was in Patience, but I always liked her. I find comfort in anyone who can be themselves around me, because it’s not an easy thing to do. People generalize me as soon as they meet me, and I’m okay with that. Saskia was always different, she saw past the trauma and looked at me for who I was—a girl with a heavy shadow that seems to hover over everything she touches.
“Where’s Killian?” I ask, swirling the OJ inside my mouth.
Sass waves me off. “He’s training. I’m bored.” Her eyes find mine, sparkling with mischief. “We have one night here before we go back on the road. What should we do?”
I shrug, emptying the contents of my glass into the sink before turning to face her. “What do you want to do?”
Saskia and I have the kind of energy you don’t want both of at the same time. She’s almost like a charging station.
“Well, it’s only our bus and yours that have stopped here for the night. Perse and King have carried on to Florida since she needs to be there before anyone else, but I say we pay a visit to—” She flashes the screen of her phone. “The competition.”
“The competition?” I ask, focusing on the image that’s on her phone. It looks like a club with black doors and gold handles. “That looks like a club, not a tent.”
She rolls her eyes and flicks through the images on her phone. “Okay, so they’re not really our competition, but I still want to go check them out. I overheard Kill and King talking about them, too.”
I lean forward and take her phone from her, studying their web page.
The Connoisseur of the Dark
R18 Adult performances.
All mobile phones to be resigned to the front desk.
I hand her phone back. “What, with Killian?”
“Of course!” she exclaims, her face animated as she ties her brown hair up into a topknot. “We can all go. We have drivers. It’s not like we need to sleep.”
She has a point. I don’t want to appear as though I have an interest in going. Despite Sass’s excitement.
“What are we doing?” Eli asks as he strolls into the kitchen while scratching the back of his neck. His eyes swoop to me instantly and the corner of his lip curls up in a smirk. “Bit tired this morning since someone, or someones, kept me up late last night.”
“What, all three of you?” Saskia asks nonchalantly, refusing to bother looking up from her phone.
“No.” Eli’s shoulders shake with laughter as he reaches for the coffeepot.
“Okay, I’ve got us all tickets!” Saskia does a dance in her chair. Her eyes fall up and down my body. “We need to figure out what we’re wearing.”
“To what?” Kyrin enters the kitchen, sweaty and out of breath as if he’d just finished a sprint.
I try to ignore how fluidly he moves around the room while consistently stealing every inch of oxygen we have and try really hard to not focus on the bulge augmenting through his gray sweats, but it’s hard when you know he was all yours to play with just the night before.
“Sass has booked us all tickets to The Connoisseur of the Dark…”
“I’ve been. It’s not that great.” Eli slips a trunk of a smoke out from behind his ear and places it between his teeth.
“Ohhh, I sense history?” Saskia teases, and I watch as Kyrin shifts to the dining table with a bottle of water. He finds me almost instantly and I swear his eyes darken. Or dilate. Whichever one makes more sense.
“Something like that,” Eli murmurs, sipping on his coffee.
Saskia bounces off her chair and points to all of us. “Well, I don’t care. We are all going.”
I shrug. “I’m in.”
“You gonna wash my cum off your tits before we leave?” Kyrin asks from behind me.
I turn slowly to face him, leaning against the entryway. “Maybe.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” He covers his smirk behind his water bottle.
“Why am I walking in to talk about cum?” Keaton rubs the sleep from his eyes.
I take this cue to leave and make my way back up to my bedroom, closing the door behind myself. I consider not washing him off and dressing in whatever it is I’m going to wear, but the thought of my tits feeling sticky doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather be comfortable than smell like man juice, no matter how hot Kyrin is. I change into a pair of yoga shorts and a sports bra, shoving on my shoes and making my way back out the door. I’m almost out the front when Eli’s hand stops me while I’m putting my second AirPod into my ear. He’s dressed in sweat shorts and has runners already tied on his feet.