Chapter Three

 

~ FREYA ~

 

I should be livid. Or lamenting. Or crying in my coffee. Or something.

But I’m not. Patrick was a first-rate asshole and all I can feel is relief for being rid of him.

I didn’t even toss his Armani suit out the window like I’d said I would. I just packed it in a plastic grocery bag and hung it from my doorknob for him to take.

I might have peed on it first. A little.

But the cost of his dry cleaning pales in comparison to the money I forked over for that damn dress I was going to wear to his firm’s gala later this month—the same dress that’s in my closet with the tags still hanging from it, thank God. I just need to dig up the receipt.

My mind’s not even on that right now, though—much—as I sail across the Navy Bridge in my ancient Toyota with a small stack of papers on my passenger seat, feeling energized like I haven’t felt in ages.

I shouldn’t feel this way. I should be a little hung over. Mason and I ran into some of his Navy friends at O’Toole’s after what I’ll always refer to as The Incident. I got slightly hammered on microbrew samplers. (I’m a bit of a lightweight when it comes to liquor.) And I wasn’t even tossing them back because I’d essentially been jilted by my boyfriend. I was celebrating. I had an agent seriously interested in my manuscript again. A top tier agent (despite what Mason says). All I needed to do was jazz up the sex scenes.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, as my five-year-old niece always quips.

So this morning, I woke up at the crack of ass, as Mason calls it, and started hammering out a fresh new scene.

I pull into the driveway that leads to his basement apartment and take care to not slam my door. It’s still early, and the old couple who lives above him might be asleep. My phone chirps in my purse and I wince, reaching for it to silence it. I eye the text from my mom.

“Who put Paris her poo who ray! Corn graduation avowed the Asian,” it reads.

My eyebrows rise. First time I got a text like this, I thought she might have had a stroke, and was ready to rush down to Florida and find a nice assisted living home for her and Dad, even though they’re still about twenty years too young for it.

But then I found out that Mom started using a voice recognition app on her iPhone and we’re all discovering that she doesn’t speak very clearly before her morning coffee, and won’t take the extra step to proof texts before clicking Send.

Giving my head a disapproving shake, I slip my phone back into my purse and detour slightly from the brick-paved walkway that leads to Mason’s stairs to soak in the view of the Severn River. I swear I’m going to write a scene one day that’s set in this exact spot, I promise myself, watching his hammock blowing in the wind—the same hearty gusts that fill the sails of a catamaran that’s slicing its way through the early morning waters as it heads toward the Chesapeake.

I love Mason’s apartment, and if it was a little cheaper, I’d ask the owners if I could move in after he leaves for Little Creek. Mason takes this view for granted, with the skyline of the Academy stretching across the horizon in the distance. But I can’t get enough of it. I grin, letting it fuel my soul, and then turn to head to Mason’s door.

I tap on it lightly, deciding I’ll just leave the pages on his doorstep if he’s still asleep. Under the mat, definitely, rather than in his mailbox. Last time I left scenes in his mailbox, the old lady who lives here apparently didn’t see his name on the manila envelope and she was more than offended by my prolific use of words like “cock” and “shaft.”

Mason swings the door open, looking as awake as I do.

“Hey! Didn’t know you were stopping by.”

“I didn’t want to call and wake you.”

“Nah, been up for hours,” he says, stepping aside to let me in, and revealing a scene I wasn’t quite prepared for.

My face falls. “You’re really leaving,” I tell him, my eyes tracking over stacks of cardboard boxes lined up neatly along the walls.

“Movers came yesterday to pack my crap, remember?”

“I remember,” I murmur, not liking the barren look of this place.

“So I’m living out of boxes for a few days.”

A few days. I don’t like the sound of that. I reach into my purse and hand him my phone. “Any ideas?” I ask him.

Mason stares down at the text from my mom. “‘Who put Paris her poo who ray. Corn graduation avowed the Asian,’” he reads quietly, used to my mom’s gibberish by now. “Easy. ‘Hip hip hooray. Congratulations about the agent.’”

Impressed, I cock my head to the side. “How do you do that?”

“I told you. I drank a lot in my early twenties. The whole world sounds like that after a twelve pack of Red Stripes.” He hands me back my phone. “So what are you doing here? Did we have plans I forgot about?”

My stomach growling, I help myself to a banana from his counter. “No. I just wanted to drop off a new scene.”

“Wow, you don’t waste any time, do you? You could have emailed it to me.”

“I know. I was hoping to catch you in so I could make any edits before… you leave.” Saying those last two words is somehow harder standing next to a stack of boxes destined for a new apartment in Little Creek. “Do you have a second to take a look?”

“Sure. My PCS leave has kicked in, so I’m not headed into work today.”

I nod. He told me that already. I know his plans every day as well as I know my own. How strange it will be with him gone.

“Want some coffee?”

“I’ll make it myself,” I reply, heading to the canister of instant he prefers, while he sits on his sofa with my pages. “I can’t stay long. I have to open the bookstore at nine.”

Swinging open the fridge door, I take in the emptiness of it with a scowl. No need to bulk up on food, I imagine, with him leaving. But he still keeps the usual flavor creamer I like in the door. Funny. He hates the sweet stuff himself, yet he always has it for me when I come over. Patrick never kept any of my favorite foods or drinks in his refrigerator. Or Nathan, the guy who preceded Patrick by a few months. Or… who was the guy before that? I can’t remember.

Yet through all those men, here was Mason with thirty-two ounces of froufrou sweet macchiato-flavored creamer, the same “pansy ass” product he’d once told me would deplete his testosterone level by ten percent with each sip if he ever drank it.

“This is impossible.” Mason’s voice breaks through my musings.

“What’s impossible?”

“This,” he lifts the pages. “Look, the heat level is great, really. I can see where you’re going with it. And I like the idea of changing positions with Zander’s schlong still in her…”

I laugh at his use of the word schlong. Cock and shaft might be overused in my novel, but schlong is one choice I’d never use in a romance.

“—but going from missionary to doggie-style is impossible like that.”

I frown, picturing the scene in my head again. “No. It’s possible. Totally possible.”

“Freya, I know the guy’s well-hung, but he’d have to be sporting a firehose to pull this off.”

“On the floor, Lieutenant.”

“What?”

“Get on the floor,” I order, sitting on the carpet. “Five bucks says it’s possible.”

“Ten bucks and you’re on.”

Cringing, I lie on my back on carpet that smells like stale corn chips. “Okay, so, not to get forward with you, but assume the position.”

He props himself above me with this elbows planted at either side of my face, and I feel his crotch pressing against my groin.

“Um, not to get forward with you, but you need to part your legs,” he says.

“Oh, yeah.” I start giggling uproariously.

“Quit it.”

“I can’t.”

“Pretend we’re in a wrestling match.”

“I don’t wrestle.”

He tilts his head. “Well, that’s obvious from these fake moves you write about in your books.”

My eyes narrow in challenge. “They’re not fake.”

“So stop laughing and prove it.”

“Okay, okay,” I mutter. “So they’re like this, right? Standard missionary. Then—how is it I wrote it?” I ask, wracking my memory. Somehow with Mason’s crotch pressing up against me, my brain has turned to scrambled eggs.

His shoulders droop and he stands to retrieve the pages, then lays them on the floor by my head and plops himself down on top of me again.

“‘Genevieve pressed her palms against him, pushing him onto his back,’” he reads and then looks at me with a wry grin. “Okay, cowgirl. Take me for a ride.”

As instructed, I press my palms against him and… holy shit, his pecs are hard. I mean, I know that already, and have seen the glory of them plenty of times. But actually pressing up against those well-tended muscles and letting the heat of his body sear my hands through his shirt, the strength of this guy really hits me. Hard.

I’m on top now, looking down at him and getting sucked into the vortex of his crystal blue eyes. “What now?” my voice squeaks.

“How am I supposed to know? I can’t read it from down here.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I glance over at the paper. “‘She moved her leg around to the other side, with him still rock-hard, pulsating inside her moisture—’”

“Jeez, Freya, will you spare me the details while you’re riding me in a full mount? Or this is going to get damn awkward for both of us.”

“Um, sorry,” I find myself apologizing again. I know I’m blushing. I give myself a shake. “Okay, so anyway, the gist of it is that I spin around and end up with my back toward you.”

He groans. “Okay. So, have it, authoress.”

I lift up my body, and turn awkwardly until I’m facing his feet. “There.” The ten bucks is mine.

“Nuh-uh. ‘With him still rock-hard, pulsating inside of her moisture.’ You didn’t keep your hoo-hah where it’s supposed to be. Now do this the way you wrote it, or pay me my ten bucks.”

Grumbling, I mount him again. “Did you really just call it my hoo-hah?”

“Oh, that’s right. Not appropriate for a romance. Okay, so put the core of your desire against the full length of my manhood and let’s get this over with,” he quips, tossing a few of my well-used phrases back at me.

I give a snort—I can’t help it—and then my brow furrows. Shit. He’s right. This is impossible.

“Ha! You’ve seen the light.”

“No, wait,” I say, scooting one folded leg onto his chest, determined to be right. The other one moves awkwardly, painfully, until I have my knee smashing his thigh. I shimmy further, inch by inch, grunting as I do.

“Watch it, Freya,” he barks when my foot ends up planted against his nose.

“Sorry.” I try to edge my knee from his thighs to the floor on the opposite side of him.

Okay. It’s a lot harder to do this than I’d imagined, forgetting that we had to keep our crotches linked in the process. A muscle in my lower back cinches up, but I swallow my complaint; I won’t let him have the satisfaction.

There’s nothing sexy about what I’m doing right now; I’ll give him that. And in reality, seeing Genevieve struggling to turn around on his dick like he’s some kind of human Sit-and-Spin would have made Zander go soft inside of her—I don’t care what kind of a sex machine the guy is.

“Uh-uh,” Mason scolds as he sees too much space between our groins when I nudge further over on his leg.

“Dammit,” I say, then breathe out a long sigh when I’m finally facing in the right direction. “Okay. So here I am. Now what?”

Mason pauses after he lifts the page. I have to assume he’s reading it, but I have no clue because I’m now facing his feet, not his face, as he lies on the floor with me spread eagle over him. And besides, if I turned my head right now, he’d probably see that I’ve got a serious blush running up my neck to my cheeks.

The sound of a paper flutters as he reaches out to wave it at me.

“You are toast, lady.”

My face falls when I look at what I wrote. How the hell are we supposed to get into doggie style now?

“Ready to concede yet?”

“No. You’re just upset we got this far. Besides, this part’s up to you. I mean, we’re both facing the right direction. It should be easy.” My tone is mocking.

Of course, it’s not. Mason first tries to bend his knees, as if he can catapult us both forward. When that fails, he thrusts us both onto our sides, nearly cracking my lower leg when the weight of him falls on it.

“Ouch!” I cry out.

Waiting for an apology, instead I feel his body vibrate and I look behind me. His face is beet red, holding back laughter, till he finally bursts. “I’d kill to do this again with a camera on us. This should be on YouTube,” he cackles.

“You’re just trying to distract me from the fact that you lost the bet,” I inform him smugly as we both lift our bodies up into doggie-style.

“Okay, sure, it’s possible if the guy’s got a five-foot schlong and a gallon of lube.”

I laugh. “All right. You’re right.” I sigh, shoulders deflating. “You win, okay? Ten dollars coming your way.”