Page 23 of Glitterland
I thinned my lips to stop a strange little smile making its escape. “I should shower.”
Peeling myself off him, I sat up My study was, to coin an expression, totally trashed. There was no way on earth I was getting purple ink out of the cream carpet.
“Want me to come wif you?” Darian flashed a wicked, white-toothed grin.
Yes. Oh yes.
I imagined his body, sleek as an otter and glittering with water droplets. The way the muscles of his back would shift like dappling sunlight as I fucked him.
Darian’s eyes flicked, with no pretence at subtlety, to my cock. “Tharra yeah, then?”
And then I remembered: the sharp silver nothing of the knife as it glided down my forearm like a tall ship with a scarlet wake.
“Uh, no, it’s fine.”
“Ahwight, babes.”
“Just, um, make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”
6
After
“Can I ask you a question, babes?”
Showered, dressed, and only mildly purple, I stepped into the living room to find Darian sprawled out on my sofa like he belonged on it. Did the man have no understanding of the delicate ritual of casual sex? He should have left by now. More disquieting still was the discovery that I was not entirely horrified he had chosen to stay.
“You just have.”
I perched, as though I were the interloper here, on the arm of my own sofa. But it gave me a fine view of Darian, stretched out beside me like a veritable invitation to debauchery. His toenails twinkled silver.
“Ha-ha, anuvver question.”
“If you must.”
“Do you know your plants are all like…dead?”
I looked around. As a certified loon, I was always being given plants, and Darian was right: they were all dead. Very dead.
I coughed. “Oh, yes, I’m the Green Reaper. I bring plants here to make them suffer.”
“You what?”
“Not really. I… I’ve been away.” And I had. Just not physically.
“Aww, babes, that’s well ’arsh. You should’ve got your mum to take care of ’em.”
Wonderful. I was now obliged to come up with an explanation as to why I hadn’t made suitable arrangements for the plants I didn’t care about while I was away on the trip I hadn’t taken.
“My parents live in Brockenhurst,” I said, which, at least, was not a lie. “I could hardly ask my mother to drive two hours across the country to water my plants.”
“What abaht your nan?”
“Both my grandmothers are dead.”
He sat up at once, snaked along the sofa, and wound his arms around me. I was going to pull away, but it would have been undignified. And I liked being touched by him just a little too much to be sensible. “That’s sad.”
“My mother’s mother killed herself before I was born, and my father’s mother passed away when I was ten. Grandparents die. It’s what they do. I’m over it.”
