Page 234 of Double Daddies
A fleshlight, she thought in disgust. A handy sheath to keep his dick warm when it wasn’t buried in another woman.
If that wasn’t a neon sign for her to change something, she didn’t know what it was.
She deserved more than that. She was worth more than that, and she owed it to herself to find out what she was truly capable of in this world. Yes, Adam had shoved her down into abox until only the pieces of her he required were left, but she’d allowed him to do so. She’d closed herself off because there was something… unusual about herself that she didn’t know how to understand.
Maybe now was the time to explore that side of her.
She laughed, a tiny bubble of humor popping at the absurdity of the notion. How did one go about exploring the quirks she’d had for years, digging into why she was this way? Was she even going to like the answers if she found them?
The laughter kept coming until she couldn’t stop. Her chest grew tight, her breathing turning into sobs. Too tired to hold it back anymore, Avery laughed until she cried.
Three days later, an Uber dropped her off in a parking lot somewhere in the foothills of a freaking mountain. It was pretty unnerving, enough so that she’d asked her driver three times if he was sure they were in the right place—she was getting kidnapping and murder vibes, even though there were a handful of vehicles scattered across the spaces.
The clunk of the car door closing behind her was ominous, but not as much as the eeriness surrounding her when her driver cheerfully drove away and left her in a goddamn forest.
What had possessed her to apply for a new job?
Oh, yeah, that was the vodka.
The day she kicked Adam out and indulged in the crying jag of a lifetime, Avery had spent that night avoiding his constant calls and texts while going through every room in the apartment, collecting his belongings and throwing them in trash bags.
The next morning, the abuse started. The phone calls, she rejected immediately. The texts had been… cruel, vindictive, accusatory. He called her a whore, a slut, a cunt, then switched to more offensive tactics—she was fat, frigid, ugly. No one wanted to fuck a blimp; no one could ever love someone so immature.
That one had set her hackles rising, and she’d fired a single text back, telling him she wasn’t the one using a relationship to get free accommodation, food, and internet like a leech while banging her way through every guy in the city. She ended it informing him he could find his belongings in the dumpster, didn’t tell him which one, then turned off her phone.
Although it was an inconvenience, she trekked the trash bags to various dumpsters across a six-block radius and took great delight in ridding her apartment of his presence.
After a long day at work where her usual joy was noticeably absent, she’d gone home, crashed on the couch with a bottle of vodka, and… well, things got a little hazy once she’d downed a few shots and bought a new bed, but there was a vague memory of Googling her affinity for stuffies, coloring books, and all things reminiscent of her childhood.
Psychology websites filed it under several labels—infantile personality, age regression, child ego state, Peter Pan Syndrome—all of which felt kind of demeaning.
However, the BDSM community simplified it as beingLittle.
Avery much preferred that; there was an innocence to it rather than the insidious vibe of a mental health disorder. She’d fallen down the rabbit hole then, a painless fall cushioned by vodka, and landed on a website for a BDSM resort right here in Denver.
Club Serenity.
Somehow, she ended up perusing the job vacancy section and, in a drunken haze, she’d applied for several positions,giggling all the while, before passing out… and waking up, hungover, to the offer of an interview the next day.
So here she was on a Monday afternoon, standing in a potential homicide scene, trying to decide if she was grasping the gold ring of insanity by turning her life upside down or being brave and straining the boundaries of her comfort zone.
Insanity was winning by a mile.
The whine of a small electric motor hummed through the trees before a golf cart appeared, zipping along at speed along an unseen track. It bumped down a slight incline, careening around a corner at the bottom, then flew across the tarmac to stop beside her.
The driver was maybe a few years older than her twenty-eight, male, slightly rugged and weathered. He wore black basketball shorts, a red tank top, and aviator sunglasses which he tugged down his nose with a fingertip to unveil vibrantly blue eyes. “Hey. Would you be Ms. Morello?”
“I, uh…” Taken aback by the almost inhuman shade of blue, she lost her voice for a few seconds. “Um, yes, sorry. I’m Avery Morello.”
The guy checked his watch, a dark eyebrow lifting in approval. “I thought I was here early, but you’re an eager one. That bodes well for you.” Those eyes appraised her with… was that interest? “Come on then, hop in.”
Hop in the golf cart with a man whose eyes were the living equivalent of a hypnotist’s watch? A man who, by all accounts, was ticking off every box on her fantasy-guy checklist?
Dark hair—thick, rich, black.
Eyes—hell, yes, double check.
Physically fit—muscular without being steroidal.
