Page 23 of Knottingley Ever After
I did not enjoy that drop.
I want to be clear about it with myself, because this drop in the pit of my stomach is a problem.Just like the thick erection pressing on my guard that’s making merely skating on the ice fucking uncomfortable…
Here is the math that does not work.
She is a stranger.
I met her this morning, in a room that smelled of mops, for the length of one conversation and one near-disaster. A stranger is not something a person feels a hot, irrational, full-body need to throw himself in front of. You do not develop a protective instinct toward a woman whose middle name you could not guess at gunpoint.
And yet there it is, low in my gut, this absurd standing order that has filed itself without my signature, the one that goesif anything in this building comes for her, it goes through you first.
Stupid. Feral. Inconvenient.
Aka Pinky.
Fine. I will say it where only the inside of my own head can hear it.
I like Pinky.
I like Pinky hard, and the liking arrived with no warning, receipt, and absolutely no regard for the timing, which is appalling, because the timing is day one.
First, I am a simple creature, so we start simple.
She is hot.
Brutally, inconveniently hot, in the way that has nothing to do with being delicate and everything to do with looking like she could put you on the floor and might. The kind of sizzling attractiveness that rearranges a man’s priorities mid-sentence.
Second, is the thing I am desperately, heroically trying to convince myself I imagined. A trick of bad cupboard lighting. A fiction my own filthy brain manufactured and screened for me without permission.
When she was pulling that chest plate down over her head this morning, fighting the gear the way everyone fights the gear, the wet fabric of her shirt pulled tight for half a second across her chest.
And there were two small, deliberate shapes pressing back against the cloth.
Two neat barbells.
Not a wrinkle, not a seam, not a thing the rational part of me can argue them down into being.
If her nipples are pierced, I am going to lose my entire mind.
I do not get to choose this about myself.
A man’s weaknesses are assigned to him at birth, and mine were filed under ink and metal. Tattoos undo me, always have, the sleeve of dark work running down her left arm that I clocked in the closet had me composing sonnets I will never admit to.
But ink is a soft spot.
Piercings are a death sentence.
The true judge putting on the black cap. And I have no proof, none, just a half-second of damp cotton and a vivid imagination,and it is going to haunt me straight through the back nine of this scrimmage.
Reason the third has no business being a reason at all, and it is the one that is quietly turning me feral.
I have never, in twenty-five years on this earth, met a woman who does not, somewhere, somehow, give a little.
Bend a knee.
Soften a corner.
Drop her eyes when an Alpha holds the stare a beat too long.
