Page 21 of Cheap Heat

“Yeah, because he’s a pompous jackass. I don’t think he even realises he’s a heel. He thinks the crowd worships him, not that they love to hate him.” Vince cast Crossbody one last surly look before turning his back on the royal fae. “Anyway, you want to go practise in the main ring?”

“Sure.” I glanced back to see Mads and Heidi still going strong in here. Crossbody had already taken up his usual spot on the treadmill, running gracefully at a fast clip with his long ponytail bouncing behind him and his ass bouncing in those tiny shorts. He was a pompous d-bag, but he had an admittedly fantastic ass.

He was also fully aware, hence his propensity for strutting around in the tiny shorts.

Kit, Goliaths’ resident mothperson wrestler who went by The Night Light, was hanging upside down off the squat rack and chatting to Kenneth, the cyclops, who was doing lunges, his single heavy brow furrowed with concentration.

A few seconds after Vince and I pushed through the doors and into the dim hallway that led down to the arena, something small and mustard-coloured shot past us on the stairs.

“Don’t try anything, you two,” Vince called out to Frank and Beans in a flat voice. “We’re not in the mood.”

There was no answer except a muffled, creepy giggle that echoed around the space. I stiffened, my muscles tensing with apprehension. A split second later, something small and freakishly strong slammed into the side of my head. Skinny, sinewy arms snapped across my face and pulled.

“Fucking—Get the fuck off me!” I bellowed, shaking my head like a dog to try and dislodge him. “It’s attached, you dick! You can’t run off with it!”

“Piss,” hissed whichever one of them was currently clinging to my head. “Abort the mission, Beans!”

Vince was too busy cracking up to help as Frank used my hair to hoist himself down. I winced, my lip peeling back from my teeth in an angry snarl.

Before jumping down, Frank paused and leaned in close.

“We’ll get you next time, dullahan,” he whispered in what was, quite frankly, a pants-shittingly terrifying voice, all soft and eerie and completely unhinged. Then he hopped down and sauntered off, whistling a merry tune. Beans slunk out from the shadows and joined him, but took the time to turn around and draw a bony yellow finger threateningly across his throat as he stared at me.

“Fuck,” I breathed once they’d vanished around the corner, a shudder running down my spine. “Vince, don’t tell anyone, but they scare the shit out of me.”

“They scare me too, bro.” Vince squeezed my shoulder in sympathy. “And they, uh, they’re really gunning for your head again since giving you that bob the last time they ran off with it, huh?”

I shivered again. “Yeah. Makes me want to stay in my human skin whenever I’m down here.”

I’d been asked throughout my life why I didn’t just stay in my human skin with my head attached all the time, despite other supernaturals knowing that being in our human form too much was like… wearing a coat to bed. Bulky and uncomfortable and just wrong. But dullahans were rare, so even most other non-humans hadn’t met or interacted with one. We were kind of a mystery even among supernatural circles.

Would my life have been a bit easier if my head was always firmly attached? Sure. But it would also be a lot less interesting, and besides, it was what I’d always known. I didn’t struggle with it.

Well, except that time I got up to piss in the middle of the night, but I was so tired that I left my head on the pillow, and I fell down the stairs because I couldn’t see where I was going.

“I told Holt I refuse to fight them,” I added as we continued down the stairs. “He got all huffy and annoyed about it, but fuck that. I just know they wouldn’t stick to the script. They’d do something weird with my head.”

“Yeah,” Vince agreed. “I don’t like fighting them either. I don’t want their weirdly long tentacle dicks touching my legs.”

My nose scrunched up in disdain. Their signature move, the Double Docker Shocker, was a crowd favourite, but the same certainly couldn’t be said among us Goliaths. Mainly because Frank and Beans had refused to answer our repeated questions about how often they actually washed their dicks.

I shuddered and glanced back down the corridor just as Vince pushed open the door to the arena. I was half expecting to see a pair of small mustard oblongs sprinting toward me with a murderous gleam in their eyes and their freakishly long dicks flopping around with malevolent intent.

“Hey, look, the new guy,” Vince said as we stepped into the cold arena, immediately diverting my attention. My head whipped around, and I spotted Rafe standing by the camera set-up with some computer equipment strewn across the floor. “Almost forgot he worked here. Haven’t seen him since his first day.”

“Yeah,” I replied absently, watching as my cute, surly neighbour said something to our camera guy, Paxton, with a slight frown marring his brows. Rafe pointed at the ring, holding a fistful of cables, then turned toward a laptop resting on a stool and froze at the sight of us.

As in, full-on froze in place for a few seconds, still clutching his cables, those pretty green eyes wide as if he’d never, ever expected to see two wrestlers in a wrestling arena.

He wasn’t in his human skin, so when the blush bloomed over his cheeks, it turned his skin a murky purplish grey. It was pretty, but that wasn’t the reason it grabbed my attention. He looked so caught off guard to see us—me, specifically, I was guessing—that I wondered if it had something to do with our new nightly routine.

He’d definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent seen me sucking my own dick on Monday night. I knew it without a doubt. And I got the sense that he’d liked it, but he didn’t know what to do about that, so I’d decided to do the same thing the next night, just in case he wanted to watch then too.

And the night after that.

I’d also decided to go and chill on my back deck again afterward like I had Monday night, and lo and behold, my prickly neighbour always slunk outside a few minutes later, looking flushed and awkward but with a telling haze of soft satiation in his eyes.

I knew the look well. The expression of a man still basking in post-orgasmic relief.