Vegas Royals (Love Inc 0.50)

Not that it would change my aesthetics much. With or without glasses, I’m still a fat girl. Not like…unusually fat. Just regular, eats-too-much-good-food fat. The kind of fat that curls the waist of my blue jeans down and creates an unattractive line of back fat between my pants and my top, just over the butt, when I sit cross-legged, hunched over one of my textbooks.

Since finishing undergrad—since my mom threw my dad out before having her third nervous breakdown in as many years, and dad went running to another family, complete with two new daughters—I’ve gained probably forty pounds, and the thing about the new me is, I don’t care. I like Phish Food ice cream. I like beer, wine, and whiskey. I like Dove dark chocolate even better than the fancy imported stuff, and my mystery novel fetish is such that the time I don’t spend studying for a PhD in Ethics is devoted to figuring out whodunnit.

With the exception of Hunter West, who’s been my own personal porn since that fateful night Mom’s Porsche broke down, I don’t find that many men attractive. Maybe I am a lesbian, but I don’t think so. I’ve never had the hots for another woman. I think most guys are just boring.

I clutch the tail of my dress a little more tightly as I glide down the hallway just off the great room. The wall on my right has turned from stone to glass, and I realize I’m approaching the atrium: a glass-walled garden in the middle of the octagonal house.

Through the glass wall on my right, I see a swatch of starry sky, and I remember three nights ago, at Mom’s house. Cross and I went to the front lawn to watch a meteor shower, and I think he wanted to kiss me.

He’s always been like that when he drinks. Affectionate. And horny. Most girls love it, but Cross is one of my oldest friends. I know how closed off he is to everyone, how shallow he keeps things, especially with girls he “dates,” and I can’t risk that happening with me. I need our long, deep talks—almost as much as I need his unwavering friendship. Besides, if we hooked up and things went wrong, Cross wouldn’t have anywhere to live.

I let my mind linger on his troubles only for a moment before I hurry past the atrium, knowing everyone standing in the glass-framed garden is probably making out or gossiping in cliques. I don’t need their eyes on me.

My destination, a replica of an old-fashioned powder room, should be just past a serving closet up here on my left. I look at the rug as I walk; it’s red, ornate, and old, and it covers most of the hardwood in this hall. My lack of sight in my left eye makes my right eye jump around, taking in the Sanskrit wall-hangings and the glittering, crystal light fixtures on the ceiling—and all the space in-between. I want to be sure I don’t run into any company.

Cross texted the directions to the powder room earlier today when I asked for an escape place if I found myself alone. Mom built the room on request, for his women, Cross told me, adding a winking smilie at the end. Cross’s mom is a well-known California architect, and this octagonal mansion in the spot where the original estate burned is one of her most recent creations.

The ‘something brass’ Cross told me would mark the powder room is a brass door-knocker in the shape of a tiger’s face. I smile when I see it. My hand is on the doorknob when I hear a moan: a woman’s gaspy moan, followed by a man’s more throaty one.

I should move. I know I should, but I just can’t. My BCBGs are pasted to the rug as my whole body heats to a boil.

Hunter is in there. I know that moan.

He moans again, and I hear a strangled “no” from low down in his throat. My body slumps against the door as my pulse races. Sweat blooms over every inch of me. I can’t swallow or breathe as the woman whispers something in an enticing alto voice, and Hunter’s baritone voice purrs, “Such a bitch.”

“You’re the bitch,” she laughs, and I hear the smack of a hand on skin. She moans like she’s turned on, and I imagine Hunter’s golden hair around his tiger face, the sexy curve of his lips as another slap rings through the room and the woman laughs again, high-pitched and off-key like the whinny of a horse.

Holy crap.

His release is rough, too. I can easily imagine his hips swinging, his ass tightening as he pumps into her from behind. His moan is guttural, almost a grunt. It sounds like pain, but I know it must be pleasure.