Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Callistina’s eyes are closed. I know this because she doesn’t ever open her eyes when we fuck. She doesn’t want to look at me. I am Eros, after all. And the sight of me is intoxicating.
It’s just a side effect of who and what I am.
She can control her infatuation when she’s fully awake and dressed up as the folly queen, but in the middle of the night and stripped of her costume, she’s vulnerable.
I give no fucks if she wants to look at me. I don’t even care if she’s pretending I’m someone else.
It’s just fucking and we both know this.
I slowly push a finger up inside her and she gasps. But she doesn’t ever tell me to stop. She lets me get her off—which I always do first—and then she climbs in my lap, eyes still firmly closed as she pushes her tits into my face and fucks me until I’m spent.
It happens like this every night. Every time.
And tonight is no different. I finger her for a few minutes, she gushes all over me as she comes, and then I sit up, she climbs in my lap, and we fuck ’till we’re spent.
This is how I end every day.
And I’m starting to get tired of it.
All of it.
Which brings me back to my point about the reality check. A man—even one who is a god—needs to come to terms with things eventually. And this eventuality is starting to hit me.
This town has no location on a map.
I cannot leave, I cannot move forward, I cannot do anything but exist in my current state.
And this is not enough for me.
CHAPTER TWO - CALLISTINA
I wake with the sun, as queens do, and leave the bed I share with the god of love. He sleeps until noon, which is really the only thing I like about him.
Well, the sex isn’t bad, either. And the night is a precarious time for me. It’s when the veil of illusion is thin and see-through. The sun makes everything better.
In order to get out of the bed I have to slither out from underneath Eros’s possessive arm and slide my body over until I can swing a leg out.
Every time I do this, I hold my breath, wondering if this will be the one time I wake him.
But it’s a needless worry. He never does wake.
When I’m free from his bed I go into the bathroom and start a tub. It’s not a very grand tub—in fact nothing in this town is very grand—but I’ve gotten used to the dingy, shallow basin and have decided to make the most of it.
There could be no washtub at all. I could be forced to take, God forbid, showers. Like a common peasant. Besides, the dragon-girl at the feed store cooks up soaps and lotions. And she gifts me a bubble bath scented with rose hips and lavender every time I wander in there.
It might be, quite simply, the most divinely scented concoction I’ve smelled in my entire life. And I come from a palace.
This one small addition to my bath routine has elevated the experience to a level that is comparable to a Fireday Saturnalias. In fact, I think the rose hips and lavender bath is better than the sex with the god of love himself.
It’s so strange and so disproportionate—I mean, sex? It’s definitely one of the more enjoyable moments in life—but it’s so disproportionate that I start to wonder if the dragon-girl is putting magic into those bubbles.
She could be. She is a dragon. But it’s a recessive trait that has mostly gone away since that dragon-man left her alone and retreated to… whatever hovel he’s living in these days.
Still, the girl—Madeline, her name is—must have some alchemist lineage.
I myself have alchemist lineage. As First Daughter of Saturn and the great alchemist, Ostanes, it was my fate to be groomed to be one of the best alchemists in all the realms.
But I cannot make rose hips and lavender smell like this.
I love it so much I fill up my palm and hold the viscous liquid under the rushing water twice! Two fistfuls! It makes a spectacular cloud of bubbles that hides all the dreary, dingy parts of the too-small basin.
And thus, this is how I start the daily delusion.
Imagining myself in the royal bathroom just off my royal chambers with all my attendants in attendance. Waiting on me hand and foot. Scrubbing me, and washing my hair, and carefully drying me off with fluffy things. Then dressing me in fabulous gowns made by the royal tailors.
I close my eyes as I bathe. Picturing all this. Picturing my old life.
It’s a fantasy. I know this.
But it’s still better to live in the fantasy than admit that it’s all gone.
When I’m done bathing, I get out and dress myself. I pick up articles of clothing from the various shops around town. Today I am wearing an electric-blue dress with poufy sleeves. The girl at the shop said it was a prom dress, but I don’t know what that is. I was just in the mood for blue when I picked it up. Blue the color of the electricity that used to spit and crackle inside the glass globes that dotted the palace hallways in the night.