Excerpt from Not Safe For Work

I feel the red hot build-up in my thighs and groin. I’ve had it with fragile. I don’t want any more beautiful. Feathery touches can’t convince me that he’s mine. I need the raw pounding, the eclipsing of the self.

He senses my hesitation and props himself up on his elbows. The look he gives me is full of reproach. “I’m your best friend first.”

I know what he means. What am I doing, keeping him in the dark? We’ve always told each other everything. I release his cock with a sigh and sit up. My hair hangs in apologetic wisps in front of my face, as if to filter what I know I have to say. “Leo…”

“You want something else.”

“Yeah, I…” I gesture limply, afraid to name it.

But he already knows. “Look, when I said I wanted you to use your mouth… I mean, I do, I want that, but fuck it, Jakob… I’d like to really seal it, you know?”

I nod, completely in tune with his thinking. “Mark the beginning,” I translate. “Make it real.”

“Yeah.” His cheeks are flushed, his eyes twinkling with mischief. “So who should… I mean…”

I laugh a little. “Who should fuck who?”

He rolls his eyes and then grins cockily. “Well, I’d offer, but we both know you’re the asshole.”

 

I move a stiff hand to minimize the window. “I think that’s enough for now.” I sound completely exhausted. Perhaps I am. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Merethe looks up with glistening eyes, surfacing as if from a dream. She looks like she’s waiting for something. My confession? My shamefaced confirmation that this is in fact completely real, exactly what happened? Jesus. This is so fucked up. Seriously, psycho fucked up. I’m letting her read Leo’s fake post about his sexual escapades with me? In my name. We’re nowhere near that level of friendship.

“It’s well written,” she says, and I know it’s her way of asking how it can’t be true: something that beautiful just has to be real. She’s always been romantic like that.

“Emphasis on ‘written,’” I mutter, but my voice grates against dry vocal cords and doesn’t sound very convincing. “Written, as in fictitious.”

She doesn’t grace that with a comment. She’s the literary theory buff, I’m the linguist. She believes everything she reads, especially if it’s well formulated. As if an adage is automatically true because it sounds good. While I doubt everything, and suspect lies at every turn.

“It is kind of romantic,” she says.

I want to explode at her, but I don’t have the energy. I just shake my head in despair. “Romantic? Are you completely bloody insane? What’s romantic about hijacking someone’s identity and rewriting their whole life?”

Merethe bites her lip. “In the beginning was the word…”

I roll my eyes. Trust her to believe that. Now she’s going to tell me that writers lie to tell the truth, that Jules Verne predicted the future and that nothing is real but what we clothe in words. The very thing I said to Dahlberg today.

She sighs, looks like she’s going to say something more, but then swallows it down. A minute of silence, then she cocks her head. “Want some coffee?”

“Huh?” I stare at her. She’s strangely out of focus.

“Coffee.” She smiles. “You seem to need it.”

I don’t reply, so she just takes an old mug from my desk and goes to fill it, leaving me a moment to gather my fraying wits. I should be grateful, but I just don’t know where to start. I try to go back to this morning, pick everything apart from beginning to end. Why did I read that blog post in the first place? What made me browse the #nsfw tag today of all days? My dream comes back to me through a fog of confusion. The image of that welcoming smile, the reddish hair, the plea to take me… And then Leo’s text, gatecrashing my embryonic jerking session. As if he knew…

Drawing a hissing breath, I lean my head in my hands. I’m being completely insane. He can’t read my mind, and he doesn’t know what I dreamed. Christ, I’m being paranoid! How could a secret dream ever be related to a spoof blog post? A Professor Dahlberg question if ever there was one. Can he have hacked my computer somehow, seen my Internet history and put his crazy story on the very website I frequent most often?

He probably could do that, actually. But hacking a computer is very different from magically controlling someone’s dreams. No, that was just a coincidence.

Although Leo does have kind of red hair.

“There you go.” Merethe plonks the mug in front of me and I grab it instinctively. Too hot, I remind myself. Take it easy. She watches me while I blow on the coffee, being very careful not to spill it.

After a minute, she sighs. “Okay.” She’s scowling now, radiating disappointment. “I believe you. He made it up, fine. I mean, you’re here. Not in London.”

“Exactly.”

“Although that photo could have been taken anywhere.”

“No.”

She makes a face. “Well…”

Clenching my teeth, I reach for the mouse to go back to Facebook and show her: look, for fuck’s sake, there’s a big whopping Westminster Abbey or whatever in the background – but my finger slips and the Tumblr page refreshes, tossing up a new post that actually makes me drop the mug. Like you never do in real life: the kind of shock-limp hand that makes trays of porcelain crash in romantic movies. Coffee splashing everywhere.

I stare at the screen, heart in my mouth. There’s a video. A very real-looking video of me and him, as if we’re part of a game, and this is the promo clip for it. And it’s obvious from the still what we’re doing. What is this? What is this? my brain keeps shrieking at me, and the answer is as inevitable as it is frightening.

It’s ultimate fucking proof.

And I do mean that literally.

Find Not Safe For Work at All Romance Ebooks, Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo or iBooks.