This distraction? It hadn’t helped. The only thing it’d done was make it disturbingly clear what I was missing. What I needed. My body throbbing and aching for something I’d gone without for so long. I’d only gone and made it so much worse, unable to do anything but replace the hero’s face with Ryder’s, a masochist because my own kept slipping in, too. And there went that dangerous fantasy. Round and round. A cycle I wasn’t sure I’d ever get free of. But it made it extra difficult when he was in the room two doors away.
