Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
With his shaking hands, he lifted the sheets off his pelvis. His sex was lying off to the side on his hip. With the rest of him having shrunk, the size of his cock was absurdly large and out of proportion. Even flaccid, it was still as thick as it had ever been, the blunt head a knot at the top that was no longer supersensitive.
The idea of touching the thing, of tugging and pulling at it, had as much appeal as digging a ditch with a golf club.
Cursing, he yanked the duvet back over himself. Then he looked across to the darkened screen of the TV on the opposite wall. The remote was on the bedside and he blindly reached for the only thing he’d been giving hand jobs to lately.
As the pixels, or whatever the hell created the picture, flared to life, the familiar setup eased him—oh, good. At Home with Dan was on.
To his surprise, QVC had proven to be very good company during the lonely days, the hosts morphing into colleagues—friends, even. He and Dan Hughes were especially tight, and not just because they shared the same name. He really liked the shows on home improvement, the ones that were about storage solutions and ideas about how to make spaces work better. He never bought anything, of course. One, because he didn’t own a house. Two, even if he had a mortgage or was a renter somewhere, he didn’t own enough shit beyond what fit into the saddle bags of his Harley. And three, his side hustle dying slowly kept him from making any disposable income, so there wasn’t much in his checking account.
And going into his savings to fund hoarding instincts violated financial disciplines he wasn’t previously aware of having.
But buying wasn’t the point for him. In his out-of-control world, the illusion that he could mail-order a shelving system and turn everything around was as addictive as the idea that he could light up a cigarette or sip some Jack and somehow reach back to the days when he’d been blissfully unaware of his mortality. He also liked the countdown of how much had sold of what, as well as the QVC price cuts and sale prices and the whole three easy payments of $16.84 thing.
And then there were the hosts. With their relentless cheerfulness and their this-is-my-home-welcome-to-it stage sets, everything was so sitcom perfect, nothing ever going wrong, only the positive, the glass half full, the optimistic consumerism, being offered like a platter of sunshine on a gray day.
Plus they were going into the holidays. So everything was Tom-turkey delicious and red and green festive.
As good ol’ Mr. Hughes’s reassuring murmur caressed over the details of a desk with a retractable keyboard tray, Daniel closed his eyes and had a thought that he needed to go empty his bladder. The fact that he felt no urgency at all might mean his kidneys were shutting down. Maybe that should bother him more—
His cell phone lit off with a shrill old school ring-a-ding-ding and he jumped. Slapping around the bedside, he got ahold of the thing, in case it was Lydia hitting something else—although at least this time, she was in one of C.P. Phalen’s armor-plated SUVs that could probably crash through a concrete wall and still go eighty on the highway—
He frowned at the number and then quickly answered. “Hello?”
“This is Alex Hess. You called me last night.”
* * *
On the other side of the connection, Xhex shifted her Samsung to her left ear and leaned back against the headboard of her mated bed. Almost immediately, she was distracted by the sound of the shower and glanced over at the partially open door into the marble bathroom. Between one blink and the next, she imagined John Matthew arching back and sweeping suds from his freshly cut hair.
Niiiiice…
Except then the labored breathing registered. The rasp was not subtle in the slightest, the kind of thing that even a human wouldn’t overlook.
“Hello,” she said with impatience.
Because she really didn’t want to be doing this. Thank you, Rehv. After the male had pulled his doom, gloom, and loom back at Basque, apparently he’d felt the need to tee up this contact again. But she’d already been flaked on once by whatever asthmatic vampire this was. Or was it a human?
She didn’t know, because the SOB hadn’t showed. And surprise!, she was even less interested in playing games now.
“Thanks for calling me back,” the hoarse male voice said.
In his background, there was the murmur of a TV, but then the chatter was cut off like he’d hit a mute button. The groan that came afterward suggested he was settling into a different position, wherever he was.
She tried to remember what Rehv had told her about the guy, but it had been how long? Six months? And back in the spring, she’d been on her way to some kind of existential crisis of her own so she’d been a little distracted.