Chapter 279: 279 | Show Me You Can Keep Up
The moment hung there. My palm open between us on the couch, the string lights from outside painting everything in warm gold, Addison’s legs still warm across my lap and her wet hand still between her thighs.
She could say no. She could laugh and call me a milk-drinking degenerate and grab another lollipop and we’d finish the game and everything would stay normal and uncomplicated.
Addison pulled her hand from between her legs. She wiped the wet fingers on her own thigh, leaving a glistening streak across the pale skin above the stocking. Then she reached for my outstretched palm.
Her grip was strong. Callused at the base of her fingers from years of manifesting scythe handles, rough in a way that Belle and Naomi and Aurora weren’t. She squeezed once, tight enough to hurt a normal person. I squeezed back with C-rank strength that made her eyes widen a fraction.
Then she moved.
Addison swung her legs off my lap and pivoted. In one continuous motion she was straddling me. Not sitting on my lap politely the way Naomi had the first time, or positioning herself with Aurora’s deliberate performance quality. Addison dropped onto me like she was claiming territory. Her thighs bracketed my hips. Her weight settled against my body with the full commitment of someone who did not do anything halfway. Her lace bra pressed against my bare chest and the contact of skin on skin, her stomach against mine, sent a current through me that I felt in my teeth.
Her face was close. Close enough that I could see the individual false lashes and the smudged eyeliner and the fact that her natural eye color behind the violet contacts was actually dark brown, almost black.
Her breath smelled like cherry candy and garlic from the pasta. The combination should have been terrible but somehow worked because it was genuinely, unapologetically Addison.
"Show me you can keep up." Her voice was barely above a breath.
My left arm wrapped around her waist. My right hand slid up her back. My fingers traced the line of her spine past the two training scars, past the clasp of the lace bra, until my palm cradled the back of her neck where her hair gathered in a warm heavy mass.
I pulled her down until my lips brushed her ear.
"I’m about to show you heaven."
Addison’s entire body went rigid against me for one single heartbeat.
I activated Private Sanctum.
The world dissolved.
Aurora’s apartment vanished like someone had pulled the plug on reality. The couch, the string lights, the abandoned controllers, the death metal speaker still buzzing with static, the empty coffee jelly cup perched on the arm of the couch, the chocolate box sitting unopened on the kitchen counter where Aurora had left it with a knowing grin.
All of it folded inward and disappeared in a rush of sensation that felt like falling through warm water while someone poured honey through your skull.
When everything solidified, we were somewhere else entirely.
The Sanctum materialized around us in its Bronze-rank glory. The room I’d designed was different from the one I used with Belle and Naomi. Completely different.
I’d spent fifteen minutes that morning tweaking the configuration because I knew Addison would see through anything that felt fake or generic or like I was trying too hard.
The space was darker than my usual setup, lit by clusters of candles scattered across surfaces at different heights. Real wax candles, not the LED bullshit. The flames cast moving shadows that made the room feel alive.
The walls were exposed brick instead of the cream-colored luxury of the standard configuration, rough and industrial and real. No plastic veneer pretending to be architecture. Just brick and mortar and texture that would leave marks if you pressed against it hard enough.
The massive windows showed a nighttime cityscape from what looked like a penthouse thirty stories above some impossible skyline, all neon and rain and car lights reflecting off wet pavement far below.
A king bed sat against the far wall with sheets the color of dark wine. The whole room smelled like sandalwood and something smoky I couldn’t identify.
Addison pulled back from my neck and looked around.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"What the fuck."
She twisted on my lap, craning her neck to take in the brick walls and the candles and the rain-streaked windows and the city that didn’t exist anywhere in reality. Her thighs tightened against my hips as she turned. The rotation ground her center against me through the jeans in a way that made me grip her waist harder than I intended.
"This is your thing. Your sex dimension." She turned back to face me, her violet eyes enormous behind the dark eyeshadow and winged liner. "Aurora said you had a pocket universe for your weird vampire milk sessions but I thought she was exaggerating like she does with everything."
"Aurora has never exaggerated about anything in her life."
Addison looked at the windows again. A police siren wailed somewhere in the fake city below, the sound distant and lonely and exactly right for the aesthetic. Rain tapped against the glass in irregular patterns that I’d programmed into the environment because apparently I’d also become a sound designer for my seduction dimension.
"How long do we have?"
"Forty-five minutes."
"And nobody can see us."
"Nobody can hear us. When we come back, we’ll be exactly where we left, and Aurora will be sitting on that couch pretending she didn’t plan this entire evening from the moment she texted me at lunch."
Addison’s face did something complicated. The tough exterior—the girl who manifested death-aspected scythes and kicked doors open for dramatic effect and ate ghost peppers on dares—all of that flickered for a moment. Underneath it I saw someone who desperately wanted to believe what I was telling her but had been disappointed enough times to know better than to trust easily.
"She really told you to bring me here alone."
"She really did."
"And you’re not going to be weird about this after."
"Define weird."
"Like every other guy who thinks they want the goth girl until they realize I come with actual opinions and a personality and a knife collection." She twisted the ring on her middle finger, the one shaped like a skull.
"I’m not some fun little detour you get to brag about to your lottery buddies before you go back to chasing blonde cheerleader types."
"I don’t have lottery buddies."
"You know what I mean."
