Chapter 939: First Impressions; The Courtney Dilemma
It was apparent to all three of them — to Phei, to Noor, to Soraya — that everyone now knew precisely what had happened behind that locked door.
The main crew especially. Their looks came in flavours: envy from some, jealousy from others, and from a particular cluster of men, a hot black hatred aimed squarely at Phei, it was so much Phei was sure that it would have curdled milk at forty paces.
He could hardly blame them. Two women that beautiful did not move through a workplace without accumulating admirers, and somewhere in those crews were men who had spent weeks nursing quiet hopes and rehearsing casual conversations — and who had just learned, in the span of a single locked hour, exactly how those hopes had concluded.
He could practically hear the private little funerals being held.
’I am a very very bad man and bad news to men with beautiful girls and women, tragic for them, I love it!’
And the two beauties weren’t helping the rumour along so much as confirming it with their entire bodies:
The soreness in the way they walked; the careful, recalibrated gait and small winces neither quite suppressed — would have told the story even if the moans hadn’t already done so, loud enough to have seeped under the door and out across half the production.
The dragon had devoured them thoroughly, and the building knew it.
’But what, in the end, can all this hatred actually do?’
Nothing.
That was the answer.
Nothing but sit there in their chests and curdle, a bitter pill to be swallowed dry.
It wasn’t as though he’d taken anyone’s girlfriend — Noor and Soraya belonged to no one until today, when they’d belonged briefly and enthusiastically to him.
And even if they had been spoken for — well;
’When had that ever once slowed me down from pursing a woman I love to get?’
Some of the women on set were envious too.
There were a few wore open disgust, the curled-lip variety reserved for women who’d done a thing other women only thought about. But Phei knew the truth under that disgust, knew it the way he knew most things people preferred to keep hidden: put any one of them in the same chair, behind the same locked door, and they’d have done exactly what Noor and Soraya did, and called it fate afterward.
The disgust was just envy that hadn’t found the nerve.
The difference was that he wasn’t attracted to them. Not a flicker. And that — though it would sound spectacularly rich coming from a man who had, by any honest accounting, worked his way through every pussy of nearly everyone in his orbit — was the whole crux of it.
Phei did not simply take a woman because the opportunity presented itself and the lighting was good.
There were things he weighed first; things beneath the surface.
Because here was the part no one watching ever understood: it was never only the beauty. If beauty alone had been the price of entry, he’d have left this set a far busier man — there were twenty women in the mansion and its gardens if there was one, each apparently engineered to be lovelier than the last, a deliberate parade designed to drive ordinary men to ruin.
And out of all of them, Phei had been drawn to exactly three. Only three resonated. Only three plucked at what he privately called his heartstrings, that low answering hum beneath the breastbone that he’d long since learned to trust over his eyes.
One would find it hard to believe there was any real consideration involved — any genuine reading of character, any development — given he’d had Noor and Soraya within hours of meeting them.
But that misunderstanding was the world’s problem, not his. He’d never go around explaining himself to people who only wanted the scandalous half of the arithmetic.
Phei did not do one-night stands. He knew, with a certainty that lived in his marrow, that every woman he took was becoming a permanent fixture of his life — that even the ones who arrived thinking this is just sex would find themselves, in time, pursued and courted and woven in until they were wholly his.
That was the shape of it.
So in light of the eternity he intended to spend with his women, no — he did not simply collect a woman because she happened to be beautiful.
’I am going to be with them for eternity after all!’
But Phei also placed a great deal of weight on first impressions; the one a woman made on him and the one he made on her.
And so, even as the warm afterglow of a very good hour with Noor and Soraya still hummed pleasantly through him, a colder thought was already filing itself alongside the satisfaction:
’This was going to make going after Courtney difficult.’
Because if Courtney learned what had happened in that room, it would complicate the courting of her considerably. Worse — she might simply say no. Outright. And as much as it bruised the ego to admit, not even Phei could promise that every woman he admired would one day be his.
Attraction ran both ways with these three, he was sure of that.
But attraction was not consent, and if a woman’s principles crashed hard enough against his actions, against the unapologetic shape of his life, she could still look at all of it and decide no, thank you — and be entirely within her rights to.
The worry rose, sat with him a moment —
— and then dissolved, because Courtney was walking back into view, and she was walking back with the goddess.
The two of them, side by side, mid-conversation and easy with each other.
They’d evidently spent the entire break together.
Which meant Courtney didn’t know. Not yet.
Oh, the rumours would reach her soon enough — this was a set, and sets ran on rumour the way engines ran on oil — but hearing a thing secondhand was a different creature entirely from witnessing it, or from being told it to your face by someone who’d watched.
It bought him room:
It wasn’t that Phei regretted Noor and Soraya on the expense of loosing his chance out on their boss, Courtney, nor did he feel even the faintest splinter of shame over them — not at all — but he’d have strongly preferred Courtney be kept clear of it.
Clean of it.
’First impressions, remember?’
Then again. She might not care in the slightest.
Phei hadn’t courted her in any way neither had he tried anything.
They were, for the moment, simply two strangers at a workplace who had happened to strike an easy spark across a folding chair — and when he did eventually approach her properly, he didn’t want a single thing standing in the path.
No old gossip, no half-heard story, no reason already loaded in the chamber for her to refuse.
From the looks of it, she and the goddess were friends of a sort, or near enough — acquaintances who liked each other.
Which was its own small thread to pull on, later.
Anyway. Who knew. He might never lay eyes on Courtney again after today.
Or he might be looking at her, across rooms and years and the slow turning of an entire shared life, for the rest of eternity.
That, too, would sort itself in time.
But for now — that aside — there was one more problem.
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