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Just fifteen minutes of this, and my heart rate would be at a healthier beat again.

Just fifteen minutes of this, and I could go back to who I needed to be.

ChapterTwo

LEO

“Can you—”Jacqueline gasped as I sucked on the pulse point between her shoulder and neck, she shivered underneath my hands as my fingers teased the warm skin at her waist, “Lead?”

“Lead?” I repeated against her neck.

“You know, like,” she removed one of her hands from my shirt as she flapped it in the air beside us, flustered as I teased her skin with my lips and tongue, “Take charge. Be in control. Tell me what to do—if you’re comfortable with that.”

I paused only momentarily before standing tall and pulling her flush against my front, more than comfortable with this goddess’ shy request, “I can, as long as we have a safety word. Do you have one in mind?” I cupped her jaw and tilted her face up toward mine.

Her lips parted as she locked her eyes with me and breathed, “…Glacier.”

* * *

“No.”My cousin didn’t even bother looking up at me as she deleted a line of code on her screen.

“Why not?” I pressed, sitting on the edge of her desk and twirling a pen in my fingers.

I was towering over her, clearly an authoritative figure, and yet when Mary Jiang gave me a look down her nose while sitting at her desk chair, scrunching it in irritation, she still felt taller than me.

“Because I have plans,” she replied, turning her dark eyes back towards her screen.

I grabbed a lock of her dark silky hair and tugged it once before her hand immediately swiped at me.

“You see Jamie daily,” I argued, “but we’ve hardly hung out since I moved here.”

“I hung out with you for like two weeks straight, when you first moved here.”

“That was to help me unpack.”

Mary rolled her eyes without bothering to look up at me as she replied, “Actually, no, that was for me to unpack for you.”

I rolled the pen between my fingers again, watching it glide back and forth over my knuckles, “You’re better at interior design than I am.”

“True,” Mary nodded, “but it’s no excuse to weaponize your incompetence. I have plans. Go away.”

“C’mon,” I adjusted my grip on the pen so that I could bounce it in between my thumb and middle finger rapidly, “Hold my hand while I make new friends.”

Mary scoffed.

I grinned.

“You have never needed help making friends since the moment you were born.” Mary tapped on her keyboard with her black-painted fingernails, locking her screen, then bent down to grab her bag, “You’ll be fine.” With that, Mary stood and started marching toward the lift. I tossed the pen I was fidgeting with on her desk and followed, undeterred by her dismissal. We turned the corner to where the front desk sat directly across from the doors, seeing Signe Lange and Jamie Hansen chatting.

For as long as I’ve known Mary, I never would have pictured Jamie being her type. Usually, Mary dated women who looked more like her. Women who wore a lot of black and had some tattoos, maybe facial piercings. Grunge clothing usually filled their wardrobes. One time Mary dated a woman whose hair was dyed the colors of the rainbow; eyebrows included. It was badass, which made sense because Mary usually dated badass-looking women.

Jamie was shorter than Mary, smaller, with medium-length pale blonde hair and blue eyes. I didn’t think I’d seen Jamie wear makeup once since I started working here, and today she wore a pale pink blouse with a cream-colored floral print, French tucked into her straight-cut jeans.

There must have been something special about Jamie, something that made her a badass in Mary’s eyes, because Mary seemed more at peace in this relationship than she had in any of her previous ones.

“You ready?” Jamie asked her girlfriend, before giving me one of her timid smiles, “Hi, Leo.”

“Hello,” I gave her my signature smile, the smile I crafted during my early twenties that generally worked on women, “Is there any way you could let me steal your partner for tonight? Actually,” I raised my eyebrows as if the idea had just come to me, “Would you like to join us, too?”