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It would be reassuring if it weren’t so damn condescending. She’s so good at that. Talking to you and making you feel ten times dumber about a subject than you did before. Like I don’t know I work my ass off! Just ask Annie. She works ten hours a day cleaning up after me. If it weren’t for Annie, my schedule would be a total mess.

Just to make matters worse, the jerk winks at me before turning around and conferring something with her father. A wink. A fucking wink.

A wink shouldn’t bristle me. A wink is nothing. More condescension.

More… whatever it is she sometimes does to me.

God, I can’t stand being around her. When she’s not making me want to gag on her toxic smugness, she’s making my knees tremble from those quick looks and quicker grins.

I can’t believe it. Even after twelve years, I’m still hot for the shithead.

Hang on, let me back up a minute.

Once upon a time, when a horny teenage girl named Kathleen was getting as much action as she could, she went to a gala hosted by Donovan Mathison.

Ira was there. Ira Mathison, the seventeen-year-old heartbreaker that every queer girl in our academy was throwing themselves at. Rumor was she had the tongue of a god. Of course, to a stupid girl, a “good tongue” meant anything that I could at least feel. Since Ira is two years older than me, I hadn’t seen much of her at school outside of the soccer games I was often dragged to. Ira never stood out to me until I saw her up close at her father’s gala.

Even back then she was clean-cut and masculine. Nah, she’s not a bodybuilder, but she’s got some nice, cut muscles that make most women – and dare I say, men – salivate. Even before I committed to the term bisexual, I knew there was something aesthetically pleasing about Ira, someone who has always been at home in her body, in her sexual and gender expressions. I’ve never seen her in a skirt, and I doubt I ever will. Still, when you like masculine lovers, regardless of what they’re packing, you take note. You wonder, Is she that good with her tongue? What about the other shit? I hadn’t been with a girl yet. I was only fifteen, for fuck’s sake, although that didn’t stop me from being on my fifth boyfriend and having a reputation of my own.

Anyway, since our dads were friends, my father went out of his way to introduce me.

I had met Ira before, but that was before puberty when she was a scrawny kid who looked no more interesting than a beanpole with shaggy hair. Post-puberty Ira, on the other hand, was a prince ready to sweep a girl off her feet. Nowadays, she goes by two sets of pronouns, but back then, it was only she. Her. Burgeoning woman. It wasn’t lost on me that this androgyne a whole two years older than me (and therefore, really cool,) had often stared at me out of the corner of her eyes, even when we occupied two different hallways at Winslow Academy.

So there was this babe. Ira Mathison, the one everyone said was sweet and handsome and well talented if you know what I mean. One of my friends said she was lab partners with Ira’s ex-girlfriend. “She makes her come twice in a row,” she exclaimed more than once. I was lucky to come from my hand at that age, never mind who I was dating. I didn’t have my first assisted orgasm until I was a freshman in college.

Do you see where I’m going with this? When I shook Ira’s hand that night at the gala, I batted my eyelashes and made sure one of the sparkly black straps of my dress fell off my shoulder. Oh, trust me, she looked at it. And then she looked at my body as if she were going to devour it whole. The exact kind of shit I ate like catnip.

A half-hour later, she asked me to dance. Her hands were firm on my frame, though we danced a respectable distance apart. We didn’t say anything. I think she barely knew my name, and I didn’t care about any of her details. All I cared about were her eyes on my chest and her hand on my ass.

We were horny teenagers, okay?

Another half hour later, we were in a coat closet making out like bunnies. Or is that humping like bunnies? Either way, I was feeling things I rarely felt with anyone else. Like the burning need to fuck.

It was gonna be quick and dirty. Ira wore easy-to-remove clothing, and she was already unbuttoning her dress shirt before I could get down on my knees and taste pussy for the first time in my life.

Guess what? It’s a good thing I forwent that because it turned out that our dear Ira Mathison had been visited by the uterus goblin ten minutes before our dance. All over her underwear, no less.

That’s right. Ira Mathison, everyone’s bachelor darling and you will call her a bachelor, not a bachelorette, mind, almost got menstrual blood on my face when we hooked up as teens.

I shouldn’t hold it against her. Happens to the best of us. God knows I’ve been caught by surprise when taking a new lover back to my place or the five-star hotel suite I fully intend to use as my temporary love shack. But being the very mature youths we were, I ran out of the closet, mortified, leaving her behind with shame and embarrassment.

We didn’t see each other for two years, not until I graduated from school and went off to college. Neither of us brought up that night. We haven’t talked about it since. Sometimes, I wonder if she even remembers that it was me she had that experience with twelve years ago.

It’s humiliating. This prince has only gotten hotter with age, and now here I am at ten on a Friday morning with a hot coffee in my hand and memories of making out with Ira in my head.

“Kathleen!”

I nearly drop my coffee. There’s that booming, commanding voice in my head. I turn, meeting Ira’s gaze from across the large conference table.

“They’re here,” she says, settling in a chair next to her father. “You ready?”

Fuck her. I’m never ready when she’s in the same room as me.

Chapter 2

Ira

Lara Anderssen walks through the door, dressed like a runway model with hair as perfect as a movie star’s. That’s not unusual for the women around here, but you have to understand that Lara is about forty, a relatively young age for someone with so much power in this region.