Page 38 of Even Robots Die (Even Ever After #3)

Florentine

I ’m starting to think he’s doing things on purpose, because he has barely finished his sentence when he moves down the bench again. He’s now at the end of it and less than thirty centimeters from me.

“I understand sarcasm,” he tells me, and it feels like a caress on my skin.

It also makes me very conscious that my legs are naked under his gaze.

I’m not ashamed of them. I mean, I know I’m not top model size, but I like my curves.

If I’m plump, it just means there’s more to love. And that I make a better pillow, too.

He’s still too close to me, because this isn’t the breeze I can feel on my skin anymore. It’s the warmth of his breath that acts like it’s stroking my skin like a lover.

Fuck. I truly need to get laid if I’m turned on by the feel of air—even if it’s warm air coming out of a very hot man—on my legs.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” I tell myself, and this time I make sure not to make a sound. But then I remember that Milton is still logged on my holo. “Don’t answer me, Milton,” I add as I start massaging the bridge of my nose.

I don’t have my toys here and it’s starting to get harder and harder to deal with my libido. I mean, even while sharing my room at home, I manage to sneak my toys into the shower.

Here, I don’t have my toys, and I need more than my fingers. Call me greedy, but I don’t vibrate for freaking sake.

And the dream a few days ago only made things worse.

Well, not worse than Brice’s voice almost asking me to call him ‘boss’ and the air he breathes caressing my legs.

“I just choose to do whatever has a chance to get you mad,” he adds, and I feel the words spread over my skin and straight to my pussy.

Get a grip, Flo.

“What?” I ask, looking over my shoulder in Brice’s direction, half convinced I didn’t hear him right.

“You get such a lovely shade of red,” he adds, and now I’m sure I heard him right.

“What the hell?” I ask, but the only answer I receive is a chuckle.

I turn my body completely to look at him, and I can feel my fist squeezing at my sides.

You know that grip I was talking about? I think it’s going to be me gripping my hands around his throat.

The worst part is that he looks completely unbothered, his left arms laying on the back of the bench and the right one in his hair.

“See, that shade of red,” he tells me with that taunting smile I’m coming to know as his signature.

Completely unbothered, like I said. But why would he be, anyway? He can’t feel a damn thing, so of course taunting me is without a consequence in his mind.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” I tell him as I breathe through my nose to calm down because I don’t want to give him more ammo.

It was supposed to be a question, but halfway through my sentence, I realize I don't need confirmation.

I know that is what he is doing and from the light in his eyes, he wants me to know exactly that.

This man is going to be the death of me.

I really need to figure out how to un-fry his brain so I can be gone quickly.

“If you’ve stretched your legs long enough, we can go back to the castle …” Brice says with an extra emphasis on ‘stretched your legs’.

Can I throttle him now?

I face away. I don’t need him to be happy about my coloring again tonight.

I take a deep breath. And then another one.

Once I’m calm again, I feel like I should tell him we can go back inside.

But I’m enjoying the light wind on my skin and the fact that he’s probably still waiting for my answer—and the latter fills me with joy.

I have absolutely no other reason to stay outside longer than to annoy him a bit. I don’t think I can manage to piss him off the way I am now—he can’t feel a damn thing, for fuck’s sake—so I’ll settle with a bit of annoyance.

Weirdly, Brice doesn’t press me to go back inside.

He’s silent at my back. Not that I can forget that he’s here—I can feel the heat coming from him. If I didn’t know better, I would think he was the dragon, not his best friend—if we can still call him that when the mere sight of Elhyor makes Brice want to kill him …

“Finished sulking?” he finally asks.

Not so silent after all.

I won’t react. I won’t react to the taunting man.

“If staying outside bothers you so much, I’m not preventing you from going back inside,” I tell him.

I know it’s childish, but he riled me up—like he always finds a way to do—and I need to be alone for a while so I can think straight again.

These damn hormones aren’t helping either.

It’s been a couple weeks since I've been here and my body is not so gently reminding me that I didn’t have fun with the barmaid on the day I arrived, but also that I’m due for my period .

I have no idea if the shifters have to go through the kind of shit us humans have to deal with, but I know I’m a horny mess a few days prior to my period and then when it’s here … Well, I’m just a mess.

I don’t think the shifters are ready for that.

Because one would think humanity would have made progress when it comes to what human women have to survive—yes, I said survive—every month, but no.

To some extent, they made progress. I’ve heard back in the day, they had to take pills every single day to have contraception, that it might not have been so easy to get them, too depending on where you lived.

Now we get a yearly shot and we’re good to go.

Men started to have their own contraception too, even if some still think it’s not manly enough to get the shot— bunch of sissies .

So yes, there’s been progress. Except it’s all centered around not getting pregnant.

The only progress that’s been made about periods—that half of the human population has once a month for fuck’s sake—is for shifters to avoid them altogether, or, well, as all humans call them, angels, vampires, and a whole bunch of other names that I don’t even remember.

Actually, scratch what I said earlier. I do know that shifters don’t have to go through the same shit I do.

For one, I don’t know how often they normally get their period, but now it’s like they don’t have them anymore.

And two, that shot I take yearly to avoid getting pregnant—because believe me, after helping raise four sisters, I have absolutely no will to be a mother—it can be combined with the “no period” one.

And when I said it’s not made for humans? Well, I know for sure. I learned it the hard way.

Because I’m a mess before and during them, when I was eighteen-years-old, I decided to get both. Why not before? Because weirdly you have to be recognized as an adult to decide by yourself to get that shot .

Before that? It’s the adult responsible for you who decides. In my case, my dad.

And there’s no way around it. He doesn’t have a uterus, he doesn’t know what women go through every month. So he said ‘yes’ to the contraceptive shot—he wasn’t ready to be a grandad while he still had a toddler to take care of—but decided against the one that would give me freedom from pain.

Except it didn’t.

Because those damn shots weren’t made with human women in mind. And one can’t forget how the shifters heal so much faster than we do.

Or, well, someone obviously forgot, or the dosage would have been different.

Maybe they’ve changed it since then, but when I was eighteen, it was still not curated for my kind.

That’s why I ended up throwing up my stomach—not my stomach literally, but its contents—for a week every month for well over a year.

Seventeen months, to be exact.

Seventeen months of pain, but also seventeen months of ‘I told you so’ from Dad.

If I have to trade one kind of belly pain—plus that damn glint of knowledge in his eyes—with another to avoid my period, it kills the whole idea behind the process.

Needless to say, there is no way those shots will get close to me anytime soon—even if it kills me to do what Dad wanted from the beginning.

I’m looking the other way on the contraceptive one because it’s too damn practical—and doesn’t have side effects that I can see—but I’m pretty sure my ovaries have shrunk because of that.

Which brings me back to the problem at hand.

I’m not on the anti-bleeding shot, and I basically have two to three days before I become a bitchier version of myself .

I wish I could say that I’ll be done with this little experiment on Brice’s brain by then, but I doubt that.

I also doubt that he is ready to handle me at my worst.

I doubt anyone in this castle knows what’s coming, and maybe a part of me feels bad, but there is another part—a huuuuge part—that revels in the idea that I’m going to be a pain in their asses.

I should care.

I don’t.

They should have thought twice before kidnapping some human girl with a sarcasm and authority problem.

The joke’s on them.

I take another minute before I head back inside without saying anything to Brice.

Why would I, anyway? He can see perfectly well what I’m doing.