Page 136 of Let the Game Begin

“I’d say we’re finished,” Anna commented after we wiped down the bathroom. It was the one I’d been using most often lately.

“You’re an angel, Anna.” I smiled at her and put the new vase on the living room table before glancing around. The pool house gleamed and smelled clean, like it was brand new. It had taken us a good five hours to puteverything right, but we’d gotten great results.

“Why have you been using this as an apartment and not your room anymore?” asked Anna, who was fussing with the pointless fake flowers my mother loved to use to brighten up the decor.

“Because this is more private.” And it was the truth. The women I took to bed were too loud, and bringing them up to my room was no longer sensible. Chloe had suffered from insomnia after what Carter had done to her and could have easily heard what was going on in my bedroom. Plus, now Selene slept next door, and it made me feel oddly uncomfortable to know that I was causing her sleepless nights. I couldn’t help but imagine her listening in on me when I was with someone else, which only made me think of her at inopportune moments.

“Oh, I understand… Your habits haven’t changed then?” Anna glanced at me, and I detected a hint of reproach in her tone.

“Why would they change?”

I needed to do what I did. It might have been psychologically questionable and morally unacceptable, but my survival mechanism was the only thing that gave me moments of slight relief from the memories that constantly tormented me.

Miss Anna didn’t answer but only heaved a great sigh and left me by myself.

I spent most of the rest of the day in the pool house, and not because I’d summoned a blond to fuck, although the thought did cross my mind a few times. No, instead it was because I needed to be on my own.

After a few hours of solitude, I’d taken another one of my long showers and stretched out on the sofa to stare up at the ceiling, still wearing just my boxers. My hair was still damp and my skin still red from the heat of the shower.

Abruptly, I tucked my chin and gazed down at my body. With my index finger, I tracked the edges of my tattoo on my left flank, just as Selene had done. I thought about how delicate her touch had felt on me. Even when she was trying to pleasure me, she did it so gently that it made me smile.

God…how could she be so gentle with me?

I thought back on her luminous eyes, her full lips, her pale skin, herhands that shook at my slightest caress, her shocked expression at my teasing, her shyness, her innocence, and for the first time, I thought about how things might have gone differently for us. If only I’d been a less complicated person.

But I wasn’t. And I knew that if she ever found out everything there was to know about me, she would have run like hell in the other direction.

Thus, I decided in that moment that the best course of action was to get completely out of her life. I needed to stop wanting her, stop touching her, stop trying to protect her, because the only person she really needed to be protected from was me.

She was a moment of perfection, and as such, had always had an expiration date. Yes, I needed to move on from her and do it so gently that she didn’t even notice.

This thing between us would remain just a brief but intense period in my life that I would remember forever. One of the few positive memories in the swamp that was my mind. Still absorbed in these thoughts, I let my head fall to look toward the enormous window that overlooked the patio, because I had felt eyes on me.

And I wasn’t wrong.

I caught a glimpse of a figure in the twilight of the evening, a figure in a hood, but I saw them for such a fleeting instant that I wasn’t completely sure. I leaped off the couch, still half-naked, and ran for the door, throwing it open.

“Who the fuck is out there?” I demanded, seeing no one. The freezing air combined with the heat from indoors had hit my exposed flesh, making me shiver.

Maybe I was starting to see things?

Dammit. I didn’t use drugs, but I really felt like I’d just had a hallucination.

Worried, I took a step back inside, but before I could retreat completely, something caught my attention.

A sealed black envelope lay on the doormat at my feet. I frowned and retrieved it. I flipped it over to read the sender’s information, but there was nothing written on the front except a name that was, oddly enough, not unexpected: Player 2511

I looked around the darkness that surrounded me, examined theswimming pool, the long walkway that led to the entrance gate and to the front stoop of the house.

Nothing.

There was no one there.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I whispered to my imaginary conversational partner. Someone I couldn’t assign a name or a face.

With one last cautious look, I retreated into the pool house and closed the door behind me, staring at the envelope in my hands. I headed for the kitchen bar and tore it open angrily, eager to see what was inside.

I pulled out a sheet a paper with a padlock drawn on it and an almost poetic composition written on it: