Page 3

CHAPTER 3

Butterfly Man

No one can escape their past. But I do when I read her words.

They’re a lifeline, a thread that connects me to a different reality where I can leave behind the shadows that haunt me. In her stories, I forget the memories that torment, the regrets that consume, the sins that stain. My pain, guilt and shame no longer exist. The faces of those I’ve lost, and of those I’ve destroyed, blur in the pages until they disappear.

Until there’s no one there but you and I, darling.

Lost in her lines, I become someone else. Someone who deserves her attention, her trust, her love. The only one who can make her happy, who can save her, who earns the right to be with her.

She doesn’t see me, but I see her. In those universes she crafts for the two of us to secretly meet away from the cruel world that’s keeping us apart, and through the words she nonchalantly writes on her social media accounts and speaks in interviews and podcasts, I’ve learned everything about my little bird. Not the outside shell she allows fans to dissect, not the lies she makes them believe, but the real her.

Birdie Abel, although she made it official, isn’t her real name. She tells everyone her favorite color is blue, but, even though it matches her eyes, she never ever wears it. Her glasses either—when she thinks no one is looking. She sings about how much she loves her housewife mother and accountant father, how supportive they are, but they’re never in the picture. They don’t have names known to the public. No one can tell for sure if they’re alive or dead—or made up.

But I do.

I’ve dug deep underneath that surface to learn about the things she doesn’t let anyone else see. The secrets. The lies. The desires. The darkness. They don’t scare me. They entice me. I’ve devoured them all to the point of obsession until I worshiped her through them. They’re not easy to decipher, but for me, they’re loud and clear. The hidden messages between her lines, they speak to me, calling out to me, because she, too, escapes her past when she writes those words.

“I see you, my little bird. I see you in every way possible.” I caress the image of her face on the live feed streaming from the hidden cameras I planted around her house when I stole that moment in time to be so close to her beauty, to hear her peaceful breaths, to inhale her addictive scent, to finally confess at her altar my feelings and my sins, while I whispered a prayer of love.

Will her security guard—if she ever chooses one—find my little windows of heaven? It can be a problem, but in a way, I hope he will. It’ll prove he’s competent enough to protect her, not that she needs anyone but me to protect her. Her husband didn’t bother checking the house for bugs before he installed that flimsy security system I could hack easily. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have wasted the precious minutes I had in her house hiding my expensive high-tech cameras. I’d have spent every second with her.

What did she see in a guy like Blake Abel to choose to share a lifetime with? “Big mistake.” I nod at her. “I know. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Soon enough, he’ll be out of our way. Don’t worry, darling. No one can come between us. No one can take you away from me.”

She’s ready to get lost in a book. What are we reading today, darling? In the brief time I was in her office, I took pictures of the stacks on her bookshelves. Then I ordered all the books I didn’t already have. Now, we have matching Tbr lists. We can have our first reading date today.

I zoom in on the footage to see what book she’s reading. Forced by Katie Saldana. “In a mood for some cookie cutter, flat, dark smut written by a white trash wanna-be who won’t dream of becoming half the storyteller you are? Hmmm…”

The tiny wheels of the work chair I sit on glide toward my little home library, and by little, I mean floor to ceiling bookshelves that cover all four walls of the loft I’ve recently rented in Vineyard Haven. “Well, it’s our first reading date. I’ll let you call that shot.” I fetch the book and roll back to the monitors, to her gorgeous face that haunts my waking hours before my dreams. “Who am I kidding? I’ll let you call all the shots.” I smile, but she doesn’t. Does she not believe me? After all these years, she still doesn’t know how much I love her. “Of course I will. I’ll do anything for you, darling. You’re my queen.”

She opens the book in the middle. “Oh, already started it without me? Let’s see what page you’re at.”

Her eyes, bare, bluer than the clearest of skies, move with the lines, as she lies back on the sofabed. For a moment, I forget to look for the page number and trace the shape of her body instead. Long neck. Elegant and inviting. I can bury my head there for days to taste the delicacy of her skin and breathe the smell of her hair. I close my eyes, conjuring her sweet scent, and my breath shudders. If that’s what you’ll do to her neck, what will you do to her pussy?

Snapping my eyes open, I silence that voice. I don’t like that voice. But you like her. And her pussy. You want to fuck that pussy so hard and hear her say your—

I flip through the pages fast and find the right one. Then I read out loud to distract myself. “ She is my life, my soul, my reason for being. She is the only one who can save me from my past. She is the only one who can make me whole. She is the only one who can make me happy. She is mine, and I am hers .” My eyes squint at the paragraph as I reread it. “Wait a minute. This sounds so…familiar.”

I roll across the loft to the side where my bed is and grab a foxed paperback copy of Until I’m Yours from the stack on the nightstand—where I keep my favorite rereads of Birdie’s masterpieces. The sticky tabs tell me exactly where to look. Yellow for the hidden messages she knows only I can find. Red for explosive steam. Blue for inspirational quotes. Purple for power statements. Magenta for the absolute best I can’t get enough of.

The magentas in this mastery of storytelling are abundant, but I know exactly where to look. Page eighty-three. My stare lands on the marked paragraph automatically. “Aha! She is my light, my breath, my reason for being. The only one who can rescue me from my past. The only one who can make me whole, who can make me fly. She is mine, and I am hers .”

Birdie slams the book shut and bolts upright. “That bitch.”

“Right?” I look from the book to her and back to the book. “She stole your work…and turned it into some tacky, boring lines in cheesy book porn without a hint of a plot.”

She rubs her fingers over her mouth, a gesture I’ve learned she makes when she’s angry…or horny. For the latter, it comes with a gentle flutter of her eyelashes that floors me. Then she uses her phone to take a photo of the plagiarized page, finds her own book and takes another photo of the original she wrote. She hits send and makes a call. Who is she calling? Her assistant? Her editor?

Lucky for me, she puts the call on speaker. “Hey, Birdie.” I know that woman’s voice. It belongs to Martha Goldman. Birdie’s agent.

Birdie leaves the sofa bed, clenching her jaw. “Did you see the screenshots I’ve just sent you?”

“I…have. Yes.”

“I’m sure if I read through her book I’ll find more. This is not the first time, Martha. I ignored it before like you asked me to, convincing myself it’s just a coincidence, imitation is the best flattery and all that bullshit, but this is plain patchwriting. She practically used a cheap thesaurus to replace a few words, my words, and used them in her pathetic excuse of a book. Why does she keep targeting my works?”

“You know why. You’re at the top. Your books have been high on the charts for months. Everybody wants to be you. All you need to do is relax and enjoy it. Then write the next bestseller. Worrying about a minnow that rephrases a paragraph of yours here and there won’t get you anywhere. It’ll only give you hemorrhoids.” Martha laughs.

“I can’t just stand by while she steals my stories right under my nose and makes a fortune out of them.”

“First, she isn’t stealing your stories. Those come with signature plot twists that are hard to replicate. Saldana will be too stupid to just copy them, and she knows it. What she does is borrow heavily from your finely crafted words, butcher them, and then try to make them fit in her weak prose.”

Good point.

“Which is the definition of mosaic plagiarism, and it is selling her books like hot cakes.”

Also a good point.

“She is not a threat to you, Birdie.”

“I don’t care. She stole from me. She won’t stop unless someone makes her stop.”

Yes, darling. I hear you.

“I understand your frustration. What do you want to do?”

“I want to sue her.”

“Sue her? Birdie, do you have any idea how long copyright infringement lawsuits take or how much money they cost or the statistics of winning them? Unless she published something that’s word for word or plot point for plot point, the chances to win are slim to none.”

“We can’t just do nothing. At least, tell the publisher to issue a cease and desist. It’s my right!”

“It is. But have you thought about how much attention you’ll be drawing to her books if we do, attention that will be taken away from yours? Because she has a good reach on social, and she’ll use it to twist things around. You know the drill. She’ll hold a cat and blubber ugly on camera while she begs for forgiveness and blames the whole fiasco on depression medications. She’ll do it over and over until she turns your own readers against you, making you the villain.”

“The villain? For claiming back what’s mine? This is ridiculous.”

“I totally agree, but it’s the culture we live in, my friend. The world, as my villains, is morally gray…”

“And so are the rules of vice and virtue. Neither can claim supreme authority,” I say with Martha. One of my absolute favorite quotes by Birdie.

“…your words, not mine.” Martha chuckles as if anything about this situation can be humorous.

Birdie wipes a full hand over her mouth. “You’re my agent. You must figure something out.”

“There are only two options, Birdie. We take the legal route or the public route. One is a waste of resources if we don’t have more than a few rewritten, too generic paragraphs, and the other… Well, let’s face it, you can’t win unless you’re willing to put your face on a camera all over social in a vicious war that can last a while, which is something you don’t do, and she does...pretty well.”

“Well, there must be something else that can be done.”

There is, darling. There surely is.

“I’ll tell you what,” Martha says after a long pause, “I’ll set up a meeting with Blake and see what we can come up with.”

Birdie’s eyes widen with rage. “Get him out of this.”

“He’s your manager, Birdie. It’s what he’s here for. Unless something has changed?”

Birdie swears under her breath. “You know what. Forget it.” She hangs up and tosses the phone on her desk.

I touch her hair, imagining how it feels draped over me while I have my arms wrapped around her. “Oh, please, darling, don’t get upset. Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it. She’s not worthy of your time or anger. Let me take care of my little bird. It’s what I am here for.”

She lets out a heaving breath, and then she looks up at one of Blake’s cameras. Her eyes narrow for a moment before she opens her laptop and presses a few buttons. She waves in the direction of the camera and gazes at the screen. Then, when she doesn’t see herself on the monitor, she takes Until I’m Yours and lies on the sofa bed.

“Did you just turn off the office security cameras? Why?”

When she resumes reading page eight-three and her slender fingers slide down her pants, I have my answer. From line twenty on page eighty-three to the end of page eighty-nine is one of the most epic spicy scenes she’s ever written, and she’s touching herself to it.

And I can see her touching herself to it.

My breath snags in my chest. I swallow, hot blood pumping through me. Call me crazy but having sex with a woman is great, watching her work on herself to word porn is... “Fuck.”

Pinching my upper lip, I listen to her laboring breaths that quickly turn into moans, and I imagine how loud she can be when she orgasms. Then she does that thing when she rubs her lips and flutters shut her eyes.

“Oh God.” I can’t stop my hands from unbuckling my belt and freeing my now painful erection. Yes, she turned off the cameras so her husband wouldn’t see. She’s putting on that show only for you. You might as well enjoy it. Don’t let it go to waste.

Her back arches, and her breasts thrust up. My tongue darts out and licks my lips instead of her pebbling nipples, but in my head, I’m feasting on her plump flesh and filling my hand with it while my cock is giving her pleasure and inducing those delicious moans.

When her mouth forms a silent O, and then she breaks into a crescendo of successive gasps and curses, I allow myself the release, too. I know I’ll be allowing myself more releases today and the days to come watching this footage over and over and over until I learn every sound, every move, every contour of that face she makes when she climaxes.

“Thank you, my love. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this.”

I’m about to clean myself when she grabs Saldana’s book and opens it. She takes the fingers that have been inside herself and smears the page. It isn’t hard to guess which paragraph she’s just stained.

“Oh. My. God. Wow,” I laugh as she uses her laptop to write something. Her printer whistles, and a paper comes out of it. She takes it and pastes it on the front page of the book. I adjust the camera range to see what’s written. Congratulations . Then her index finger dips back in her pussy, and it traces her initials on the paper, as if signing her name with her cream. She puts the book in a yellow envelope, seals it and writes an address on it.

I look it up. Yes, it’s Katie Saldana’s address. “Holy fuck. This is gold. I love your mind, little bird.” I think about doing the same with my cum, painting her most beautiful quotes with it and mailing it to her. Not as a statement or a threat, but as proof of how much power she has over me.

She turns the cameras back on, shoves the envelope in her purse and leaves the office.

“I thought we were taking a nap first before you left for the gynecologist’s .” I chuckle because I know she was lying to Gia. “Where are you flying so fast, little bird?”