Chapter 1
I squinted at the lethal warrior across from me, carefully sidestepping as I focused on his hips. He mirrored my every move, like a dark phantasm reflecting up from a puddle of blood. The dance of death was at hand.
Beams of early morning sunlight pierced the shadows of the park, desperately, mercilessly, attacking the last vestiges of night in their never-ending battle of dark versus light. My foe had used the sun against me before, striking the very moment I squinted at the unanticipated brightness. I tried luring him into a similar trap, but he smiled devilishly and stepped in the opposite direction.
“I’m growing bored,” my foe drawled. “Attack when your enemy least expects it, from a place she least—”
He interrupted his own lecture as he abruptly blurred forward and swung his katana low in an attempt to take out my thigh. I dove towards him to disrupt his timing, thrusting my blade at his gut. I felt a whisper of fabric against the edge of my sword, but I knew he had only moved enough to avoid my strike. I hadn’t almost gotten him.
He’d merely wanted to expend as little energy as possible to avoid my attack.
Which was why I simultaneously rocked forward with a swinging elbow to hammer his jaw while he gloated about dodging my blade.
Well, that had been my intent.
But this was Ryuu, not some half-assed swordsman looking to bolster his self-confidence. Ryuu embodied self-confidence. To him, admitting self-confidence was like bragging about being able to breathe. Pointless.
He pivoted and rolled with my elbow—impossible as it seemed—and rapped the knuckles of my sword hand with the flat of his blade. My hand spasmed and I dropped my katana even as he bumped his hip against mine and used it as a fulcrum to flip me over his body and slam me down into the dew-laden grass carpeting our make-shift arena. He rode me down to the grass, straddling me in a half mount as his arms shifted to pin my elbow and extended wrist to the ground near my ear. I rabbit-punched him in the ribs with my free hand—once, twice, three times—earning only soft grunts as consolation prizes.
His weight atop me shifted, and I wrapped my legs around his hips to prevent him from decoupling or riding higher into a full mount that might wind up giving him a more advantageous position where he could trap me into an arm bar. He’d done that twice this morning already. I snatched one of his forearms, jerking it low between us and trapping it against my belly as I squeezed his body against me with my legs, which brought his shoulder into contact with my cheek.
“Nice,” he growled, panting heavily as he struggled to free his arm without giving up his position. The heat of our bodies momentarily distracted me, and then I began noticing other positives about our entanglement—and not in an aspect limited to wrestling. The ebb and flow of our hips, arms, hands, and chests flexing, twisting, pressing, grinding together in a passionate embrace that could either signify love or hate, war or peace.
We were not just wrestling on four dimensions, because layered on top of the grunts and squeezes of the visually documentable physical realm and the ephemeral white-water rapids that was the passage of time were the quantum entanglements of our minds and our motivations. Our sin and our virtue. Our past and our present.
The space between us was life and death, and it was a heady, spiritual, incalculable plethora of immeasurable dimensions. It existed and didn’t exist at the same time, always shifting, never shifting, depending on if it was being observed and when.
The contact points between us—although ever shifting and writhing—was the intersection of the two loops of infinity or the ouroboros that visually depicted a snake eating its own tail but symbolically implied an eternal struggle of eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. Together, we were infinity.
Alone, we were two circles bumping and grinding.
Which was also fun, and entirely distracting.
“Your mind wanders, Penrose,” Ryuu breathed into my ear, sounding amused as he continued to struggle in an effort to slip free of my leg lock trapping our hips together. “I wonder on the topic…” Thankfully, he couldn’t see my face or I would have head-butted him. His breath smelled of spicy cinnamon and green tea, and I felt my mouth water instinctively as I spotted a drop of sweat on his neck, barely an inch away from my lips.
For a single moment, I wanted nothing more than to lean forward and lick it up.
Yum.
I felt my tongue tingle in the back of my mouth, and then I realized that Ryuu was no longer struggling or teasing me about my focus. I shifted my head to the side, keeping my chin tucked in case it was a ruse to conquer an opening in my defenses. I caught a glimpse of his face and realized that it was calm but perfectly still. Frozen. I frowned, unsure about this strange new tactic. I could still feel him breathing and pinning me to the ground but he looked as if he’d had a sudden thought that required his full attention. Was he admitting defeat? Or maybe you gave him an unprofessional bodily reaction to contend with, I thought to myself with a wicked grin. This close, I probably would have noticed such a tactic. No, scratch that. I definitely would have noticed.
“You two should just fuck and get it over with,” a familiar voice purred in an encouraging tone.
Since I was upside down, I pressed the back of my skull to the grass and shifted my eyes up to try and look behind me. Aphrodite, the goddess of sex, was sprawled out on the quilted blanket Ryuu had laid out earlier. She wore a shiny, satin toga that stretched from one shoulder to mid-thigh and scandalously flaunted side-boob as it barely managed to cover both of her breasts. A gold belt was cinched around her waist, looking as if it was made of golden medallions, the ends hanging lower than the actual toga. She wore golden sandals with straps that crisscrossed up to her knees before tying into pretty bows. Her thick, shiny brown hair was perfectly styled and hung down her back and over her covered shoulder, emphasizing the opposite bare shoulder and the hollow curves of her collarbone. Her somewhat large, almond-shaped green eyes glittered like dew on fresh-cut grass. I took a silent moment to honor my hatred of her raw beauty and the primal sense of physicality her very aura inspired.
Maybe, just maybe, she’d been pouring gasoline on my libido while I’d been wrestling Ryuu.
Then again, maybe not. Ryuu hadn’t noticed her presence, and he probably would have if she’d been toying with my emotions. It had also been years since I’d made any decisions after midnight, so to speak. Abstinence makes the suck grow suckier, I thought to myself. It was in First Corinthians. Somewhere.
She was unashamedly nibbling on the cheese and crackers, grinning at us. I couldn’t actually glare at her from my current position, so I growled my displeasure. “Hey, goddess of sex. Good morning. I’ve been better, thanks for asking.”
“I did not ask. It is painfully apparent to me that you have not had a good morning…yet. You haven’t even had a mediocre morning. An orgasm a day keeps the carnage at bay,” she said in a sing-song voice. She gestured encouragingly with a shooing flutter of her long, tan fingers. I scowled…as scowly as I could manage from my disadvantaged position. She let out an impatient sigh at my reaction and shifted her position to lean back on both elbows and gaze at the sky. “Oh, don’t be a prude. I’ll look away, my dears. Just get it out of your system. You’re obviously not learning much about real wrestling. Any one of my boy toys could have pinned the both of you before they hit puberty.”
Ryuu growled, shocking the hell out of me and causing me to reflexively squeeze his hips tighter. Which…introduced me to an interesting new development. Ryuu had definitely heard the conversation, ladies. “Is…that…so?” Ryuu rasped, slowly lifting his chin and shifting his attention to Aphrodite. I pretended I had died, even though I was stuck staring at his Adam’s apple and pinned beneath his obviously operational secret shinobi tool.
Aphrodite glanced over sharply, giving Ryuu an impressed smile. She nodded her approval at his ability to snap out of whatever magic she had used to freeze his body but not his awareness or hearing. She then ruined it by taking a full three seconds to eye him up and down with a smokier, hungrier grin before settling on his eyes. Ryuu didn’t react or comment. He just stared back, and I wished I could have seen his eyes, because her face paled and her smile faded a hair—which was the equivalent of a terrified scream from anyone else. “I retract my statement,” she said in a soft, respectful tone. Her appraising green eyes flicked to me for a moment before returning to his. “Are we still wearing masks, Ryuu?” she asked, emphasizing his name in such a way that told me she was obviously referring to him, specifically.
He gave her a slow, stiff nod. “I would have presumed that wearing a mask would earn me your blessing, Aphrodite. Kink-shaming seems hypocritical for the goddess of sex.”
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