Suddenly, a voice, echoing in the distance.
“Sean?”
A sensation like ice water trickles down my back.
I know this voice. I hear it multiple times a week. It asks me about new cath lab equipment and always tips the baristas 20 percent at Brews and Beans and giggled through her vows at an ornate floral altar a few weeks ago.
Leila.
I am at work, I remember suddenly.I am taking a nap in the clinic right now.
I push Julian away with two hands against his chest.
“Wait,” I say.
Julian pulls back ever so slightly.
“Wait?” he repeats, and for a second, the air around us falls still.
Then, without warning, the bed bursts into flame.
The heat is instant and overwhelming. I understand, implicitly, that I am on fire. But this is a different kind of burn, an overstimulation that leaps past pleasure and into agony. The flames lap at the erogenous zones behind my thighs, arms, under my breasts like so many tongues, leaving sizzling trails of humming skin in their wake. The rush of sensation is so staggering that I squeeze my eyes shut to stem the sensory overload.
“Tell me to wait again,” Julian croons. His voice comes from everywhere, a whisper in my ear, an echo in my skull. “Tell me you don’t want me right now.”
“I—” I try, but I can’t find the words. My body is twisting, writhing, both darting away from and arching into my own immolation. I feel so good that a part of me, irrational but deafening, thinks that I will not survive this. That the human mind is not meant to comprehend pleasure so all-consuming, that my brain cannot possibly translate the signals that my every minuscule nerve ending is currently sending. Julian’s hands pry my thighs apart like a clamshell, his palms so hot I can see the red imprints of them behind my closed eyelids, and when he blows a gust of steam over my core, I finally wrench my eyes open.
The creature between my legs is obviously Julian. It has Julian’s balanced bone structure, his full lips and dark, curling lashes, his broad shoulders and large, veined hands. But the Julian I know doesn’t glow from the inside out like a hot coal. His eyes are a warm, inviting brown, not the slit-pupiled amber that spear me like a flailing fish now. And his tongue is a normal, human length, not this terrifying, alluring appendage that slinks out of his mouth and splits me down the middle.
“Say it,” this Julian monster says, in between languorous laps that sand at my sanity. “Say that you’re mine.”
The words he wants bounce around in my head, ring in my ears like they are the only ones I know.I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours, “I’m—”
“Dr. Sullivan!”
A bolt of recognition jolts me back into reality. I snatch back my legs so quickly that I almost kick the creature in the face. Within the next instant, Julian is human colored again, and he sits up to watch, stunned, as the scene around us falls away like a straw house in a maelstrom, white walls peeling in ribbons to give way to the drab gray cabinetry of my office. Just before he disappears, he turns back to me, nostrils flared, eyes dark, and I’m not sure whether it’s lust or rage that I see on his face.
There is a hand on my shoulder, shaking me, and then the world I had with Julian is gone, blown away like a candle flame.
“Sean?” Leila repeats, her tone high with rising concern.
I blink up at her, disoriented, my ears still ringing and skin still buzzing. For a second, I see the creature again, its unblinking stare, the way my mind went blissfully blank in its grasp.
But it’s just Leila, and she’s stifling a laugh.
“Must have been a good nap,” she says from behind a parted hand. Her diamond glimmers on her finger, and an old, hateful part of me tenses at the sight of it.
“I’m tired, what’s new,” I say grouchily. “What are you doing here? I’ve never seen you in clinic.”
Leila holds up a rolled-up set of hospital-issue scrubs.
“Brandon used all his scrub machine credits and said he had an extra set here. I’m just running them up before his next case,” she informs me.
Instantly, my hackles lower, and I feel the burn of embarrassment.No more monster smut for you, I think, because did I really just have a sex dream about a long-tongued lava man in the middle of the work day? A terrifying thought occurs to me:God, what if I made…sounds?
“Sorry,” I say, stretching to cover for my grimace. “I’m a bit of a grump when I first wake up.”
Leila assures me that there is “nothing to worry about, I’m the same too,” and I comfort myself with the knowledge that her grin would be a bit more knowing if she’d caught me moaning in my sleep. I’m getting ready to shake my computer awake to check my schedule when Leila lays a gentle hand on my shoulder.