Cassidy Hastings slammed the door of her apartment, flipped the lights on so hard her fingertips stung, and tossed her keys toward the table.
“Fuck.”
Craning her arm behind her back, she unsnapped her bra through her T-shirt and began the process of wiggling out of the torture device.
“Fuck this day. Fuck Mr. Callahan.” Her strap got tangled in the sleeve of her shirt as she tried to pull her bra through. “Ugh, fuck everything!” With a few ominous pops of thread, the bra was freed. She flung it across the room. It bounced off the floor-to-ceiling window of her small, one-bedroom apartment with a muffled ping and then fell to the floor.
Her tits were free, and she’d thrown some shit, but she by no means felt better.
“Wouldn’t know a good story if it bit him right in the dick, which apparently is an organ I need to get someone to pay attention to one of my damn pitches!”
She stomped over to her leather gaming chair and flopped into its well-worn depths, grabbing one of the many controllers resting beside it on the floor. With a flick of her thumb, she turned one of her consoles on, but when the title of the game they’d released today flickered onto the screen, she scowled. “Forgot you were still in there.”
Road of Trials was going to earn them mega bucks and put Westward Gaming on the map with competitive gaming companies—right up there with Blizzard and Bethesda. All the gaming blogs and magazines had given it near-perfect scores.
Cassidy couldn’t even look at the title without getting pissed. Within the first five minutes, the game’s hero watched his girlfriend get killed by his enemies—which, of course, made him want to be a hero. But worse, in the game’s closing sequence, the hero’s new girlfriend sacrificed her life so the hero could win the game. Just freaking Juliets all over the place for a dude still mourning his first dead girlfriend.
If Cassidy had to play one more game with a woman being used as the plot device in a man’s storyline, she’d switch back to fucking Pong. Which might kill her. Woman could not live on Pong alone. Which is why, amid myriad champagne toasts at the office, she had sneaked over to Mr. Callahan’s side and pitched an idea for a game with a—gasp—girl in the lead.
She also might have thrown in a little dig about the unoriginal plot of Road of Trials.
Yeah, that could have been why Mr. Callahan had snapped. Epically.
As soon as Mr. Callahan’s face had grown unnaturally red, she’d known she had made an error of judgment. She was good at those.
Spend your on-the-clock time writing the stories you’re supposed to write or you’re fired.
The word fired had echoed over the suddenly quiet cubicles. And it was only because everyone was staring at them with keen interest that she had bitten her tongue and kept from creating a scene that would have gotten her fired right then and there.
Sure, she regularly pitched game ideas with a female lead. Sure, she spent time on the clock working on projects she wasn’t being paid for. Sure, she had no tact when she did either of these things, often insulting her co-workers in the process.
But did that mean her boss had to threaten to fire her? In front of everybody?
Did it? The answer might not be an emphatic no.
She winced. “Damn it, it’s too late to think about stuff.” The clock on her cable box read 11:27. She wanted to call her sister-in-law, Victoria, who never failed to make her feel better, but given the hour, Victoria was no doubt sleeping, or very much not sleeping, with her man, Kip, and Cassidy didn’t have enough bleach on hand for her ears if she had to listen one more time to Kip whisper naughty things to her sister as Cassidy tried to have a conversation with her.
Cassidy needed to be asleep herself. However, the potent cocktail of recent embarrassment mixed with impotent rage was going to keep sleep elusive for a while.
“I need to get laid.”
A good, screaming orgasm would do the trick for sure. Unfortunately, the last guy she’d gone to for an orgasm had been a co-worker, and now every day was awkward as he hinted they would be good together in a relationship.
Hell, we hadn’t even been good together during the one-night stand. She was definitely not up for a repeat. And she’d learned her lesson regarding the company ink.
There was no help for it: she was going to have to handle it herself.
Okay. She rolled her shoulders. Just get it done, and then she could relax.
Holding down the glowing X on the controller, she shut down the console, but as she rubbed her palms down her thighs, the title Road of Trials kept appearing behind her eyelids every time she blinked, despite the screen now being black.
Ugh. Least sexy thing I could be picturing right now.
With a sigh, she swiveled her gaming chair until she faced the window, the TV now at her shoulder. Outside the window, the city was completely dark. Quiet. The hateful game title finally began to fade.
Much better.
Planting her feet on the floor, she lifted her pelvis and shoved her shirt up. A quick unbuttoning and unzipping later, she was shimmying her skinny jeans and panties down her hips and thighs. She kicked them in the general direction of her discarded bra and settled back into her chair, the leather beneath her ass quickly warming against her skin.
Spreading her knees, she stroked down her pubic bone without fanfare and pressed two fingers to her clit, giving a quick, tight circle.
Nothing. No zing. No pleasure. Hell, she was already bored.
“When at first you don’t succeed . . . ” She stroked again, but the result was no different.
“Okay.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was going to have to get serious. She didn’t have book or movie boyfriends—oh, no. She had game boyfriends. An entire catalogue of them. This situation called for the best. She pictured the chiseled, devastating features of Joel, the forty-something zombie slayer with a heart of gold from The Last of Us, and stroked herself a couple more times.
Nothing.
“Well, shit.” She flopped her hands over the sides of the chair as she opened her eyes. Sprawling her knees wide in surrender, she huffed and lowered her chin, glaring out the window into the dark night.
Only, it wasn’t dark anymore.
She sucked in a breath. Directly across the alley from her apartment, her most intriguing neighbor stood in front of his window. The lights in his apartment were on behind him, making his dark hair and drool-worthy build clearly visible. She had no trouble seeing him holding a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other. His eyes were a bit wide, but other than that, his expression didn’t betray that he had just caught her attempting to masturbate half naked in her apartment.
Don’t panic yet. Maybe he can’t see me, even though I can see him. That was a possibility, right?
His expression unfroze. A wide grin spread his lips, and he lifted his spoon in a jaunty wave.
“Balls!” She launched to her feet, tugging her T-shirt down as far as she could in the process—which turned out to be not nearly far enough. Her lady parts remained fully on display as she tangled with the vertical blinds cord for far too many seconds before it finally cooperated. She jerked the blinds closed as she heaved that small cord with all the gusto of a sailor on board a ship in the middle of a hurricane.
The blinds swayed for several moments afterward as her breaths echoed through the apartment, and her heart tried to beat its way up her throat.
Masturbating with the lights on in front of the window, Cassidy? “Well, that was dumb.” Another error in judgment.
Damn it, peeking at her lickable neighbor every now and then had been one of the highlights of her new apartment. How was she ever going to be able to spy on him now without being mortally embarrassed?
There went her second-biggest form of entertainment.
She covered her face with her hand and blew out a breath. “Worst day ever.”