And if Kori is the villain I believe her to be, then I’m obviously the hero of this story and will need to rise up against her in a battle of wit and wills. At the first sign of weakness, she’ll go for the jugular. I need to make sure she believes nothing is amiss. I have to last these next couple of days until I can leave this place known as Tucson behind and return to the land that is my home and begin to plot my revenge.

And why is she doing this?

It’s obvious.

She’s trying to get me to fuck up around Dominic somehow so he’ll learn the true nature of my feelings (rather, how I used to feel, I correct myself pointedly). In doing so, Dominic will be forced to look at me with pity and sadness (Poor little twinkie boy, he’ll say to himself. Poor little Tyson with his crush on the straight guy) and then will let me down in a way that’s gentle but will still be mortifying in ways I can’t even begin to understand (keeping in mind that this won’t happen because I most certainly don’t feel that way about him anymore).

And she’s doing all of this not because she thinks Dominic and I are going to end up together (ha-ha, now there’s a random and stupid and out-of-my-mind thought!), but because she’s actually heartbroken about how our relationship ended, even though she’s the one who broke up with me (I haven’t quite figured out how that makes sense, but trust me, it has to be right). She knows how I feel (used to feel, I chide myself) about Dominic and wants to make a mockery of me.

This whole thing has been planned from the beginning.

“Uh-oh,” Dominic says.

“What?”

“You’ve got that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“It’s that same look you get when you see a story on the news about a rich guy posting pictures of himself big-game hunting and standing over the corpse of an elephant. Like you want to murder someone.”

“Why would you kill such a magnificent creature and then post a picture of it for everyone to see?” I exclaim. “You have to know everyone is going to think you’re nothing but a gigantic dick who should be strung up and pelted with rotting pumpkins!”

“The most gigantic of all dicks,” Dom agrees. “But since I haven’t seen any dead elephants since we got here, who is it you want to murder? And you may want to reconsider. I may be on vacation, but I’m still a cop. Don’t make me get the handcuffs out again.”

My mouth goes instantly dry at such an image, and I wonder (traitorous fucking brain!) just how that would look in the mirrors above the bed.

“I don’t want to murder anyone,” I mutter. “We don’t need a hotel. We can just stay here in the sex dungeon.”

“I really don’t think you know what a sex dungeon is,” he sighs.