Love at First Sting

I love books, I think you can tell that pretty easily. I love books that I have stories in even more. My story "Silence Is Golden" appears in Alison Tyler's Love at First Sting. I had almost forgotten what it was about, so here's the opening as a reminder to me and a heads up to you. You can win a copy from Alison over at Lust Bites just by leaving a comment!



Silence Is Golden
by Rachel Kramer Bussel

“Silence Is Golden” read the sign on Dean’s bedroom wall. It struck me as odd the first time I saw it, and every time thereafter. He is a therapist, after all, paid to listen to people talking all day and often into the night. But I quickly learned that for him, silence isn’t just golden, it’s paramount. “You talk too much,” he told me on our first date. I chose to take it as a compliment, babbling away even more after he’d uttered it, even though I knew he meant he wanted me to shut up. I picked at my fries, my burger open and messy, picked apart, rare red meat staring back at me as my gaze flitted from my unfinished dinner up to his pale blue serious eyes. The more solemn and serious he looked, he brattier I wanted to be, so I poured about a quarter of the ketchup bottle onto my plate, drowning each fry in a sea of red mush. He was so silent I wound up spilling my secrets, talking and eating, eating and talking, undone by his intense stare, not sure what he thought of my antics. His eyes took in all of it; he seemed to be looking right through me, even as I poured out my heart, secrets, fantasies and all.

It was our first date date, but we’d been chatting online for a month. “Chat” is such a tame word for what we were doing; “fucking each other’s brains out” would’ve been more accurate, if wordy, a description. Even though we did it virtually, it was still real as anything to me; he made me wetter than I could ever remember being.