I woke up, and the pain in my rear end when I tried to shift grounded me in profound ways. I cracked my eyes open and realized I was still in the room I had been in during my dreams. The morning rays lit up the room, and the mirror opposite the bed displayed a familiar face, just not mine. My mind struggled to grasp why my favorite main character was staring back at me when I was the one facing the mirror. The man beside me stirred, and it hit me that whoever I was, I had just slept with this money, and if memory served me correctly, this was not my house.
I crept up, fighting against the intense pain I felt with every move. Every instinct I had screamed for me to get out of that house, and now there was no overwhelming lust hindering my judgment. There was still bubbling underneath the surface, but I would figure it out later. I hailed a taxi, which happened to be parked nearby, thankful to have gotten one as soon as I walked out of his building. I was no match for him, judging by his fast movements last night, if he decided to chase after me.
The taxi driver scrunched up his nose as soon as I got into his car and tried putting more space between us by leaning forward. I said my address, hoping it was all a bad drug trip at least, and this stranger would take me back home, where everything made sense and was a girl. Instead, he stared at me with wide eyes, confused, and my heart sank. I gave him the other address, one I had read many times over and knew better than my own, my heart sank even further as he started the car with a mask on his face now.
He dropped me at the lavish skyscraper that I had more than once imagined living in, envying the large amount of wealth Ristoff had managed to acquire. As the accountant at the weapons manufacturing company, he handled billions of dollars, which means he was heavily rewarded for his troubles. He lived in a penthouse on the highest floor of the building, and his building was fitted with an elevator that allowed his collection of five luxury supercars to rest in his indoor garage. As soon as I stepped into the building after paying the fare with money I found in the wallet in my pocket, a doorman walked up to me and led me to the reception, where another man offered to take my bag and coat, and I handed them to him, too exhausted to try and be independent.
The man pressed the top floor using his key to activate the lift, leaving once he handed me my belongings. My breath was robbed by the expansive open floor house that occupied the top floor of the most luxurious building in the city. I always enjoyed the fact that Ristoff and I had a similar profession, and I often wondered what was shown of his work to be ridiculously easy. It was a crime that he was richer than I, but his had been a fantasy world that my reality couldn't compete with. I knew this house like the back of my hand, me along with a million.
I walked to where I knew the bathroom would be and gasped at the white marbled dream, completed with a stone marble bathtub that I needed to be inside of. My skin felt sticky and dirty, the fragrance which oddly reminded me of roses lingered heavily in the air as if it was oozing from my being, and if the book was to go by, it was. I filled up the tub with hot water after pouring in bubble soap I found at the ledge, and it was Ristoff's favorite brand because it reminded him of his father's smell, a touch of a home long gone. I sank into the hot, scented bath and could immediately feel the tension easing from my body. The stinging in my ass eased a fraction, allowing me to finally get relief for my aching body.
I heard my phone ring, but I was too tired to even leave the tub, so I let it ring out, wishing for a glass of the extensive wine collection that I knew he kept. I was experiencing an alternate reality where I was living in the body of my most beloved character, so the next best explanation after the dream theory was that I had gone insane. What I had experienced was traumatic; there was no denying that, and yet it wasn't the worst thing that had happened to me. Losing my parents in a car accident had been by far the worst thing I had ever and would ever experience in this lifetime, so having a mental break over what had happened did not seem very plausible, but there was a logical explanation as to why I was here.
Reality or not, I wanted nothing to do with my life, and this presented an opportunity to live a different reality. It was no longer important to make sense of what I was experiencing. I had loved this book to death, often hoping for a live adaptation, but this is better than any production. I got to live in the ideal world with the ideal job and three men clamoring for my attention; someone would have to fight me to take me back to reality. I had been an avid Yaoi manhwa reader for the longest time, a fujoshi to the core, and here I was with the best possible seat in the world from the first point of view. The more I thought about the more it felt like a dream again, and if I was indeed trapped in the figment of my imagination, then no one should come and save me.
After two hours, I finally got out of the tub, admiring my pale skin pruned from being soaked in hot water. I made my way naked to my bedroom, another similar trait he and I shared, so it wasn't an odd occurrence for this body to make its way naked across the expansive house, which I wasn't expecting were the twins I had fantasized about. The gentleman last night was known as Petro, the current CEO of the biggest weapons company, in other words, my boss. The original character had stayed away from him because he did not believe in mixing business with pleasure. He also treated pleasure as a punishment, and the three times he had engaged in intercourse over the three-book series had always been as a last resort. Those encounters never went past the one, but Petro was never an option for him.
The twins, childhood friends who had thrived in affluence unlike me, openly stared at my naked body with jaws hanging so low, they were almost on the floor. Ristoff's initial reaction would have been to run away and hide his body, but I stood there, locking eyes with them or at least attempting to, as their eyes were everywhere but my face. Before I could say anything, my door flew open and there at my threshold stood my boss, who hadn't even showered before rushing out after me