Four Men Thought I Was Unconscious, Now They Wait for My Yes novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Third Glass
Lena is drugged at her own birthday party, wakes in the dark mid-touch, keeps her eyes shut, and realizes Vincent knows she is awake.
At ten o'clock, in front of fifteen guests, Dominik raised his glass and said I was the best thing that had ever happened to his lake house.
Everyone clapped.
It was my twenty-seventh birthday, and I had lived in his attic room for five months.
He owned the house and restored wooden boats in the boathouse.
He and his three friends had thrown me this party without asking. Paper lanterns hung along the dock, and the cake was shaped like a rowboat.
I was happy. I want that said first.
The redhead beside me pushed a third glass into my hand. "Birthday rule. You finish what the host pours."
"I'm already tipsy," I said.
"He poured it himself."
Dominik smiled at me from the head of the table. "Drink, Lena. It's only wine."
The first sip tasted of aspirin.
I said I needed air and carried the glass out to the porch.
Nobody was looking, so I tipped most of it into the fern beside the door. The dark soil swallowed it.
When I came back in, Vincent was watching my glass.
He drove an ambulance for a living.
He was the only one of the four who never joked about my cooking.
He said nothing. I drank what was left, so Dominik would stop watching me.
Twenty minutes later the lanterns started to slide.
Felix caught my elbow. He was the quiet one, the one who fixed computers at the kitchen table.
"You're white as paper," he said. "Come on."
"I only had two," I said. My tongue felt thick.
"Lightweight," Dominik said warmly. "It's adorable. Look at her, she's done."
Fifteen people laughed, and none of them stood up.
Dominik lifted me against his chest.
Florian held the door. He was the redhead, the one who ran the beer kiosk down the shore. The last thing I saw was Vincent's face, and he was not laughing.
Then it went black.
I woke in the dark with a finger moving over my underwear.
It drew one slow line across the front of the cotton, right over my pussy.
I was soaked through the fabric. I could not tell whether it was from a dream I had forgotten or from whatever they had done before I woke.
I did not move.
My head was heavy and my arms would not lift, but I could hear. Four men were breathing in my attic room.
"Jesus Christ," Dominik said. His voice came from my hip, low and awed.
"She's dripping," Florian said.
"She must have had a dream." That was Felix. His voice came from the foot of the bed, and it shook.
I knew every voice. I had eaten breakfast with all four of them for five months.
The finger stopped. Dominik's weight left the mattress, and I heard him step back.
"What do we do if she wakes up?" Felix whispered.
"She won't," Dominik said. "I measured it by her weight."
"You measured it by a guess."
"Then we stop when she stirs."
"And if she remembers?"
"She won't remember."
They whispered fast, and none of them argued about whether to stop.
I lay still with my eyes shut and counted what I had.
I could not run. I could not stand. Whatever was in that glass had taken most of my legs.
I could scream, and fifteen guests would hear it.
They had watched me carried up here and called it sweet.
I could also feel the cotton clinging to me.
My own body was answering them when it should have been afraid.
I was frightened.
I was also so turned on I could barely think, and I hated that more than anything they had done.
Whatever my body did, they were the ones who had put me here.
So I kept my eyes shut.
I wanted to know what they would do when they thought no one was watching.
I wanted to know it before I had to stand in a room with them in daylight.
"Let me see her face," Florian said.
A lamp clicked on beside the bed. Light pressed orange through my eyelids.
I kept my jaw loose and my breathing slow.
"Out cold," Florian said, and the light went off.
Floorboards creaked across the room. A key turned in the lock of my door, and nobody downstairs would hear it.
A mattress dipped near my head. Cool fingers closed around my wrist, two of them on the inside of it, pressing.
Vincent.
He had counted pulses for ten years, and I understood it as soon as his thumb settled.
My heart was racing. I could feel it hammering against his fingers.
"Her pulse is fast," he said, very quietly.
"She's dreaming," Florian said. "Look at her."
"Nobody dreams that hard."
"Maybe she's hot. Maybe the room's hot."
Vincent's thumb stayed on my wrist a long moment.
Then he lifted his hand away, and he said, "Maybe."
That was all.
He did not tell them.
He knew, and he had just told three men I was asleep.
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