Julian: DEAR stephen?
Fleur: just a joke bec i knew it would rile u up *sticks tongue out*
Julian: And don't think I don't know why you're sneaking in all those French terms.
Fleur: oh dear, i have a client call on the other line. ta-ta, mon ceour. à demain.
Since Julian did not like anyone else having the last word with him, he decided to try another first and started browsing his phone's GIF library.
Fleur threw herself in the bed after sending her last message to Julian. Their exchanges might not exactly qualify as sexting, but for someone like her, who couldn't even make herself follow any of the guys she had a crush on over the years—-
It was like her inner prude never existed in the first place, and it had just been inner slut all along, pretending to be nice until the right man came into the picture and she could finally be naughty for good.
Buzzzzz!
The sudden vibration of her phone startled Fleur, and she snatched it off the bedside table with eager haste. She had a feeling it would be from Julian, and oh.
Fleur burst out laughing when she saw the GIF that Julian had sent her. It was from the movie 365 DNI, and the clip showed one of her guilty pleasures from the movie: a shower scene in which the heroine was about to have a grand exit, only to have her plans ruined when her Mafia abductor-and-would-be-lover grabbed her by the nape and forcibly turned her back to take her mouth for a brutally hard kiss.
Not for the faint of heart obviously, but...
"It's a sign," Fleur told Pippa excitedly an hour later.
Pippa glanced at the GIF Fleur had forwarded her. "A sign of what? That he leads a double life as a drug lord?"
Fleur sent an appealing look to Pippa's husband. "Tell me you get it. I know you know Julian personally, so you must get it. Right?"
Acheron, who hadn't any choice but to hear the two gab away since Pippa had chosen to accept Fleur's Facetime call when they were already in bed, obligingly took a look at the GIF under debate. "Ah."
Pippa's brows shot up to her hairline. "So you actually get it?"
"The Julian I know is not the type to send such a thing," her Greek husband explained, "which thus makes your friend special to him."
Fleur's face lit up. "Exactly! Exactly! That's exactly what I'm talking about!"
Pippa shook her head. "Or maybe—-"
Acheron took his wife's phone so he could tell Fleur, "I'll need the rest of the night to convince your friend, I'm afraid."
"I'll pretend to believe that," Fleur said laughingly.
"Good night," Acheron said over Pippa's protests, and the last thing Fleur saw before the screen went black was Acheron firmly pushing her friend down on the bed.
Good for you, husband of my friend, Fleur thought happily. Acheron Simonides was one of the most intelligent men in the planet. He was a self-made billionaire who had survived a violent past in order to be where he was now. Fleur looked up to him for sure, so if Acheron believed she was special to Julian, then of course it had to be true.
It was with this thought that Fleur went to sleep with a smile on her face...only to wake up around midnight hurt and bleeding.
Oh God, no!
JULIAN WAS ABOUT TO head up to his bedroom when his phone started vibrating inside his pocket. Since only a select number of people knew his number, he immediately answered the call, but before he could even say a word—-
"What are we going to do?"
Fleur's voice was immediately recognizable, and so was the distress that underscored her words, which instantly drove Julian to alert mode.
"What's wrong?" he demanded even as his mind already started coming up with a list of possible problems and its subsequent solutions. If she was ill, then he would use all of his resources to find a cure. If she was—-
"I have my period," Fleur wailed.
Well, hell.
Julian's adrenaline-powered system instantly deflated, and he had to grip the steel rails of his apartment's glass staircase when he actually felt woozy for the first time. She had him seriously worried, for fuck's sake.
"Did you hear me?" Fleur asked anxiously.
"I—-"
"You have to give me your word that just because we can't have sex for the first few nights, you won't back out!"
"Well..."
Fleur let out an ear-piercing shriek, and Julian's lips twitched even as the sound sent pain waves all the way to his brain.
"Calm down. Of course I won't back out."
"You said well!"
He was beginning to realize that Fleur on her period might also be Fleur regressing back to her teenage drama queen phase, and the prospect...surprisingly didn't horrify him.
"I was merely joking, milaya."
"Not funny!"
"I know that now," he soothed, "and I shall not do it again."
"But what are we going to do?"