Eros | #ONC2020 Shortlisted

Three: To Tame a Beast

Eros Riley was hot as fuck, that much she had to admit, and if Gianna Moretti admitted to it, that meant a lot.

Now, one thing you had to understand about people with her kind of money was that everything was a choice, including being in the company of a plethora of above-average-looking men. The truth is, people who say money can't buy everything are simply those who don't have it, and therefore don't know shit what it can really buy. You can buy anything with money; youth, beauty, old age, a kidney, a friend, too many friends, fame, a singing career if you'd like, a husband hot off the pages of a magazine, a collection of exotic wives housed strategically in equally exotic corners of the world, consequence-free rape and murder if you pay the right people, education at top establishments for your kids—and a fancy degree to match—when their brain capacity can only see pi as a dessert, hell, you can even get elected to run a country when you can't spell right these days if you have enough of it.

Why? In a world where overpopulation is a thing, you can always count on the majority of its inhabitants to be poor, and as long as the number of poor people continues to grow, the need for money grows with it and so does its capacity to buy all kinds of shits. Money can't buy love, you say? The way the world is today? Mothers don't even have time to love their kids between jobs and updating their Facebook for likes, and you were hoping someone would love you for free when you can't get off your phone long enough to say ten words to each other during dinner? It doesn't happen. Love is overrated anyway. It's an excuse for self-glorified virgins to fuck and make babies and it's not like we need more right now—self-glorified virgins or babies.

Anyway, the point was, that people with her money also didn't have to look at ugly people if they didn't want to, and most of them didn't want to, mind you. You could hire beautiful people, choose to go only where beautiful people go, and if your neighbor wants to paint their house something hideous there are ways to relocate them or yourself if you have the dough. The result is that the elite society is filled to the brim with beautiful people like Eros, so much so, that being shown a slab of juicy, pedigreed, A5 Matsusaka beef—or a limited edition Hermès Birkin—would be more effective in making their knees weak than throwing a half (or wholly) naked Greek-god lookalike at them. So when she said Eros Riley was hot as fuck, it meant he was hotter than Beyonce's new line of underwear if that ever happened.

And he was standing there now, in a well-chosen designer suit he managed to fill to the last quarter-inch of the cut with his bulk (including the bulk that had grown way past the last quarter-inch of those pants right before her eyes just seconds ago), trying strip her naked right there in his obscenely large backyard (where bodyguards and gardeners stood witness, mind you) with his eyes and grinning at his own imagination to boot. Now, if this had been that third-rate romance novel you could now safely buy and pretend you're reading Tolstoy, thanks to Kindle and oversized phones, the self-glorified (dirt-poor—they're always poor) virgin MC in a bad boy billionaire please-tie-me-to-a-chair-and-let-me-pretend-I-hate-it stories would be finding it highly offensive and quickly label Eros a vile, ungodly creature to be avoided at all costs by now.

Gianna, however, had always considered herself a grown woman with a healthy sexual appetite, and Eros was being vile and ungodly in his obvious desire to get his godly length (however long that was) into her pants, she found herself thoroughly enjoying the sight and the imagination of what it would be like to tie this man to a chair immensely and wasn't going to lie about it. It turned her on, made her knees weak like swallowing a gleaming piece of bluefin tuna otoro fresh off the dock.

"Oh, we're not going to Ginger," she told him, turning away quickly to head back to the chopper. Pull yourself together, woman. Don't jump the man in his own backyard.

"Okay. Where then?" He said.

"Carl's engagement reception, of course. You're my plus one for the night. Are you coming, Your Royal Highness, or do I have to roll you a red carpet?" The truth was, she'd thrown that invitation in the fireplace and incinerated it last Monday, but suddenly thought it might be a good idea to utilize this god for something two hours ago.