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He flashes another grin. “Hey, speaking of clothing…do you always sleep in that underwear with Jason Vorhees' face all over them?”

My jaw drops. “Seriously?!”

“What?” He chuckles. “Not my fault you sleep without covers on.”

I roll my eyes. “What do you want, Kirill?”

I see the brotherly teasing glint in his eye the second I ask the question.

“Well, originally, I wanted to let you know that it’s ten-thirty, and we had plans to meet at ten so you could make sure I don’t fail my global economics class.”

“The fact that you’re coming to a sophomore to get you out of your junior-level mess is kinda⁠—”

“Let me finish,” he sighs. “That was the original reason I invited myself into your room to wake you up in playfully amusing ways. However, that was before I heard you say, 'oh yessss pleasssse, sir' in that sex dream you were obviously having. Now I want to know who sir is.”

My face turns white as he beams at me.

“Well?” he says eagerly.

When I just glare back at him, he grins widely.

“No? Okay, I’m always up for a good guessing game, especially when it involves you and embarrassing dream-sex partners.”

“Kirill—”

“You were calling him sir, which obviously means he’s a Scorpio.”

I groan “Please no fucking astrology bullshit? I can’t.”

And he knows that, he’s just being a dick.

Astrology is what happens when gullible people look up at billions of galaxies containing trillions of stars and make it about themselves. It’s narcissism dressed up with a moon-phase necklace and a deck of tarot cards.

There’s a shop down in Hawthorne Hollow called The Celestial Veil, run by this utter scam artist who calls herself Madame Ophelia who charges people actual money to tell them which planet they should blame for their own shitty decisions.

I may or may not be permanently banned from the shop for replacing all the zodiac cards with little handwritten notes that said “take responsibility for your own bullshit.”

Actually, it may have been for the “needs citation” sticker I put on the front window. Possibly for the time I told another customer if she needed a planet to explain her personality, she probably didn’t have one.

Now, astronomy, on the other hand, I fucking love. The universe is huge, brutal, beautiful, and utterly indifferent to me. And that feels a lot more honest than trying to convince myself that Saturn gives a fuck about my dating life.

Kirill grins at me. “I’m just saying. Scorpios are super dominant in bed. That’s very well documented.”

I roll my eyes. “No, it’s not.”

“Spoken like a true Virgo.”

“I swear I’m going to kill you.”

“Classic Virgo rage,” Kirill hoots, laughing as he dodged my thrown pillow. “Okay, I swear that was my last one.” He makes a face. “Will you please just fucking tell me who you were banging in your sleep?

As close as Kirill and I am—and he really is like an annoying older brother to me—there’s a zero percent chance I would ever in a million years tell him about my sex dreams.

That percentages drops into negative numbers when said sex dreams involve Damiano Barone.

Ugh.

I’ve been having them for weeks, ever since that night at Château de Sulfuric Acid, aka Carl Bigsby’s house of horrors that burned down in a five-alarm fire.