after
I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe, how to speak. Above me, Embry moves in the dark like a beast, and I have flashes of memory from our first—and only—night together, of his mindless rutting, his blind need, but I find my mind can’t drift far from the present. There’s only the here and the now, there’s only Embry’s merciless thrusts, the thundering of my heart, the delicious tightening deep in my core. I imagine I can feel him there, the tip of his cock buried so deep that he’s in the bottom of my belly, and every jagged, sawing thrust from the monster above me sends thrills of fearful pleasure through my body.
I’m sweating, that’s how hard he’s using me, and every nerve is alive, alive, alive, and singing.
His lean form folds down even lower over mine, and he bites my shoulder as he drives into me, like a lion with a lioness. The sheer wonderful savagery of it sends me spinning further out into—well, into I don’t know where. It’s like the place Ash sends me with ropes and belts, but Embry is not fucking me like Ash would, even if we’re both pretending that’s what’s happening. Ash is calculated with his cruelty, but Embry is not. Embry is a slave to his own cruel urges, lost to himself in a way Ash could never be.
And so I’m actually scared.
Which is what I want. What I need.
It seems counterintuitive—masochistic even, when I’ve only ever dabbled in masochism, preferring instead the more power-oriented dynamic of submission. But every bruising thrust, every cruel taunt that comes from a man I love instead of my would-be rapist neutralizes the awful reality of what happened. Affirms my consent and power, my ability to give my body to whom I choose. Every zing of pain followed by a thrill of pleasure—it’s all mine, all my choice, my design. And so this bed, the place I would’ve been raped, is now the place where I have my choices given back to me. The confirmation and assurance that I still have power in the kind of sex I crave, that I can still take pleasure in it.
The bite on my shoulder turns into a bite on my neck, a mouth hot against my ear. “Does your husband get to have you like this?” Embry sneers, and I shiver at the anger and jealousy in his voice. I told him to be Melwas, to pretend to be the man who’s deeply and awfully jealous of Ash, but this doesn’t sound like pretended anger. This sounds real. And my body stirs with trembling, fearful delight at it.
“Yes,” I answer. I’m goading him, I know I am, but his possession and jealousy are so addictive, I want more, I want him to crush me with it. “I let him have me any way he wants.”
Strong hands flip me onto my side, and he’s on his knees, sliding back into me with his bitter, brutal thrusts. One hand digs into the front of my thigh, the other into my hip.
“Look at me,” Embry says roughly. “Look at me while I’m fucking your cunt.”
Not fucking me. Fucking my cunt. It’s such a sadistic, spiteful turn of phrase, like I don’t matter, like I’m nothing to him. The idea makes my toes curl with lust.
“You’re sick,” I say, but my voice has no heat. Or rather it has the wrong kind of heat. His hand drops down and pinches my swollen clit, and every vein and cell of me lights up like the Fourth of July.
I moan.
He gives me a cold-blooded smile. “No, sweetheart. You’re sick.”
“I am,” I say, almost wonderingly. “I know I am.”
His hand is still on my clit, kneading it hard. “We both are.”
I don’t know why I say it, but I do. “That’s why he likes us.”
We both know which he I’m talking about. Embry’s hips go still, so do his skillful fingers, and for a moment, we just stare at each other in the moonlight, the sweat and tangle of our mock-rape all around us and the thought of Ash there like a ghost in the room. And I know in that moment that Embry and I have something Ash can never have with either of us—which is, of course, the experience of being loved by him. Embry and I share a secret path, a secret knowledge, and the cause is Ash, but it exists outside of him too. It’s a living thing that binds Embry and I together, animated by whatever kinks and cul-de-sacs in our minds that make us the twisted, strange lovers we are.
Embry’s head drops, his teeth digging into his lower lip, and I wonder what labyrinths of memory I’ve sent him into, what images and murmured words he’s conjuring up for himself right now. And I remember that handsome princeling who charmed me in Chicago with his deck shoes and carelessly expensive blazer, who fucked me like his life depended on it.
But I don’t want the prince right now, I want the monster.
“Come back, Embry,” I beg. “I need it.”
He doesn’t have to ask me what I mean. He presses down on my thigh, tightening my legs and cunt to squeeze around his cock, and then his fingers find my clit again, not strumming lightly, but grinding, exactly the kind of pressure I need to come. The moonlight spills over the carved lines of his torso, the tensed muscles of his stomach and chest and shoulders, the straining muscles of his thighs. He is pale marble in the silver glow—the full lips, the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the elegant bevel of his collarbone. Darkness gathers in the hollow of his throat like so much wine.
I still think he looks beautiful in the moonlight, Ash said to me once, and I see it now. Perhaps everyone looks better in moonlight, but only Embry can look like this, like a decadent prince after the candles are snuffed, left alone with his regret and grief. Like an ancient statue, chipped and cracked and still the epitome of male beauty. Except with Embry, all the chips and cracks are on the inside, visible only in the icy flare of those blue eyes, the bitter twist of his lips when he thinks no one is looking.
The orgasm is sharp as it twines around the base of my spine, and I can tell Embry’s close too, his movements getting jerky, his breath ragged. “More,” I plead, and I don’t know what I mean because I mean everything: harder and deeper and faster and meaner.
And Embry knows. Somehow he just does, the pain and perversion we share like its own kind of language. He flips me back onto my stomach, and it’s all rough and careless—hard knees, digging fingers, thighs that clamp over my hips. He shoves back into me, my bound legs keeping the fit so tight that he has to use force to push inside, even though everything is so slick and wet down there that I can feel it on my thighs. I feel his abs tensing and his thighs bunching as he penetrates me again and again, and then he stretches out on top of me, his weight like the hand of God pushing me through the floor and into Hell. But if this is Hell, I never want to leave.
Embry’s hand finds my mouth, my neck, my hair, sometimes pulling, sometimes choking, sometimes gagging me with his fingers, like he loves it all so much that he can’t decide what he wants to do. His other hand finds my clit again, working it in ruthless, almost hostile rubs as he fucks me into the bed. “It’s only me here right now,” he growls, his lips damp and moving against my ear. “Not him. Me.”
He’s said that to me before. And Ash has said that to me before. That pulsing, furious, singular possession at its most honest, that jealousy we all have to live with, and it snakes right into my belly and unleashes its fury, wave after wave of intense, clenching contractions. My cries are muffled by his palm over my mouth, and it’s as if he’s spurred on by the noise, because each thrust becomes achingly hard and deep, all of his strength bent on the one task of plundering as much pleasure from my body as he can.
And still I squeeze and pulse around him, the orgasm so fierce that it pulls at the muscles in my belly, seizes at my inner thighs.
“Mine,” Embry grunts. “Mine.” And with a ragged breath and his hand still on my mouth, he erupts with a shudder, holding himself so rigid and still that I can feel the throbbing pulses as he empties himself inside of me. I can feel the warmth and the wet, I can feel the hammer of his heart with his chest pressed to my back, I shiver at the scratch of his stubble against the side of my face. And every feeling is a feeling I welcome, a feeling I choose, coming from the person I chose to give it to me.
I belong to myself again.
He flexes his hips once or twice more, and then we lie there in total stillness, total silence, our harsh breaths synchronizing and then slowing. Contentment unfurls in me, a sense of safety, a deep well of love. And the sense of a secret uncovered, a hitherto hidden shore landed upon. Something that belongs to Embry and me alone.
“This is the first time it’s been only us in five years,” I say after a minute.
Embry rolls off of me without answering.
I try again, attempting to articulate something I myself don’t understand. “I needed it. Thank you, Embry.”
He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat as he grabs his pants and yanks them up around his hips. “You’re thanking me for assaulting you?”
Something in his voice isn’t quite right. “For pretending to assault me,” I say slowly, propping myself up on my elbows so I can watch him. “After I asked you to. And we established a way for me to safe out.”
He pulls on his shirt, still not looking at me. “We should get going.”
“Embry.”
He glances at his watch; I see the glass face glint in the dark. “It’s only been twenty minutes. Wu and Gareth are probably only just now getting to the rendezvous point.”
“Embry.”
He finally looks at me. In the moonlight, there’s no sense of color in his face, it’s all highlight and shadow. Those bright blue eyes are nothing more than castles of ice in a dark ocean.
“Did I do something wrong?” I ask, my voice small. “Was this asking too much?”
“You didn’t ask for anything I didn’t want to give.” His mouth twists up into a bitter smile. “And that’s the problem.”
I roll and sit up so I can see him better. “I know you’re not like Ash,” I say carefully. “It seems like you want pleasure more than control from sex—”
“Not pleasure,” Embry cuts in. “Escape. There’s a difference.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to—”
“Don’t talk to me about wrong. You don’t know what I was thinking in that bed, goddammit. You don’t know what I was feeling. What I wanted to do to you!”
This hurts. I swallow. “Whatever you were feeling, I was only feeling the connection between us.”
“There is no ‘us’ without Ash, don’t you see? You say it was our first time alone together in years, but did you feel alone there?” He cants his head toward the bed. “Did you feel like Ash wasn’t there? Because I felt him there. I saw your wedding ring flashing in the moonlight, I heard you talking about him. I felt like I was fighting him off every second I was inside you, just to have you all for my own for a few precious moments.”
He drops back on the bed, eyes on the star-speckled sky outside. “I’m a bad man, Greer. I’ve always known it, the way they say you can know that you had a twin inside the womb. It’s a part of me—this selfish, careless part—and I wish I could cut it out of me, I wish I could be perfect, and when I was younger I used to wish that I had the courage to…”
He stops and sighs. “I don’t wish that anymore. Except maybe I do now, because how fucked up is it that I enjoyed forcing myself on you? I don’t have Ash’s excuse. And how extra fucked up is it that while I was forcing myself on his wife, I was angry with him? Jealous of him? Possessive of you? The three of us have only had this for a few days and already I’m fucking it up.”
“No,” I whisper. “I love it, Embry, I love you. All of you.”
He turns to look at me and then he’s kissing me, pushing me onto my back and hungrily stealing kisses from my mouth, murmuring over and over again, “You shouldn’t love me. You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t.”
But I do, I can’t help it. I never could. I fell in love with him after only one night five years ago—he thinks I can change that now?
With a reluctant sigh, he straightens up and stands again, pulling a small knife out of his pocket. I blink up at him, curious, and he gives me a rueful shake of his head, as if he’s astounded that I still trust him after what just happened. But I know him and I know what he wants, and so I stay still as he cuts the bonds free from my wrists and then moves down to my ankles, sawing at the thick band of tape there.
“Fuck,” he swears. A split second later, warmth drips onto my bare feet. I sit up to see him cradling his hand, blood running down his wrist in a thin line, the crimson of it turned black in the moonlight.
“Embry!” I say, horrified, and I peel the tape off my ankles and sit forward onto my knees so I can take his injured hand into mine and examine it.
“It’s nothing,” he says, wincing a little as I uncurl his fingers. “My hand slipped, that’s all.”
It is a shallow gash, but a long one, stretching the entire width of his palm. I grab the white sheet off the bed and wrap the corner of it tightly around his hand.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, “so don’t move.”
He obeys me, watching me with a sudden stillness as I slide off the bed and quickly go into the closet. When I flip on the light and see myself in the mirror, I see what he saw as I walked away—a woman, completely naked, with tangled hair hanging to her waist and bite marks on every inch of her body, marks so dark I know they would have been visible in the moonlight. As always, I feel a flash of pride at the sight of my marked skin, marks I’ve asked for from the men I love. But I don’t know what Embry felt when he saw it.
I grab what I came for and go back out to Embry, who’s now standing by the window, still holding the sheet around his hand. He’s staring at the blood glistening on his fingertips with a strange look on his face, like he’s lost in a memory.
I gently peel the sheet away from the cut and use a clean edge to wipe away as much blood as possible. The bleeding has slowed, but the cut still oozes and drips.
“What is that?” Embry asks, breaking the silence.
I hold up the fabric I brought out from the closet, which is essentially a length of silk and lace. “It’s a decorative scarf,” I explain as I begin wrapping it around Embry’s hand. “It goes with a lingerie set in there.”
“He bought you lingerie?” Embry’s voice is razored with anger, and I glance up at him.
“Yes. Hold still.” I pull the fabric as tightly as possible and knot it on the back of his hand in a makeshift bandage.
He lets out a short breath as I tie it but otherwise keeps silent. His eyes trace over the marks I know score my neck and collarbone and then move over to the open closet door.
“You’re not like him, you know,” I say, pressing his bandaged hand against my chest.
He looks down at his hand, bound and bloody against the soft curves of my breasts. “I don’t know what I’m like.”
I kiss his fingertips, tasting blood. “You’re like Embry Moore. Isn’t that enough?”
He sighs, pulling his hand away from me. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a long time. Get dressed. We have to go.”
And so I dress in another one of the filmy frocks Melwas set aside for me, find a pair of silk slippers (all the other shoes are high heels), and then Embry and I leave the house, Embry with his gun at the ready.
We crawl over rocks and under fences with holes cut in them. We dodge drones and skitter down dangerous slopes, the rocks cutting through my slippers and gouging into my feet. For several anxious minutes we hide under a cluster of fallen branches as we think we hear men patrolling nearby. It takes us a good thirty or forty minutes to reach the people who are here with Embry, and by the time we get there, my feet are bleeding and I’m covered in scratches and cuts from rocks and brambles.
Even so, I look at Embry as he hands me into the car they’ve concealed farther down the valley, and say, “It feels too easy. Can it really be over?”
Embry shrugs, climbing into the car. “What else could Melwas possibly do to you?”
