before
I didn’t wake up that morning thinking my life would change. In fact, I woke up hung over and alone, feeling horse-kicked right in the ribs because my heart hurt so much.
Ash had proposed to Jenny the night before. Had proposed to her in a beautiful Chicago restaurant with Merlin and me and her parents there. Got down to one knee and said all the usual words about love and promise and fidelity. Jenny cried. Her mother cried. Her father shook Ash’s hand. There were pictures.
I left right after, walking to my hotel alone.
I felt acutely aware that I’d never seen the ring he proposed to me with two years before. He’d never opened the box. That was strange, wasn’t it? Didn’t you normally open the box to show the ring to your lover? He did with Jenny, the pretty diamonds flashing in the light from the chandelier overhead. She was charmingly captivated by it, and then charmingly even more captivated with Ash when he started talking.
Maybe he never opened my box because he knew deep down that I’d say no.
But it wasn’t the ring that made me order up an entire bottle of Hendricks to my room, it really wasn’t even the proposal itself.
No, it was the look on his face.
Open and happy. Adoring. He loved Jenny—like, genuinely loved her. He wanted to marry her. Not to spite me or to please Merlin, but because she made him happy in her own uncomplicated, straightforward way.
I used to tell myself that Colchester was an extraordinary man with extraordinary needs. That the karmic balance of him saving lives and winning wars was his dark hours with me. That I gave him something no one else could, that the things I let him do to me under the cover of night enabled him to wake up the next morning and be a hero for everyone else.
But now I knew that was a lie. He was still a hero. He was still a hero having straight vanilla sex with a lawyer. He was still a hero in a relationship where a blowjob was a birthday present, not something he could take by force whenever he damn well pleased.
So where did that leave me?
What did that make me?
Extraneous? Damaged? Sick?
And couldn’t he have at least acted like it hurt a little? To propose to Jenny?
Because it hurt me a lot. And maybe that was the point. Maybe Ash couldn’t deny himself just a little taste of that old sadism to make me watch this, make me see how happy he was with someone else.
But I told him I’d stay with him, I thought bitterly as I got in the shower. My mouth still tasted like limes. I told him I still wanted to fuck even though I couldn’t marry him.
I remembered his face when I’d said that, as he’d slowly gotten to his feet at the top of my favorite valley, the ring box still in his hand.
“But I don’t want to just fuck you,” he’d said in a hollow voice. “I want to love you.”
“I’ll give you everything of myself,” I’d said, pleading. “Just don’t ask me to give that. Please.”
And I’d seen it in his face. The rupture. The hurt. The fury.
“Would you rather have it be all or nothing? Really?” I’d demanded. “Isn’t it better to have something?”
He hadn’t answered, and so I’d answered for myself, out of my own ruptured fury and hurt. “Fine,” I’d said. “I thought you meant you’d take me any way you could have me, but apparently that’s changed. So maybe it’s better if we don’t have each other at all.” And I’d left him there clutching the unopened ring box.
It was a testament to his faithful nature that he’d still sought my friendship afterwards, that he still trusted me with his life in combat, that he still kept me close. A lesser man than him would have pushed me away, but he didn’t, and I was grateful for it because I still craved him. I still craved the smell of his skin when he accidentally got too close, hungered at the way sweat slid down the cords of his neck during the hot summer days. I was starved for him and willing to chase after scraps.
But that had to stop now. It had been two years since that day in the valley and he was engaged now. I had to move on; as my Aunt Nimue told her son Lyr often enough when he got in trouble, “This is your dishwater, now you have to soak in it.” I’d made the choice to put Ash’s future before any future we had as a couple, and now I had to live with that choice.
I had a text from Ash when I finished my shower. I’m doing lunch with Merlin—want to come?
I manifestly did not. It still hurt too much to be around Ash for one thing, and for another, I resented Merlin almost more than any human on earth. Even though this had all been my decision, my choice, and I owned it as such, a juvenile part of me still blamed it all on Merlin. On that day in the train car and all his talk of sacrifice.
Besides, I had to go to his birthday party that night and that would be more than enough of him for me.
I spent the rest of the day napping and fussing and finishing off the Hendricks, and when it came time to go to Merlin’s party, I was tipsy and resigned. I’d see Ash and Jenny, Merlin would see me seeing them, and it would all be terrible, but there would probably be an open bar and I wasn’t above prostituting my emotions if there’d be alcohol present. But I never made it to the party.
Life had other plans.
“Fuck,” the girl who’d just run into me muttered.
“My favorite word,” I said automatically, but also amusedly. But my amusement faded as she looked up and I saw her face. Her fucking gorgeous face.
Waves upon waves of waist-length hair in hues of gold and platinum. Soft, pretty lips. An arresting beauty mark on her cheek. A small cleft in her chin. Huge silver eyes limned with lashes longer and darker than Ash’s and that were now pooling with tears.
She was someone who didn’t cry often, I saw that immediately. People who cry often are good at hiding it or at least betray a certain amount of comfort with it, but she was neither hiding it nor was she comfortable. She was miserable with it, her shoulders hunched up defensively under her leather jacket, her chest juddering with jerky, unhappy breaths.
“Pardon,” she managed thickly and pushed past me.
Fascinated, I turned to watch her go and my shoe knocked against something. Her phone. She must have dropped it when she ran into me.
Fate at work, I decided. I wasn’t about to miss the chance to render aid to a beautiful girl like that. So I grabbed the phone off the floor and decided to go find out what could make such a pretty girl so sad.
When I was twenty-nine, I met a princess.
Her heart was broken, and so was mine. She had a raspberry dress, I had bright blue pants and deck shoes. She had tears and I had a hand to wipe them away. She had something she wanted to give me and I had something I wanted to take.
Maybe I knew it was love the moment she smiled through her tears at me on a Chicago curb. Or maybe it was in the Ferris wheel, kneeling at her feet as she pressed her hands to my face. Or maybe it was the moment I claimed a place in her body no other person had.
But the moment I knew for sure came later, after I’d fucked her for the first time, after the shower. As I brought her back to bed, eased into her tender cunt, and she arched in pain underneath me.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, worried.
“Yes.” And then a big smile in the dark. “Do it harder.”
She was like me.
It was in the way she twisted underneath me. It was in the way she scratched and shoved at me, bit me, came like a shot when I bit her. She wanted the pain, she wanted the rough, she wanted the struggle. I wouldn’t know until later that she only wanted the struggle with me, that with Ash—just as I was—she was fully submissive. I wouldn’t know until later that with each other, we found something we couldn’t find with him.
I only knew then that something in her body, her heart, was identical to my own. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t let her go.
“Where’s Jenny?” I asked as Ash slid into his seat next to me. We were at a coffee house near our hotel; I’d called him the moment I’d woken up to an empty bed, my chest full of panic that my Chicago angel had melted away in the morning sunlight. But she hadn’t—in fact, she’d even left her number and her hotel address in a note—and in my relief, I discovered something new. Something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Excitement.
I was excited about her.
And Ash was my best friend. I wanted him to know all about it, and if there was a small, spiteful part of me that also wanted him to witness my happiness without him, I didn’t admit it to myself.
Ash took a long time to answer my earlier question, looking over the pastry menu, and then he sat back. “I wanted to talk to you without Jenny here.”
For the first time, I noticed how haggard he looked, his eyes bloodshot as if he’d been drinking or up all night or both. “But I want to hear about this angel of yours,” Ash said, forcing a smile. “You wouldn’t have called me unless she’s amazing.”
Something was definitely off, something more than him being jealous of me with someone else, no matter how much I wanted that to be the case.
“Ash, is everything okay? You seem…” Hung over. Troubled. Miserable. “…off.”
He ran a hand over his face, palm and fingers passing over the scruff covering his cheeks and jaw. I shivered to remember what that scruff had felt like against the most intimate corners of my body.
“Do you remember those emails I kept with me when we were deployed in Carpathia?” he asked after a minute. “The ones I printed out?”
“The ones from the teenager?”
He looked down at the table. “I saw her yesterday.”
I saw everything I needed to see in his face. The defeat. The guilt. The shame.
The longing.
“Did you…?”
He looked up, his stare knifelike. “I didn’t fuck her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t,” I said, giving it more thought. “You’ll be faithful to Jenny until death do you two part.”
He sighed. “Don’t say that. Because I did…touch her.”
I raised my eyebrows and he held up an unhappy hand. “Not like that. She was at the lunch Merlin brought me to. Seeing her was—it was a shock. Like touching a live wire. She’s twenty now, you know, and so much more beautiful than I remembered. I followed her out of the lunch and we talked. She’s fucking smart on top of being so fucking sweet and sub—” he stopped himself.
“Submissive?” I finished for him.
He closed his eyes. “In a public place, I wrapped her hair around my fist and yanked her head back. I shoved my cock into her belly. And she said, yes please.”
With his eyes closed, I could see it even more clearly. He wasn’t just stricken with the shame of wanting someone else, he was stricken with the real physical want of it, the keening deprivation of coming so close to something he needed so fundamentally and yet couldn’t have.
“The things she wrote to me, Embry,” he continued. “I knew she’d say yes, please. It always felt like she was made for me somehow. The way I used to feel about you.”
His eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see the way I flinched at that. The lacerations it left across my face.
It was because of those lacerations that I said it. “So you saw her and you’re all worked up. Get Jenny in bed and get it out of your system.”
His eyes opened, and he regarded me with a steady look. “That would be wrong.”
“Is it worse to be sitting here without her, squirming and hard over a twenty-year-old?”
“I’m not hard—”
I reached under the table and palmed his cock, which was thick and rigid down the left leg of his pants. We’d fucked for nearly three years—I knew when the man was hard—knew it the moment he closed his eyes and relived their meeting. Our table was in a corner and our seats were next to each other, so it was easy to do it discreetly.
When I wrapped my fingers around it through the thin fabric of his trousers, I could press my fingers against the underside and squeeze. He let out a soft hiss.
“Fuck, Embry,” he managed, but he didn’t try to shift away from my touch. Instead his eyes met mine and he opened his legs ever so slightly.
That was enough for me. It had been two years since I’d touched him like this, since I’d gotten to see the way his pulse thrummed in his throat and his pupils widened into black pools of lust.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said, all calm and polite above the table and all squeeze and shift below. “You feel something you haven’t felt since you last fucked me, and now you don’t know what to do. You thought you could live without it, but now you know you can’t. You can’t starve it out, Ash. It’ll always be there, hungry, waiting.” I began to move my hand back and forth, the pads of two fingers pressed against his frenulum, a small movement that no one in the coffee shop would notice.
He noticed, drawing in a sharp breath and opening his legs even wider.
“So why don’t you let me feed it?” I crooned quietly. “Why don’t you let me feed it just this once?”
I squeezed and his eyes fluttered closed. “I don’t—it’s not right—” He was mumbling now, his coherence gone, the beast in him too hungry.
“Tell me more about her,” I said, and I didn’t know if I was trying to help him or destroy him. “Tell me what she looked like. What you would have done to her if you could.”
“Blond hair,” he mumbled, eyes still closed. “Silver eyes. Long throat. A small cleft in her chin that I want to bite. I would have done everything to her.”
The coffee shop noise bled away, leaving only his voice and a small alarm in the back of my mind.
“What’s her name?” I asked as casually as I could, still rubbing his cock through his pants.
“Greer,” he managed. “Greer Galloway.”
Time didn’t stop, my blood didn’t freeze. In a way, I realized I should’ve known—maybe I already knew. Her tears as she rushed through the lobby and ran into me. Her words in the Ferris wheel, we weren’t together in any real sense. But I still had feelings…no normal person would have feelings for four years with no encouragement…
It was fate, obviously, even though I didn’t believe in fate. But it felt fated: there could be nothing in my life that wasn’t connected to Ash.
The truth tumbled together with my anger. It welded and fused itself into a solid lead block. All these years Ash had been secretly in love with her, my angel, my Greer. She’d been the one to capture that corner of his heart that he’d refused to surrender to me; she’d been the one to enslave him with a handful of well-chosen words. And now that I’d met her, I understood. I understood why he couldn’t let her go.
For one terrible moment, I thought about telling him. I thought about making him know that I’d been the first person to be inside her, I’d been the one to wash the blood from her thighs afterward. I’d been the one to make her smile and sigh and squeal for more, I’d been the first one in the world to taste her and to hold her after an orgasm.
Me. It had been fucking me and not him, and I was still hurt enough by his engagement to Jenny to tell him that, and I’m a terrible man, remember? Selfish and mean. This wouldn’t be beneath my level.
But I didn’t tell him.
I couldn’t.
Not because I was righteously overcoming my worst impulses but because I loved him too fucking much to hurt him on purpose. Still.
And I couldn’t hurt him by seeing her again. Even as her number burned a hole in my pocket and all those might-have-been fantasies of being her boyfriend danced in my head, I knew I couldn’t do it. I was too noble or too weak, and I didn’t know which.
I let go of Ash’s cock.
He groaned, dropping his head. “I don’t want you to stop,” he admitted.
“I don’t have to,” I said, pushing back the coffee I never touched and standing up. “You can tell me to go into that bathroom and wait for you on my knees, and I would. You could go find your submissive girl and blow your load all over her pretty blond hair, and she’d love it.”
His lips pulled into one of those things he thought was a frown but was really a pout. “There’s a ‘but’ coming?”
“But you won’t. You want to fuck my face. You want it so badly that I could finish you under this table with just another couple of strokes. You want that girl too. But you love Jenny and you’re too faithful to break off an engagement for the mere reason that she is the wrong person for you.”
The frown-pout deepened. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not, I promise.” I dropped a couple bills on the table and made to leave.
“Embry,” Ash said before I could go. “What about you? What about your angel? Your night with her?”
“It’s not important,” I said and walked away from the table. Walked right into a lie that would torment me for years to come.
After all, I’d given up everything else for Ash. Why not her too?
