So our little Athena is keeping secrets too.“Fine,” I say, shrugging. “You want to do this again? Tomorrow, I mean.”
“The sparring or the making out?”
Both,I want to say, but I just smirk at her. “The sparring,” I tell her carelessly as if it doesn’t matter a bit to me. “You want to get better, right?”
“Of course.”
“Tomorrow, then.” I pull away from her, ducking out from under the ropes around the ring quickly.
Athena doesn’t look at me as she goes to grab her stuff. I’ve seen this with her before, the way she withdraws inside of herself after she does something sexual with one of us, as if she’s ashamed of her own desire. It’s one of the things that pisses me off about the other two—they’ve encouraged that because they like her embarrassment, her shame. I don’t. I don’t want her to feel ashamed of who she is. I want her to embrace it. To be the wild, beautiful, dangerous, sexual woman that she could blossom into.
I want her to be that with me. But it’s impossible.
Today wasn’t the first time I’ve made out with a girl on the mats of a boxing ring. I got my ex, Natalie, to get in the ring with me once. She wasn’t a fighter, she was exactly the Pilates and yoga kind of girl that Cayde was making fun of earlier, so I went easy on her. It wasn’t about training her; it was about sex, about getting her up against me, letting her feel my muscles flex against her, hard and sweaty. We’d done more than just make out on the mats. We’d fucked, me pinning her down with her wrists above her head as I drove into her again and again, her legs locked around me. She’d loved every second of it, how fast and spontaneous it had been, sexy and sweaty and wild. But we’d only done it once.
This hadn’t started out about sex with Athena. It had been real training, real sparring. Athena is a formidable opponent, and it was fucking fun. But that was what had made it so hot with her. It had just been a sex game with Natalie, and that had been a different kind of good. With Athena, the claws are out. We’d still have been sparring, even while we were fucking.
I know that’s what draws her and Cayde to each other, or rather, pits them against one another like two magnets. They’re both fighters, and they’d probably kill each other if they ever gave into it. But I know that fire in her is why Cayde wants to break her so badly and why Athena won’t ever be really broken.
Athena is a challenge, an equal. She’s not afraid of us, not really. And there could be a lot of power in that if the other guys would stop seeing her as a pet and start seeing her as a woman.
But none of this is my business. I’m getting too invested in her, too attached, despite my efforts to be anything but. It hurt to stop touching her today, just like it hurts to remember being tangled up with Natalie on the floor of the old high school gym. It’s not that I want to replace Natalie with Athena—but that I’ve finally found someone that could be worth opening myself up to that kind of hurt again in Athena.
For her sake and mine, though, I can’t do that.
I need to stay detached. I need to not care. To let Dean and Cayde do what they want, fight it out, figure it out.
This town took everything from me once. And I made a vow, all the way back then when I was just a teenager with a bleeding heart and an angry soul.
I’ll never give this place anything else it can steal from me.