“Yeah, it is,” he agrees and then sighs, finishing his beer. “I told you the truth, Athena. She asked me to come back to her place, said she’d help patch me up from the fight. I went along with it because I was lonely, and she was pretty, and I wanted to distract myself. I didn’t intend to do anything with her. We just had a drink, smoked some weed, and that was supposed to be it. And when she tried to make it more than that—I literally pushed her off of me and left. She was pissed about it.”
“So you guys didn’t doanything?”
The look on Jaxon’s face tells me that something happened. It makes my gut twist with a fit of jealousy that I know I have no right to feel.
“She got my towel down and my dick in her mouth,” he says finally, reluctantly. “She kind of got ahold of me before I could stop her. But I didn’t let it go on for very long,” Jaxon adds quickly. “Once I came to my senses, I was out of there.”
There’s no reason for me to feel like this. No reason to blink back the tears burning behind my eyelids. Jaxon isn’t mine. I don’t have even the tiniest claim on him. And there’s no way he could have known that Pixie was the one stalking me.
But still—it hurts.
The devil’s coming, and he loves a good sacrifice.
I’d wanted to believe that note wasn’t real. That it was just someone who knew about my connection to the club using it to scare me. I hadn’t wanted to believe they were capable of something so evil.
I know it’s time for me to accept that the club is no longer what I grew up around. That a lot of the people there now don’t even remember me. Don’t have any connection to me.
But some still do. The president. His son. A handful of others who knew my father, who ought to have protected me and my mother instead of trying to punish us for something that we didn’t even have anything to do with. That wasn’t even our fault.
“I’m sorry,” Jaxon says helplessly, and my head snaps up. I’ve never heard one of the guys apologize to me like that before.
I mean, Dean and Cayde have apologized to me for things. Sort of. They’ve admitted they didn’t do a good enough job of protecting me, that they were so wrapped up in the game that they forgot I was a person with needs and emotions—which is a shitty enough thing to admit in the first place. But the apologies, while I felt they were sincere, didn’t sound anything like this.
There’s a naked pain in Jaxon’s voice that I don’t fully understand, and when I look up at him, his dark eyes look sad, his hand running through his hair. “I’m going to get us another drink,” he says, shoving back his high-top stool and stalking towards the bar.
You can’t act like he cheated on you,I tell myself firmly as I finish my beer, still picking at the label as I watch Jaxon stand at the bar, talking to the scruffy, thin man behind it.He didn’t. He’s not yours.But it stings that he would have let any other woman touch him after rejecting me so soundly. And even more so that it would have beenher.
He didn’t know. And he left.It’s stupid that I’m even having this argument with myself in my head. None of this really matters. Jaxon isn’t mine, and he never will be. I don’t even know why we’re sitting in this bar, talking, when he could have just taken me back to the manor and dumped me on Dean and Cayde to handle.
I feel like a mess of emotions, the panic of earlier receding into the pangs of jealousy and a sudden, irrational, rising anger that he’s acting yet again like he cares about me when he ignored me for so long. Part of me wants to walk out, find my own way home and let him worry, but I’m not stupid enough after what happened to walk through the dark of Blackmoor alone. I feel like I’m almost vibrating with the tangle of all my emotions. When Jaxon walks back to our table and sets down two more beers, glancing at me with a casual, “I’ll be back, I’m going to go take a piss,” I feel like I’m coming unraveled.
How can he be so casual about all of this? How can he not see that I’m falling apart here?
I shove my chair back, stalking after him through the darkened bar. I can feel the eyes of the few patrons on me, finally paying attention to who else is in their haven, but I ignore it. I don’t care that I’m following him into the men’s room. I’m just fucking sick of him walking away from me, fucking sick of him acting like the world isn’t falling to pieces.Myworld, which has been crumbling from the minute I looked at the still-smoking ashes of my home and hasn’t fucking stopped.
Jaxon turns when he hears the bang of the swinging door to the bathroom, his face shocked and amused all at once as he sees me, which just pisses me off even more. “Are you going to keep following me into places where you don’t belong?” he asks in a gravelly voice, his mouth twitching at the corners.
“I don’t belong anywhere in this fucking town,” I hiss. “Between the bikers and your families, everyone has maderealfucking sure of that. But I know I’m fucking tired of you watching like none of this matters to you, like it isn’t your life that’s affected, too.”
His shoulders stiffen, and he moves towards me, his dark eyes narrowing as he looks down. “I know very well how what happens in this town affects my life,” he says, and I can hear that pain in his voice again, a depth of it that startles me. “You keep coming after me, Athena. I keep telling you to go away, keep trying to push you away, and you just keep after me. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m dangerous? That I’m bad for you and you’re bad for me? That nothing good is going to come fromthis?”
When I’d thought about Jaxon kissing me again, it definitely wasn’t in a men’s room in a more-than-questionable dive bar. The floor is sticky under my boots, the air is stuffy, and I don’t really want to touch any surface in here. In fact, I’m not even sure I would want topeein here. But all of that is forgotten when Jaxon’s hands go to either side of my face, dragging my mouth towards his, his rough palms pressing into the soft skin of my face as his firm lips crash down on mine, and I feel as if every single tangled up thing inside of me bursts free all at once.
The need that I felt earlier floods through me, my arms sliding around his neck without thinking, and all I can think about is how solid he feels against me, my breasts pressing into his hard chest, the warm scent of his skin and the rich smell of leather, the way the long dark hair on top of his head slides sideways, brushing against my face as his mouth slants over mine, his tongue slipping into my mouth. He tastes sweet and sour like beer, smells like exhaust. My body is thrumming with desire, so much so, that when his hands go to my waist and lift me up, setting me on the edge of one of the sinks so that he can nudge my legs apart and come to stand between them, I don’t resist.
Instead, I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him closer. I breathe him in because he feels good, smells good, tastes good, because he feels like a link between my old world and the one that I’ve been forced into because Iwanthim and I’m so tired of being denied what I want, freedom, agency, the fucking truth.
I slide my hands over the bristled side shave of his head, run the tips of my fingers through the long dark hair on top, press them into the back of his skull. When he surges forward, one hand bracing against the filthy mirror behind me as he grinds his hips against me, the hard line of his cock pressing hotly between my thighs, I bite down on his lower lip, nipping at the soft flesh until I taste blood.
Jaxon growls deep in his throat, and I can feel him throbbing, feel his hand tightening on my hip as he nips me back, sucking my lower lip into his mouth as he licks away the sting of the bite. The kissing is almost a battle, teeth and tongues, grabbing and grinding, tongues tangled together. I hear him groan as he pulls me harder against him, his cock thick and hard against me, and I want him inside of me so desperately that at the moment, I feel like I might do just about anything to have that.
But, of course, it’s Jaxon who pulls away first. But not all the way. He stays between my legs, his forehead pressed to mine, panting as he tries to catch his breath. “Not here,” he says between breaths, reaching up to slide his hand through my hair. “We’re not doing this here.”
He didn’t say you’re not doing it at all,is the first thought that goes through my head. I feel hot and flushed, and while a dingy men’s room in an out of the way bar isn’t where I’d prefer to have my first tryst with Jaxon either, I’m not exactly thinking logically right now.
“Come on.” He grips my waist, pulling me down from the sink, and sets me back down on my own two feet, his body still brushing mine. It feels as if he doesn’t quite want to let go of me, and the truth is that I don’t want him to either. If we were anywhere else, I think we’d be naked right now, Jaxon’s mouth and hands moving over my body. “Let’s go back and finish our drinks.”
I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about, but when we walk back into the smoky darkness of the bar, it comes rushing back. The club, Pixie, what happened between her and Jaxon, and I feel that knotting in my stomach again, a premonition of something bad to come.