Self-destructive vendetta or not.
“Frey,” he questions, brushing my hair to the side, exposing my neck.
“I want this,” I tell him. “Please.”
He grasps my hips, his breathing now shallow.
Again and again, he moves within me, bringing me closer.
“Is this okay?” he asks carefully.
“Yes,” I murmur.
My head rears back against his shoulder as a stranger’s moan reverberates throughout the room. Me? A low, guttural sound like the rev of a jet engine follows it.
This isn’t fucking.
This is taking. A high so intense I can’t lie still beneath it, a slave to the pleasure. I writhe instead, resisting the pull. Too weak to keep it from dragging me under.
The pain turns to pure pleasure, an intense feeling of sensations that I’ve never felt before.
And somehow, he knows.
“Good girl. Take me.” He bucks into me with no reprieve. Slow and steady. “Take all of me, Frey.” Then harder, slamming in, drawing out screams. Moans. Cries. “Fuck, I can’t…” His fingers curl in my hair, forcing my head back as his mouth finds my ear. “Oh, fuck…”
He slams home, holding himself deep as I fall apart.
SIX
I’m no expert,but I thought destruction would feel far worse than this…
Shouldn’t it?
Rather than burn in hellfire for all eternity, we wind up lying on the black mat, dripping sweat. Our bodies dominate opposite ends, not touching but still too close. Close enough to sense his breathing slow and hear how his teeth click together when he can’t stay silent anymore.
“You stood at that railing for well over half an hour.” His tone is softer, either from exhaustion or pity. Gone is the raspy hum—he’s serious. “Iwatchedyou.”
That statement sends a quiver through my belly.
I shift, crossing my arms over my chest. “How do you—”
“I wasn’t going to let you jump.” He laughs darkly, shaking his head. “Why do it anyway? Did you want to feel it? Falling? Crashing? The pain?”
He rolls to face me. Both of his legs unfold before him, nearly twice the length of mine. He’s so big in such an enclosed space. Too big to jump off a bridge unnoticed. I’d barely make a splash, but he’d make waves falling from that height.
“Didyou? Why else were you there?” I don’t look at him as I pose the question. So many stains, mysterious and dark, speckle the gray concrete floor around the mat. Blood? Sweat? Spit? The material doesn’t reveal any answers when I swipe my palm against it. Just cold, hard silence.
“Maybe,” he says finally. He sounds heavy when he’s being honest—a weird thing to notice after knowing someone for barely an hour. He’s cyclic, spitting out truth and lies in an almost predictable rhythm. His lies are soft and empty, but the truth lands like a sucker punch.
And the sting makes me feel something. Even if it’s pain.
“I’ll tell you what, though. If I were going to off myself, I wouldn’t want to fucking feel it,” he says. He lifts his arm above him, eyeing the tattoos painting his skin from wrist to shoulder. “I’d go numb. Get high, so I wouldn’t have to feel shit. Not the guilt or regret…”
He trails off, but the confession isn’t for me. In a way, he’s speaking for both of us, deploying a rare, potent drug. Honesty. My veins hum, gobbling it up, sending it straight through my heart. I’m not addicted, but it’s only a matter of time.
I might be just as susceptible to vices as Hale. We shared a mother, after all.
“My...brother. He was the best person you could ever meet. I mean it,” I hear myself confess, but I don’t really register saying the words. More than anything else, it’s like my thoughts are spilling out into the open—all those dirty things I’d never say to anyone else. “But then he changed. Hale knew something. Something bad. He wanted to tell. He tried to tell me, I think…”