the front of me I play my only card and press myself flat to the front of his pants, denying him the access he wants.
He pulls me back from him with his fist in my hair, creating a superheated space between us. If his eyes could start fires I would be ash on the wind. Zeus jerks my head back another inch as if to remind me whose house I’m in, whose lap I’m in. As if I could ever forget.
“Sweetheart.” His voice the same dark curl, the same edge as slut. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
8
Zeus
Her eyes are a complicated green, black holes in the center where her pupils are huge with lust. She’s angry. Needy. She’s red-faced with it, her hair tangled, her pussy a bare inch from my cock. I hate my pants. I hate myself. There’s a distant tremor, like an earthquake drawing closer. “We’re not doing this.”
Fuck, she’s intoxicating. I could listen to her struggle not to beg me to fuck her for days. For years. Unfortunately for me, determination rolls through her gaze like thunderclouds.
I know what she’s determined to do.
I’m proud of her.
That doesn’t make it less uncomfortable, doesn’t take the knives out of my chest any faster.
“We’re not doing what?” To emphasize my point, I pull her hair, and she pinches her lips closed over a moan.
“You’re not going to lie to me.” She fists the front of my shirt and the tension ratchets up until it pulls all my muscles tight. I fucking refuse to let her crawl away from me. She’s not going to do it. And the panting little whore won’t let me touch her. “That’s not what I am.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I do.” Brigit puts a hand on my face and presses the pad of her thumb to the corner of my lip. “When you’re thinking about what a slut I am, this corner turns up. And maybe it’s true.” She grinds her pussy harder into my pants, and it’s torture, it’s torture. I hiss my displeasure but she doesn’t care. “I am this way. For you. Because—” A hard swallow. I want to use her throat. “Because I love you.” She shifts her hand and covers my mouth entirely. “Don’t say a single goddamn thing unless it’s going to be I love you too, Brigit.”
She lets out a breath and drops her head, moving her hips in a slow circle, and perhaps this is the way I finally die.
Brigit takes her hand away and lifts her face into the dusky half-light of the room. “We’re going to start over. Zeus, you cannot leave all those women with your sister.”
I can already feel her wetness soaking through my pants. That’s how hot she is, how ready. Still, the words she wants me to say stick in my throat.
Why?
A pair of huge hands over mine. A throat in my grip, a pale, narrow throat. Those larger hands squeezing until I couldn’t tell who was really in charge of cutting off the air supply, me or him, me or fucking him. Whose fault is it really, if your hands are against the flesh? That was the moment a part of me broke, snapped, shattered. I can’t care about them. I cannot. Because if I care, then the rest of my life is heartache and guilt, so heavy it can break bone.
It happened anyway, whispers Katie in my ear.
A great pressure around my heart. Fuck—it hurts. Like my ribs really are about to give way. Like the musculature holding my organs in place is rupturing. “I’m leaving them.”
Her hand stills on my face. The rockslide tumble at the pit of my gut continues. My foolish cock bucks against my pants and Brigit responds, adding a grazing pressure that will shortly murder me. From a place outside myself I recognize this fucked-up test for what it is, recognize it for what I want, but I can’t make it stop. Not now. It has too much momentum.
For all my fingers are fisted in her hair, I would let her go. I’m the coward. Me.
“I’m leaving you, too.”
Brigit’s eyes flash, an almost unearthly green in the low light. “No more lies, Zeus.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t care about you, I don’t care about them, I’m leaving all of you—”
She slaps me.
I’m out of the chair with a roar, the handprint sting a burn on my cheek. How fucking dare she. I’m going to fuck some sense into her, I’m