me closer, his arms coming around me to hold me against him.
He was still hard, even though he was softening too, and I didn’t complain when he started to move because I knew he’d make it so that we remained connected.
When he was on his side and I was a little too, my leg hitched higher on his hip so that his cock could remain embedded within me for as long as possible, he pressed a kiss to my temple and muttered, “Sleep.”
Maybe I was a little more exhausted than I realized, because, stupidly, I muttered, “Dream of me.”
He laughed a little. Not meanly. “I always do, but tonight, I don’t have to, Thea. I’m in your arms, and you’re in mine. No dream is better than reality.”
The words had my eyes burning, and I burrowed my face into his throat, loving our position, and finally knew I’d be able to rest.
Whole and happy for one moment, before the miserable future I had ahead of me without him.
ADAM
Have you ever stared into a washing machine, watching the swirl of the clothes, and felt like you wished you could be inside?
Weird wish, I knew, but still, the chance to get clean, to have all your stains washed away in a blur?
I felt like that.
Not because I was stained, but because I wanted to erase the past. I wanted, so fucking badly, to start the day over again. But, even if I did, it wouldn’t change things.
I didn’t realize it, but this had been brewing since the day Thea and I had met.
Fate had a way of kicking you in the balls, but whatever I could have imagined, I never could have anticipated this.
The morning had started out great. Walking into Rosemore with Thea at my side? My arm around her shoulders? The link pretty much humming between us as she laughed up at me, her heart in her eyes, and I laughed back at her, well aware that, for the first time ever, I was happy in this place.
She did that to me. She made me happy.
Of course, I should have known the second Cain was involved it would start to go wrong.
Thea was so nervous about practice that she had all kinds of plans laid down to save herself from the ignominy of being embarrassed by the girls in the locker room. She had padlocks of her own, and two of everything, some of which I was supposed to keep so I could give her new gear if it was stolen from her—the level of planning told me exactly how many times she’d been a new girl. Exactly how often she’d been bullied, and though I wanted to kill someone for it, my hands were tied. All I could do was reassure her that everything was okay.
I hated that my own fucking brother had made a liar out of me.
Whatever I’d expected, however, it wasn’t striding into the pool with a pair of too fucking small Speedos up my asscrack because my dick of a brother had sabotaged my locker. I’d wasted a good ten minutes trying to find some shorts that fit, and irony of ironies, had to scour the lost and found Thea so feared for some shorts.
Great.
Borrowed swimwear.
Wasn’t sure it could be grosser, but hell, Thea needed me, so I stopped dicking around and went out to the pool.
The outright chaos that fell when I walked into the arena, though, was something that had me rearing back, taking a second to figure out what the fuck was going down. But when I looked, when I finally realized what was happening—I still couldn’t piece it together.
Cain was on the ground, his face eating cement, with one of the security guards on him. The guy had Cain’s hands in his grip, and his knee was on my twin’s back. Maria, Cain’s girlfriend, was sobbing, her shoulders hunched as she sat on one of the stools lining the wall. Coach Kyle was standing next to her, his hand on her arm, not in a conciliatory way or an affectionate one, but in a ‘you’re not going anywhere’ way.
I blinked at him, at the guard, and then I realized the small crowd of people at the foot of the pool were shielding something else. With a quick glance at the kids, I saw Thea wasn’t there, and I rushed over, the fucking Speedos damn near castrating me as I moved as swiftly as I could in them.