by Alexis Hall
His teeth scraped my earlobe. “I don’t need to spank you to own you, Arden.”
And then he pulled my hips back and entered me—one long, merciless push that I felt all the way to my bones, then a pounding so gloriously brutal it seemed to make my heart shake and my pulse falter. There was enough lube that it didn’t hurt, but it nearly hurt, and that became its own strange pleasure: a haze of rough thrusts and stretched-tight muscle, fingers digging into my hips and burning breath on my neck, and the deep, shuddering satisfaction of being so thoroughly taken. It was an odd and tantalising paradox, my body utterly conquered by his, and yet I was free, strong, happy, as I hadn’t been for months.
Caspian was a surge of ferine power at my back, snarling and gasping as he fucked me, the sweat from his brow prickling against my neck, sharp with salt and heat. And for once, I wasn’t lost in the frustration of not being able to see him. Feeling was enough, the ferocity of him, and the intensity of his desire for me, becoming, in those moments of physical unity, a kind of vulnerability.
I twisted back as best I could. “Kiss me.”
It emerged neither entreaty nor demand—just the stating of a private obvious. And Caspian leaned over me, his lips finding mine in a clumsy collision, words drowned beneath our tongues, and the tears on his cheeks wetting mine. I came less than a minute later, in great wrenching spurts, like I was splattering my soul all over the wall. And Caspian not long after, with a broken sound, pressed jaggedly against my open, panting mouth.
Oh God. What had we done?
Chapter 28
Well, I knew what we’d done. I always had. And done it anyway. But suddenly all I could see was Nathaniel’s face. The way he’d looked at me, his eyes a barbed-wire snarl of hatred and despair, as if he’d already known what was going to happen. And the reality of cooling sweat and heavy bodies and my arsehole sticky with someone else’s come flattened me like a cartoon anvil. A cartoon anvil made of regret, self-loathing, and discovering I had made yet another fucking awful decision.
I turned awkwardly in Caspian’s arms, my jeans catching against his trousers, and my cock knocking damply into his. He barely moved, still almost fallen over me, breathing in rasps.
“Tell me,” I said, “you’re breaking up with Nathaniel. As in, right the fuck now.”
There was a way too long silence. Probably it was a good time to pull up my pants.
I tried again. “Caspian, I need to hear that you’re not going to stay with Nathaniel. Not after what we…after, um, that.”
Again. Nothing.
“We were just really bad.” My voice rose and cracked. “Don’t make it into something even worse. Please.”
At last, Caspian lifted his head from my neck and stepped back. Began putting his dick away, which was never the best part of an evening. “Believe me, Arden, I’m well aware of what I’ve done.”
“What we’ve done. It takes two to cheat.”
He was buttoning his trousers. Readjusting his jacket. Smoothing the sweat-damp curls from his temples. Whether we were in a bedroom or an alleyway, the sight of Caspian Hart putting himself back together was so familiar to me. And hurt, just the same as ever. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”
“I deserve to be blamed,” I cried. “I was right here. Doing it. Wanting it. Fully consenting to it.”
“Nevertheless, it was my weakness that allowed it to happen.”
“We both allowed it to happen.” Okay, I had to cool the fuck down. I’d done enough shouting at Caspian in a fire escape to last me a lifetime. I breathed. Tried to be reasonable. “Look, this was really wrong. There’s no getting away from that. But why we did it wasn’t wrong.”
He was still…faffing. Squaring his cuffs. Arranging his hair. Chasing nonexistent creases. “What do you mean?”
“For fuck’s sake.” So much for calm. “That didn’t happen because we both fancied a rough screw against a wall. It happened because…because we can’t keep our hands off each other. Because we’re right together. You must see that now.”
He let out the softest, most defeated sigh I’d ever heard. “I’ve never doubted for a moment that, were I a different man, you would be everything I most desired, admired, and coveted in the world.”
“I don’t want you to be a different man.” I lunged across the space he’d put between us and threw my arms around him. Which made him go completely rigid so, y’know, nonideal. “I love you. Everything about you. And all the things you can’t love about yourself.”
He closed his eyes, and I caught a glint of light upon his lashes that might have been tears. “Oh, Arden, my Arden, I can’t be with you.”
“You can’t be with Nathaniel.”
“He’s…he’s my only chance.”
“Only chance at what? You know he won’t make you happy.”
“My only chance to”—Caspian faltered, choked slightly on his own breath—“my only chance to be someone not made in the image of Lancaster Steyne.”
I stared at him in actual horror. “My God, you’re not. I promise you’re not.”
“How sweet you are.” Compliments shouldn’t have been allowed to sound that fucking sad. “I’d half forgotten how it feels having someone think of me as you do.”
“The way I think of you is true. It’s who you are.”
Caspian was already untangling himself from my embrace, though my pathetic attempts to retain a state of tangle meant he ended up keeping one of my hands. And he seemed as reluctant to let it go as I was to be let go. “I’m not like you,” he said softly. “Perhaps once I was, or could have been, but what’s pure and good and beautiful in you is such a twisted thing in me.”
“Nothing”—I tightened my fingers around his and squeezed for all I was worth—“we have ever done together has been even a little bit twisted.”
“Because of you.”
“No, Caspian. No. Because when you’ve fucked me, used me, and even when you’ve hur—”
“Must you say it?”
Apparently yes, I did. Despite the pleading note in his voice. “Even when you’ve hurt me, you’ve always made me feel so absolutely cherished. Do you think that would be the case if there was anything of Lancaster Steyne in you?”
“Your capacity to find merit in my corruption is to your credit, not to mine.”
“So what?” I asked, with a bitterness I couldn’t quite control. “You’re just going to stay with Nathaniel even though he makes you hate yourself?”
Caspian swallowed. “He…he sees me.”
“He doesn’t see you.” I closed my spare hand over the one Caspian already held. He was so cold, trembling in my grasp. “He only sees damage and ugliness and his own prejudices.”
“I want to be with him. I want to be the man he needs. Or at the very least”—his mouth tightened, as if to seal away its sorrow—“I want to know that I can be. That I’m not at the mercy of…of what I let happen to me when I was younger.”
I was about to insist that he hadn’t let anything happen. But the last time we’d had this conversation—etched as it was, in layers of horrible, on my memory—he’d described everything that happened when he was a kid as something he did. As progress went, it was trench warfare slow, but it was progress. And if that meant that some part of him was listening to me—wanted to listen to me—why the fuck was he still with someone else?
“So instead,” I snapped when I shouldn’t have, “you’ll be at the mercy of Nathaniel’s bullshit?”
He broke the tender knot of our fingers and pulled away from me, his expression shifting abruptly from sadness to a kind of savagery. “It is my choice, Arden. My choice. Can’t you understand?”
“I understand,” I said, tossing the words at him like stones, “that you’re miserable. Smoking. Lying about it. And that we just banged in an alleyway when you’re supposed to be engaged to someone else. Surely you can’t think that’s right?”
“I will do better.” I watched his anger die, exhausted by its
own expression. “I…I know I can.”
A profound sense of powerlessness was settling over me—a familiar one, too, because this was how it had gone when Caspian had dumped me, the love that burned so brightly and so fiercely inside me such a fragile thing in comparison to all his years of fear and pain. I knew I couldn’t blame him for that, but it was hard to bear. Especially when I became its casualty too. Caught in the crossfire of his self-punishment, when all I wanted was to be with him.
“Is this really what you want?” Tears caught in my voice and rose to my eyes but I was sick of crying, fucking sick of it, and I swallowed them down. “A husband you hide from. Until you get so desperate to feel something good that you cheat on him instead? And what about me, Caspian? I thought sleeping with someone else’s partner would be a line I’d never cross. Except now I have, and I know that’s on me, and I just have to live with it, but what we’ve done here changes us both.”
He folded his arms, remote as marble between the cracks of moonlight. “I’ve never claimed to be a good man, whatever you wanted to believe of me.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” I came very close to stamping my foot again, but managed to restrain myself. “I’m trying to make you see this isn’t fair on anyone. I’m sure Nathaniel doesn’t actually want to be the altar for your sacrifice. And I don’t want to be your secret dirty fucktoy.”
No response from Caspian. I couldn’t even tell what he was thinking.
So I gave a shaky laugh. “I want to be your openly committed dirty fucktoy.”
“We’re bad for each other, Arden. Tonight proves it.”
“The optics right now aren’t great, I’ll grant you. But that’s about context, not about us.” I reached out to him, pleading. “I loved being with you—the kinky sex was a nice bonus but you took care of me, helped me find myself when I was lost, and you know something, when you let me, I took care of you too. I made you happy.”
“What I enjoy is not what is right for me.”
“Which is why you’re denying yourself anything you truly want? Anything that truly gives you peace?”
He took another step away from me. Only a few paces between us but they felt like treacle, sticky and unbreachable. “With Nathaniel, I have a chance to be someone I admire. With you, I would always be someone I despised.”
It was the crack of the whip before the bite. The sound of the words before the words themselves. For a second or two, there was nothing. And then, God help me, the pain damn near stopped my heart.
“Oh, Caspian.” I covered my mouth with my hands. “I…I don’t know to cope with you believing that.”
I guess he knew he’d pulled my guts out and scattered them over the pavement, and maybe it had been an accident, because, honestly, he kind of looked like he was about to faint.
By contrast, I was floating in a cool white calm. Like I’d gone through hurting and come out the other side and found…nothing. “I think,” I heard myself say, my own voice echoing distantly in my ears, “I don’t want to ever see you again.”
Chapter 29
Well. Everything was awful again. I’d slept with another person’s person, which made me pretty much scum, or rather contributed a new layer of scum to the scuminess I’d already accumulated by attempting to snog my best friend. On top of which, the first man I’d ever properly loved had told me to my face that—
Actually, I didn’t even want to think about it. The memory had claws. The part of me that wasn’t reduced to bloody mush could vaguely recognise that Caspian’s words probably hadn’t been a real reflection of his feelings. But the part of me that wasn’t reduced to bloody mush was very small. And also it didn’t fucking matter. He’d said those things to me. Fucked my arse, my head, and my heart in the same damn fire escape. While catastrophically determined to marry someone else.
I was so sad for him. For the fact the two people he had trusted most had made him believe so little of himself that even the possibility of happiness left him terrified. But I was angry too. Angry that he seemed to heed every voice but mine. Angry that he wouldn’t trust the truth of our desires. And angry-beyond-angry that he’d taken from me the time we’d shared. All my cherished memories reduced to a mistake he’d made one summer.
Fuck him for that. Just…
Fuck. Him.
Home was still an empty warehouse. Though I did have a couple of texts, one slightly concerned one from George, which I batted away with an apology and a claim of being tired, and one from Ellery asking how Broderick was. Which actually cheered me up a bit because it was the first time she’d initiated an exchange since New Year’s. I sent back that Broderick missed her and hoped she’d come back soon. And then I climbed into bed with my laptop to spend a couple of hours on Skype with Poppy and Nik, who apparently had eight gazillion properties they wanted to show me—some of which were in Cambridge, which left me briefly confused until I remembered it was the fake Boston Cambridge, not Cambridge-Cambridge.
I think I was okay company, even if some of my cheer was a little forced, what with the whole I’m someone who cheats now thing. Which wasn’t really something I wanted to share, y’know, with people who liked me. Because they’d either stop liking me, which would suck, or they’d be on my side, even though I didn’t deserve it, which would suck more. Better just to look at pictures of houses and say ooh in the right places. Besides, Nik seemed genuinely excited and I didn’t want to ruin it with a honking great ethical failure.
I can’t say it was the best night of my life, especially when I finally had to say goodbye, turn off the light, and lie alone under my duvet with nothing to do except torture myself with my brain…um, I mean, try to get to sleep. I basically had the don’t think about pink elephants problem. In that no matter what I did, I always snapped back to the alleyway, Caspian all shadows and silver, and his voice full of ice, telling me over and over and over again: With Nathaniel, I have a chance to be someone I admire. With you, I would always be someone I despised. It was fast becoming an echo to all my recollections of him—carried on the shush of the waves in Kinlochbervie or woven with the pattern of his breath as he held me down and fucked me. I saw the shadow of the words in his remembered eyes. And tasted them in every kiss he’d ever given me.
So yeah. Fun stuff. There were tears. And not a ton of sleep. But I got through it. And that was kind of how it went. The days came, the nights lurked, and I got through them. And slowly, things got easier: my life without Caspian, without even the hope or the dream of Caspian. Which I had finally chosen for myself. And would, given enough time, become just my life again.
About a week or so into this brave new world that had no Caspian in’t, I left work as usual only to hear someone calling my name. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened—normally it was just a certain type of journalist sniffing around for a certain type of story, though Boyle, at least, had left me alone since Caspian had stepped in. So I followed what had become my usual procedure: Put my head down, tell them “no comment.”
“But you are Arden. Arden”—the stranger hesitated, tripping slightly on my name—“St. Ives?”
I quickened my steps. Tried, and failed, to stop my shoulders hunching. The fact I was sort of used to this didn’t mean I liked it. “I said ‘no comment.’”
“I know. I’m sorry. The thing is, I’m not a journalist. I’m…” Another pause. The same uncomfortable mix of uncertainty and eagerness in his voice. “That is. I’m Jonas. Jonas Jackson. Does that mean anything to you?”
I came to a dead stop. Clarity like a blade to my throat.
“Arden, I’m your—”
No way was I ready for him to say that to me. “I know.”
Maybe I’d known from the start. There was a dull inevitability to the sense of recognition. Turning, I faced the man who’d…who’d what? Provided some of my genes. Loomed with incomprehensible menace over my childhood. Nearly destroyed my mother. And he gazed anxiously back at me with his plain brown eyes.
Eyes as plain and brown as mine.
“You stay the fuck away from me,” I said. Which would have been tough as all hell if I hadn’t sounded so trembly.
To be fair, Jonas didn’t move. Just put his hands in the air like I had him at gunpoint. I wished I did have him at gunpoint. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just had to find out if it was really you.”
We were on a public street. The office was less than thirty seconds away. My phone was right in my pocket. I was okay. Totally okay. Totally safe. “Well, you’ve found out. What now?”
“That’s entirely up to you, Arden.”
I should have left right then. I knew I should. But…I didn’t.
And Jonas—my father, I guess—went on, “I’m not here to make excuses to you. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve done a lot of bad things, and there’s still more I regret.”
“Wow.” I settled my bag more comfortably on my shoulder. “So great you came to see me, then.”
“It was selfish. Don’t think I’m hiding from that either. But when I saw you in the paper last month, I knew I had to come find you. You see, of all those mistakes, all those regrets, the one that haunts me is that”—his voice wavered, then steadied—“I lost my son.”
I shrugged. “Well, I did fine without you.”
“You did better than fine.” He smiled, a fucking dimple glimmering his cheek. “You’ve made a wonderful life for yourself, anyone can see that. Oxford education, interesting job, lovely girlfriend. I’ve no right to say it but you’re…I’m proud of you.”
He did have no right to say it. And I didn’t need to hear it. I’d met him less than five minutes ago. So what did it matter if he was proud? Except…something inside me twisted with the word. A thorn buried so deeply and for so long I’d forgotten it was there finally coming loose. “Ellery’s just a friend. That whole story was bullshit except”—I tipped my chin up—“the bit about me being queer as fuck.”