Seduction

by Jaymin Eve

  He dropped his arms lower before lifting me up, so that he could capture my lips. We were both a little out of control, and the kiss was hard and biting. His power licked across my skin, down my arms and across my waist where he was gripping me. The pain-pleasure thing was usually really enjoyable, but right now I had too much pain inside of me already.

  I wrenched my mouth back, a salty taste on my lips as I stared up into his shadowed face. “Pain … I need less pain right now,” I tried to explain, and Coen seemed to understand. He dropped me gently to the floor, before pressing a more gentle kiss to my forehead.

  “I’ll get one of the others,” he said, stepping back. I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “I can’t control my Pain around you tonight, but you shouldn’t be alone. Tonight, you need one of my brothers.”

  He didn’t sound upset—which was a huge relief—but I knew that Coen was great at concealing his thoughts. Before I could double-check, though, he was gone, striding back toward the cave.

  The agony was building inside of me again, now that I was back on my own, so I started walking. I headed toward the sound of water that I could hear through the trees. I expected Coen to send out Siret or Aros, since they were the happiest of the five brothers, and Aros especially had a power more suited to easing pain. What I didn’t expect was to see the same volatile duo that had been nominated to babysit me the night before. Rome and Yael appeared on either side of me as I walked, their profiles only just visible in my peripheral vision. They didn’t say anything, but kept pace quietly, until we hit the bank of the river that I had been walking toward. It was much bigger than I had expected, and the sound almost roared in my ears, a mist floating up toward my face.

  “There must be a waterfall nearby,” Yael commented quietly.

  It was the first thing that any of us had said, and the sudden sound of his voice shocked me a little bit. I stared toward the inky spill of water churning a short distance below me, and started to cry. It was gentle at first, but soon began to evolve into heaving sobs that crumbled me into a ball on the damp grass. Arms wrapped around me, holding me together as I lost myself to the grief, pouring it all out into the night until my tears ran dry and there was nothing left to give. I pushed myself away from the tangled embrace that I had ended up in—not because I didn’t want to be close to them, but because my skin was flushed, my face and neck were uncomfortably soaked in tears, and my hair was matted to the damp skin. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to tear the clothes from my body and submerge myself in the cool, churning water before me.

  “Do you guys know how to swim?” I asked, taking another step closer to the water and feeling the bank give way a little beneath my feet.

  “I don’t see how that question is relevant when we all know that you definitely can’t swim, which would mean that we’re definitely not going swimming right now,” Yael answered cautiously.

  I almost smiled at the hint of trepidation riding his tone. My hands were already playing with the hem of my shirt, so it was barely even a conscious decision when I started to lift it. It was halfway up my torso when Rome spoke.

  “It might be dark out here, Will, but we can still tell the difference between a black shirt and a whole lot of bare skin.”

  “Oh good,” I answered, quickly pulling the shirt all the way off, and then slipping my fingers into the waist of the kickass fighting pants that Siret had made for me. “If you can see me, you can stop me from drowning.”

  “Not going swimming.” Yael sounded disgruntled—as though he already knew that he had lost this particular fight.

  “Want me to start crying again?” I asked.

  He released a heavy breath, and I almost started to feel bad for him, until the breath turned into a curse as I slipped the pants the rest of the way down my legs and stepped out of both my pants and my boots.

  “Maybe we should just let her get naked,” Rome said quietly. “It seems to make her feel better.”

  Maybe he was right; maybe taking my clothes off did give me some weird sense of freedom. Maybe it was all a by-product of living a smothered, rule-bound existence, or maybe it was just my way of preparing for the inevitable naked accidents that came about as a result of my clumsiness.

  “Don’t even pretend you’re doing it for her,” Yael snorted.

  I ignored them both, stripping my underwear off and stepping away from the discarded items. I crouched down a little, trying to get closer to the water, but the dirt along the side of the bank wasn’t so much dirt as it was mud, and I didn’t so much walk down the short incline to the water as fall directly on my ass and slide down the short incline to the water.

  “Now we actually have to go swimming,” I announced, as Rome and Yael cleared the slope-of-death and landed beside me in what I assumed would have been a lithe and graceful way, if I had been able to see it.

  “Are you okay, Rocks?”

  I wasn’t even sure which one of them had asked. It was too dark for me to see much of anything clearly, which was probably why neither of them had been able to catch me—the way they usually would have—before I went down.

  “I’m fine,” I huffed out, as hands plucked me up and held me out so that I was dangling somewhat. They turned with me so that I ended up further out into the water, but facing back toward the bank. “I just have mud in places that mud should never be,” I admitted, as the hands carefully set me down again.

  My feet were lowered into water this time, instead of mud. It was something they appreciated.

  Yael chuckled, and judging by the proximity of the sound, he was the one to have picked me up. “We can fix that. Can you stand right here without falling over, drowning, stabbing someone or setting the forest on fire?”

  “Not going to make any promises.” I sniffed.

  I could hear Rome’s low laugh, then, and I turned to the side to try and make him out. It was dark, but he had been right about what he said before: it wasn’t too dark to be able to tell the difference between our arena clothing and the sudden expanse of bared skin as he swept his shirt off. I swallowed as I stared at what I could make out of the muscles lining his torso, and then I had to quickly blink and look away as he pushed his pants off and threw them toward the bank with his shirt and boots. Yael had taken a step back from me, and was pulling his clothes off, too … and now I was starting to realise why they overreacted every time I got naked.

  It was … a lot to take in.

  I turned in the water, my heartbeat trying to rip out of my chest, and took a hesitant little step further in.

  “I said not to move,” Yael cautioned me, his voice muffled behind the clothing he was pulling off.

  “How’d you even see that with a shirt over your face?” I complained. “I barely moved!”

  “I just figured you would try as soon as I wasn’t holding you back anymore.”

  I grumbled in response, digging my toes into the riverbed. There was a strange combination of soft sand and sharp little rocks beneath my feet. It wasn’t unpleasant, but each small prick of discomfort was enough to keep me feeling alert. It wasn’t the sort of river that you could lay down and doze off in, or the sort of river that you could lazily float through while you basked in the sun …

  “You couldn’t do that in any river,” Rome announced, suddenly appearing right in front of me as he spoke to the thoughts in my head. “Why do we need to keep reminding you that you can’t swim?”

  “Maybe I can,” I countered, taking a step further into the water again—this brought me directly into contact with him, and before I could stop myself, my hands were on the bare skin of his stomach.

  I could feel his muscles contract at my touch, and I could hear the deep breath he pulled in above my head.

  “Maybe all beta-sol-dweller-hybrids can swim …” I continued. “Maybe it’s a secret skill of mine, just like disappearing people’s clothes and starting little fires.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Yael sounded from directl
y behind me.

  I couldn’t see the evidence that they were both completely naked, but Rome was pressed tightly enough to my front for me to be able to feel it, and when Yael’s heat draped across my back, I knew that they had both stripped down. Did they do that for me? A show of naked solidarity?

  “You like being naked,” Rome said, answering my thoughts yet again. “And you threatened to cry. We thought this was the safer option.”

  I laughed—the sound sudden and light. I hadn’t laughed that easily in a long time, but I found his statement hilarious. There was nothing safe about the three of us standing naked in a river, with mud stuck to places on my body that would need to be washed sooner or later. Nope. This was not my version of a safe scenario. As though catching on to what had set me off, Rome started to chuckle along with me, and then Yael was laughing, too. That made me laugh even harder, until I was slumped against the hard chest in front of me and the laughter naturally died away. It was almost a relief, being able to laugh as much as I had just cried: I tilted my head up to the sky, trying to catch sight of the stars hiding behind what seemed to be a dense cloud cover. I stayed that way while the other two quietened, pulling in deep breath after deep breath. I felt like an open box: my emotions spilling out everywhere. All I wanted was to be submerged in the water, to cool the burn of intensity that seemed to be leaking out of me in a constant stream.

  “Can I swim now?” I asked the shadow that loomed over me.

  “Yeah, Will.” Rome looped an arm around the small of my back, pulling me up off my feet as he stepped further back into the water.

  He drew us out into the middle of the stream and I saw Yael’s shadow following us—I could also still feel him close by. It seemed that they had both forgotten their rivalry, at least for the moment. They were putting aside their own needs to take care of mine. It warmed something inside my chest, and I looped my arms around Rome’s neck, pulling my legs up around his waist. I had intended to wrap myself around him in a hug, but his sudden grunt and the way his hands slipped down to my butt was enough to make me pause and re-evaluate the heat of something huge and hard pressing between my legs.

  Whoops.

  “Just ignore it,” Rome growled, “or this is going to be a very short … swim.”

  “I don’t even want to know what it is,” Yael spoke up, only sounding a little agitated.

  “Wouldn’t it be a him?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “I mean … an it has no gender, right? So wouldn’t it be a him? Wait … wouldn’t it be a you? Shouldn’t it be a you? But if it’s not a you, then does it have a name or something to separate itself from you?”

  Okay, yes. I was rambling. It wasn’t like I was completely inexperienced; there had been that one boy in my seventeenth life-cycle. But ten clicks of fumbling, pain, and an inevitable disappointment did not compare to me now having a god’s thing pressing right against my thing—

  “Please stop,” Yael interrupted my thought. “Firstly, we don’t want to hear about you and a fumbling—soon to be dead—dweller. And please say the words, at least. That was one of the most uncomfortable inner monologues I’ve ever heard from you, Willa-toy. I mean it. Say dic—”

  “Whoa!” I tried to twist out and hit him, but I only managed to push my torso back from Rome and create enough momentum to fall backwards. I might have flopped into the water if Yael hadn’t stepped up and caught me between the two of them. “That’s enough of that conversation,” I squeaked, once I was secured.

  I didn’t even want to think about what I was now feeling pressed against the base of my spine.

  “You’re still thinking about it,” Yael complained softly, his voice in my ear.

  “I can’t help it.” I tipped my head back, letting it fall onto his shoulder. “It’s right there. He’s right there? You’re right there? Someone needs to help clear up the personal pronoun issue.”

  “It’s a dic—” Yael tried again, but my knee-jerk reaction this time was absolutely no different to the last time.

  I swivelled around to hit him again, and somehow ended up unbalancing us all. My sudden, swinging lurch was enough to tip Rome backwards, and I was forced to twist off to the side to avoid falling on top of him. I sank into the river, the cool water rushing over my head and the sharp little rocks biting briefly into my skin. Luckily, the water wasn’t very deep, so my head still broke the surface when I found my feet again, or else this might have been a very different night. Different, because I would have drowned.

  I slicked the hair away from my face, glancing back and forth between the two big shadows standing near. Neither of them were reaching for me, even though I could see the bunching of their arms in the darkness—a sure sign that fists were being clenched.

  “You really need to stop doing that,” Rome warned me. “We don’t know what might be in these waters, and if I can’t stop you from drowning, I can’t let you in the water.”

  “But I can swim,” I protested. “I’m doing it right now! Look!” I spread my arms out, pulling my hands from the water so that they could hear the trickle of water dribbling back to the surface from my fingers.

  “You’re standing, Willa-toy.” Yael sounded amused. “That’s not swimming.”

  “Let’s agree to disagree.” I took another step backwards, and they matched it with a step forward. “How long do you think the others will let us stay out here?”

  “Long enough,” Rome said, avoiding the question.

  “I think we’re in the middle of the stream right now—it might not get any deeper,” I noted. “Do you think we could walk a little further up?”

  “You want to see the waterfall?” Rome asked.

  I nodded, before realising that they couldn’t see me. “Yes.” My voice was faint—smaller than I had intended.

  I was standing there naked, in the dark, with two completely bare Abcurses and too much emotion for my rogue-dweller brain to handle. I felt vulnerable. Exposed. More exposed than if I had stripped and paraded my naked self in front of the entire academy and all of the gods. This was a different kind of openness. I was letting them in, inviting them into my grief and asking them to understand something that I couldn’t even explain.

  “Of course we can walk to the waterfall.” It was Yael who spoke, his voice soft and understanding.

  My mouth dropped open and my stomach flooded with warmth all at once. An understanding Yael? Wow. They really needed to stop surprising me.

  “Lead the way, Will.” That had been from Rome.

  When had they started using my nickname? I wasn’t sure, but I liked it. A lot. I turned from them and waited until the slow push of water against the back of my legs indicated that they were directly behind me. They weren’t going to go in front, or pick me up, or force me to get out of the water—they were going to follow behind and simply be there if I needed them. I started walking with a small smile curving my lips, and by the time the spray of the waterfall was raining over us, the smile had widened into something full of happiness. I laughed, again, and waded through the stream until the water was almost up to my neck.

  “Am I swimming yet?” I called out, trying to be heard over the sound of the waterfall, even though they were both directly beside me.

  “No,” Rome answered. I could hear the same low chuckle from him as before. “You’re still standing. Your feet aren’t allowed to be touching the ground.”

  I pushed up from the riverbed, looping one arm around Yael’s neck, because it was easier, before using that leverage to pull my other arm up and around Rome’s neck. They helped to tug me up the rest of the way, their hands settling either side of my waist naturally, and I kicked my legs a little through the water.

  “There.” I knew I sounded satisfied. “Now I’m swimming.”

  “Now you’re hanging,” Rome clarified.

  “You know what.” I turned toward his face in the darkness. “This is why I don’t ask your opinions on things.”

  He grinned—I could see the wh
ite flash of teeth against the tanned skin of his face, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t take it any longer. I needed to be closer.

  I needed more.

  Seventeen

  I acted without thought, tightening my arm around Rome’s neck until he had to bend down closer to my face. I could feel his breath against my lips and the contracting of his hand at my waist. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences any more, or about my mother. I didn’t care about Staviti, Cyrus, Rau, or any of the other asshole gods. My mind was full of Rome and Yael—the warmth of their skin, the hard press of their muscles, and the cool water that licked between us. I wanted to stay there forever … but instead, I would settle for something that might help me keep the memory of my first swim forever.

  The pact was broken and I was ready for this.

  “Willa—” Rome started to warn, but I wasn’t listening.

  I pressed my lips up against his mouth, swallowing the sound that grumbled out of him. He resisted for a fraction of a click, but as I opened my mouth and flicked my tongue out to caress it against his, I felt his will crumble. In a flash, my body was shifted around. I wasn’t sure who helped me to face Rome, or when I had wrapped my legs around him again—with no barriers between us, I couldn’t stop from rocking against his hard length as our kiss became frantic.

  There were hands everywhere, breath everywhere, and my brain was scattered from the feeling of his tongue pushing into my mouth. Yael was behind me again, pressing so close that I could feel him all the way down my spine. His hands wrapped around my front, his fingers brushing across my stomach. I could feel the pressure of his touch as it continued lower, sliding across damp skin, until it dipped down, almost level with my hips. With a low moan, I pulled back from Rome, trying to push up into the touch.

  “Are you okay with this?” Yael’s voice was only a growl. “I can’t leave. He won’t leave. It’ll have to be both of us.”