And then I pulled his face down, and I kissed him full on the lips. I kissed him long and slow and sweet. One last time. A goodbye kiss.
* * *
After Logan left, it was late. Middle-of-the-night late. But I couldn’t stand being alone, so I called a cab to take me to Naelen’s house. I needed to see him. I wanted to tell him that all this time, I had wanted to choose him, but that something had held me back. But that now, I knew, he was it for me. And that we could be together. Finally.
When I got to his place, the lights were all off. He was probably asleep.
I debated waking him up. Maybe I’d just sneak into bed with him and then tell him when we woke up together.
I liked that idea.
So, I used the key he’d given me to let myself in, and then I went quietly up the steps to the second floor, where his bedroom was. I pushed open the door to the room, and I had my hands on the bottom of my shirt, ready to pull it over my head. I was going to take off my clothes and crawl into bed with him.
But there were two people in the bed.
I let out a little cry.
God, all that worry I’d had about Naelen finding someone else—
I backed out of the room, breathing hard. I’d told him it was okay with me if he started another relationship, but whoever this woman was, he must have just met her and brought her home. If she was a hookup from a bar or something, that didn’t mean she was his girlfriend. So, when he woke up, he would kick her out, just like he’d done with those women before. And when I told him that we could be together, he’d stop with wanting another woman at all.
But.
It hurt.
It was like a knife in my gut, twisting, that he had slept with someone else. Because I remembered how often he’d protested that he wouldn’t do it. And now…
I was overcome with a wave of emotion. I’d already been hurt too much tonight because Logan was gone, and I was going to miss him, but to come to Naelen and see this? I felt betrayed and alone and devastated.
A dark figure came out of the room. She was wearing a robe.
I gasped, trying to hold myself together.
“Are you okay?” she said.
I just stared at her, my lips parted, tears streaming down my face.
“Are you Clarke?” she said.
And then I recognized the woman. She was the dark-haired woman from the barbecue back at the lake house, the woman that Naelen had been whispering to.
“I’m Juliet,” she said. “Juliet Ellis.” She stepped closer and patted me on the arm. “It’s nice to meet you. I told him he should talk to you before he and I, um…” She made a little face. “It’s hard to resist, though. Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” I whispered.
Naelen’s voice from inside the bedroom. “Juliet?”
She turned toward the door, raising her voice. “I think I’m going to go.”
He appeared in the doorway. He was not wearing a robe. He saw me. “Clarke. What are you doing here?” Then he looked down at his body and disappeared.
My devastation was morphing inside me, twisting into a mounting rage. How dare he do this? Even though I’d said that he could, he had promised me over and over that I was the only one he wanted.
Naelen reappeared in a robe. “Uh, Juliet, you don’t have to…”
“I have to go.” She laughed a little. “You and Clarke should talk. And I have to talk to Jeremy.”
Naelen dragged a hand over his face. “Okay.”
She gave him a little wave.
“Wait,” he said. “Your clothes?”
“I think they’re still in the living room,” she said.
My mouth dropped open.
Naelen’s face fell.
Juliet waved again, and then disappeared down the steps.
I wasn’t crying anymore. I was too shocked and too angry for that. I was trembling. I stared at Naelen, shaking all over, thinking about punching him or strangling him or…
“I thought you were with Logan tonight,” said Naelen.
“Logan left,” I said.
“What do you mean, he left?”
“I mean, he decided he couldn’t take this anymore, and he left. He said that we’d be okay against Cunningham without him, and he said he needed time before we could be friends and—”
“No,” said Naelen, sinking his hands into his hair. “He didn’t.”
“He did,” I said.
“Well, we have to get him back,” said Naelen.
“What?” I said. “Earlier today, you said that if he left—”
“It doesn’t work if he’s gone,” said Naelen.
“What doesn’t work?”
“Me and Juliet,” he said.
I was aghast. “She’s that important to you, huh?”
“She’s my mate.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Your what?”
Naelen nodded, heaving a heavy sigh. “Look, let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
“Like the living room, where you took off all her clothes?” I said.
He winced. “Dining room.”
Wordlessly, we trooped down the steps.
I went into the dining room and sat down.
Naelen ducked into the kitchen and got us both a glass of wine. He set mine down in front of me. “Sorry, I don’t have liquor right now.”
I took a big gulp. “This is fine.” Of course, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a Corona with lime in a really long time.
Naelen just toyed with his drink. “Logan really left?”
“Yes,” I said.
And then we were quiet. We’d come in here to talk, and I felt as if I had so much to say to him. I wanted to rail at him, scream at him, demand to understand what had happened. But I was only confused now.
When I had first met Naelen, he had been completely closed off to the idea of a relationship because of the way the dragon mating bond had affected his parents. They had been utterly obsessed with the other, to the point of ignoring everyone around them, including their children. Naelen had practically raised his sister Reign, and apparently, without his work with Spencertech, the family would have been buried in debt and ruin since his parents cared more about each other than making enough money to support the family.
He had been terrified of that kind of bond, had told me he would never succumb to it.
But then I had come along, and I had softened him. Or maybe it was Cunningham who’d done it, forcing him to watch me with Logan over and over. I now knew firsthand how potent a motivator jealousy could be.
So, Naelen had relinquished control of himself—or maybe Cunningham had ripped it away from. Whatever the case, he was willing to commit to me, willing to allow himself to be in love. And that had opened the door for this Juliet woman to come in and ruin everything.
But I didn’t understand. How did he know this woman was his mate? Had he known for a long time? When had he met her? It was true that all dragons seemed to know each other, and she must be a dragon, because the mating bond only happened between two dragons.
When I had been alone with Penny at Christmas, she’d told me that if Naelen met his mate, he would leave me alone. I’d scoffed, said Naelen would resist.
But everything was different now.
Naelen took a drink of wine. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did Logan leave?”
“I told you why. He said he wasn’t happy.”
“In the span of four hours, he became unhappy? He was fine when we left Eden’s.”
“No, he said he wasn’t. He just hadn’t realized it.”
“You did something, didn’t you? Did you refuse to fuck him or something?”
I winced at his crudeness. “No.” Even though I had been preoccupied. And besides, it was my fault. “I guess I’ve been doing something all along, and I think we’ve all picked up on it, but we’ve been choosing to ignore it.”
“What’s that?”
“That I always wanted you,” I said. “That I wanted to choose you.”
He got up from the table. “Always?” he whispered.
“Well, since I met you, anyway.”
He kicked one of the chairs over. It landed with a clatter.
I jumped, startled by the violence.
Naelen stalked out of the room.
I drank the rest of my wine in two gulps. Should I go after him? That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for.
He came back into the room. He set the chair back up. His voice was a rasp. “God damn it, Clarke, if it was always me, then why did you let everything get so complicated?”
I hung my head. “I couldn’t admit it to myself. Because… Logan was so devoted to me, and you were so… you. And I just felt like we didn’t make sense. And so I couldn’t… I’m sorry.”
“You have any idea how many times I was forced to watch him and you together, because Cunningham said it was what you wanted?”
I swallowed. I wanted more wine. I grabbed Naelen’s glass and started drinking it.
“Hell, Clarke, we have both been inside you at the same time. I have felt him moving in you from behind while I was moving in you from—” He clenched his hands into fists. “And that’s because… because you were confused?”
“Yes.” I drained the rest of his wine and set the glass down. My hands were shaking. The glass fell over and a little dribble of wine spilled onto the table. I wiped at it with my finger.
And then we were quiet again.
Naelen went out of the room and came back with an open bottle of wine. He set it on the table, but he didn’t sit down.
I refilled my glass. I took a drink. “I didn’t ask Cunningham to make us do those things. You can’t blame me for the fact that he’s psychotic.”
Naelen paced, his nostrils flaring.
“You didn’t exactly make it easy, you know? Because when I was close to admitting that I wanted you, right after we made love the first time in that hotel in Colorado, you froze me out.”
He stopped moving. He looked at me. “I’m sorry about that,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m sorry I did that to you. It was childish and cruel, and I only did it because I was being a coward.”
“Well, I forgave you a long time ago.” But it was nice to hear out loud, I found.
He sat down at the table. “The thing with Logan didn’t even have to get started, did it? If I hadn’t been an ass to you in Colorado, said I wanted nothing to do with you, you would never have called him.”
I took another drink. He wasn’t wrong.
“Damn it.” He poured wine into his glass. He glared at the liquid.
“How do you have a mate?” I said.
His jaw twitched. “Damn it,” he said again.
“Naelen, when did you know that you had a mate?”
“I’ve always had a mate, Clarke, I’d just never met her. I steered clear of big dragon parties, because I didn’t want to meet her,” he said.
“But you did meet her.”
“At that stupid barbecue at the lake house,” he said. “The one you forced us to go to.”
I shook my head at him. “You just can’t stop looking for ways to blame me, can you?”
He tipped his glass to his mouth. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“Well, I knew something was going on,” I said. “I saw the two of you together. What was it like? Did you fall head over heels for her right then? Are you obsessed with her, like your father was with your mother?” My tone was growing bitter.
He studied his knuckles. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t know? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to punch him or start crying again.
“I think about her a lot. I…” The bottom dropped out of his voice. “I want her.”
I pressed my lips together. “That’s why you couldn’t keep your hands off me, isn’t it? Why you kept trying to have sex with me at inappropriate times and places. Not because you were jealous of Logan, but because you were thinking about her.”
“It was… it was kind of both,” he said. “I mean, I was jealous.”
“So, you were making love to me and thinking about her.”
“No!” He was vehement. He snatched his wine glass up. “I was making love to you to drown her out. When I’m with you, you’re all I think about. You’re all I want to think about. But she… she… I can’t help it. I’ve never felt anything like what I feel when I look at her.”
I drained my glass again. “That’s the line you always used on me, buddy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s true about both of you,” he said sharply. “I feel very different and very unique things about you both. And for what it’s worth, what we have feels real to me. What I have with Juliet feels more like having a really annoying itch that I need to scratch. Or a full bladder I need to drain. It’s very… biological, but persistent. It’s not love. It’s…” He furrowed his brow. “Lust, I guess. Undeniable, impossible-to-ignore lust.”
I wasn’t sure that made me feel better.
He drained his glass too.
We were quiet again.
He poured us both more wine. “I was trying to resist her, Clarke, but you said that thing at Eden’s about being able to have a girlfriend, and I thought that maybe it could all work out. You’d have Logan, and I’d have her, and I could stop driving myself nuts trying to resist the mating bond. So, I looked her up, and she was in town, and I ran it all by her, and…” He shrugged.
“She was cool with being your second girlfriend?”
“She has a boyfriend too,” said Naelen. “He’s a dragon, but his mate died. Now, it’s possible he might mate again, but it’s not likely. So, he has been worried about her finding a mate, and she’s in love with him, you know? So… she said he’d understand. He knows what the mating bond is like. And she thought it would be a good compromise. We agreed we were going to wait until she talked to him, but then… we couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know.” He grimaced.
I sat back in my chair, shaking my head. This was horrible. I couldn’t have imagined anything worse. “Look, I can’t do this.”
“What?” he said.
“If you need to be with Juliet, then be with Juliet. But I… no. I don’t want anymore of this crazy polyamorous stuff in my life. I tried it, I really tried, but it’s too hard.”
“No?” he said. “But I did it for you, Clarke. You can’t do it for me?”
I choked. I shook my head. “I…” I clenched my hand into a fist and bit down on it.
“You would never have to see me with her,” he said. “I’d keep you both completely separate.”
“Forever?” I said.
“Sure, I don’t see why not.”
“That cuts everything off at the knees, Naelen. There’s no future. No marriage. No children. And it’s only half of you. I want all of you.”
He glared at me. “What if I’d said that to you?”
“Maybe you should have,” I said. “Maybe if someone had forced me to make a decision, I would have been able to see what it was that I really wanted.”
“Now it’s my fault?”
I rubbed my temples. “It’s no one’s fault. Maybe Cunningham’s. I don’t know. We’ve been through hell, and we’ve tried to work through it, but I don’t think the answer is more sharing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being polyamorous. Hell, what the Hudsons have is kind of beautiful. But this thing with us and Logan wasn’t beautiful. And with you and Juliet and me, it wouldn’t be beautiful. It would hurt too much.”
He shook his head. “No, no, no. You are not leaving me. Not after everything I have put up with just to be with you.”
My eyes stung. “You… you have to choose, Naelen.”
“You don’t understand.” His voice dropped in pitch. “It might drive me clinically insane not to give in to the mating bond. You don’t know what it
feels like.”
“Then you have to choose her, I guess.”
“Fuck.” He slammed his hands down on the table. The wine glasses rattled.
My cell phone rang. I reached into my pocket to turn it to silent, but I decided I’d check to make sure it wasn’t Logan. Maybe he’d run into some trouble or something and needed me.
It was Penny Caspian.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Penny?” I said, getting out of my chair. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Uh… well, that’s not exactly the word I’d use,” she said. “Tell me you’re not right in the middle of an extremely dangerous situation that you can’t leave at the moment.”
“Not right in the middle,” I said. “But we do have a problem with Cunningham. And also the Order of Rasmossen and Wolffe has one of the magical objects, and we need to get it from them.”
“Hey, I have experience with the Order,” said Penny. “Lots of experience. Listen, if you can postpone that, come help us out with the Green King and then I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Order.”
“You guys need my help, huh?”
“All of you,” she said. “You and your boyfriends.”
“Well, it would, um… Logan’s not around, and I don’t know if Naelen is actually still my boyfriend, but if you need help, I’ll definitely come. Where are you?”
“Corpus Christi, Texas,” said Penny.
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s a long story,” said Penny. “Fill you in when you get here, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I hung up the phone. I looked at Naelen. “Um… Penny needs help. I know things are a mess between us, so if you wanted to stay here, I totally get it. You could try to figure things out with Juliet, have some space from me—”
“Don’t be stupid, Clarke. I’m coming with you,” he said. “Where are we going?”
“Texas,” I said.
“Huh,” he said.
We were quiet again, but only for a moment.
“Well,” I said, “I need to go home and pack a bag and dig out my very last bow—”
“Actually, I bought you one,” said Naelen. “It’s in the garage. Along with a quiver and a bunch of arrows. And you have clothes here.”
Ashes (The Slayer Chronicles Book 3) Page 21