3. Carter
3
Carter
“L izzie’s fine,” my mother said when I called her later that evening, her tone more lighthearted than what I would have expected from someone whose youngest child had been abducted by a changeling. “She’s busy with finals. I talked to her a few hours ago.”
Despite what she thought she remembered, that wasn’t true. Lizzie had been taken during Lex and Ivy’s wedding, and no matter how many times I tried to reach out to Poppy, I got no answer. Ivy and Miri hadn’t gotten out of bed yet, and Lex sat at the dining room table with a pile of books open in front of him, chain-smoking cigarettes down to the filter.
“Promise me you’ll keep an eye on Sophie and Charlie.” My other sisters went to college, but both had randomly been home this week.
“Of course,” Mom said. “Are you sure you’re okay? It couldn’t have been easy, watching all that on TV.” She knew how I felt about Ivy, and perhaps she even suspected how I felt about Lex. A self-described mystic and Reiki healer, she had always seen with more than just her eyes. She’d been a sympathetic ear my entire life, no matter what my issue may have been.
“They didn’t go through with it,” I said, avoiding Lex’s intrigued gaze. There were more important things to deal with, like finding our abducted family members and pushing the fairy king back into his own realm. But I’d admit, it was a small victory that Lex and Ivy hadn’t gone all the way. Some selfish part of me still saw her as mine, even if I shared her with two others, and if she ever married anyone legally in this realm, I wanted it to be me.
“Good news for you, then.” Mom gave me a small laugh, and when I didn’t return it, she sighed. “Carter?—”
“Just…stay at your house, okay? Promise me you’ll be safe.”
“Come home, my baby boy,” she said. “You’re scaring me. I need to see you.”
“I will soon.” I had to finish this, but then I’d be on the first flight back to Chicago.
We said our goodbyes and I thanked my lucky stars that my mother and my other sisters had been out of town when the king attacked. He didn’t know where to find them, if he’d even gone looking for them, and by the time they returned, he’d already gone back into hiding, seemingly to lick his wounds. Siobhan had put a ward on their houses, but if Poppy had gotten to Lizzie, I figured she could get to any of them anytime she wanted.
“She’s okay,” Lex said, bringing my gaze to his. He stood and walked closer, pinching his cigarette between his index finger and thumb to place it between my lips. “Even if Poppy takes her to him, he won’t hurt her until he gets what he wants from us.”
“He could be hurting Lizzie right now, all of them. Poppy, too.” I blinked back tears and forced myself to inhale deeply on the smoke before stabbing it out. I loved all my sisters, but Lizzie and I were the closest. Maybe being the oldest and the youngest set us apart from the middle two.
“That won’t happen either.” Lex dropped to his knees in front of me, his hips between my thighs. “He thinks too highly of his grand plans. He’ll want to make sure we know he’s hurting them, and until he lures us out of hiding, they’ll be safe.”
Lex could be incredibly convincing when he wanted to, and in this case, I yearned to believe him. His calm stoicism soothed the anxious side of me that wanted to give in to the panic, especially after what Miri had done yesterday. Things were getting more daunting the longer we waited to do anything about it. Lex grabbed me, palm to palm, and pulled me down so I leaned my forehead against his.
“We’re going to fix this, Chicago,” he murmured. “We’re going to save our family and the whole fucking world, so help me God.”
“How?”
He stood and shook his head, going back to his side. “Not sure yet.”
I pursed my lips, debating whether I should say what was on my mind. The king had done something irreparable to Miri, and it made me so fucking pissed, I could burn down the world just to get my vengeance. I wanted to hold her and protect her and keep her with me for the rest of her life, just so I’d know that whatever came for her would have to go through me first.
“It’s not safe for me to be here,” Miri had said last night . “I should go back to England as soon as we figure out how to break this curse.”
That hurt most of all. Even if we could end this connection between us, I didn’t think I’d want to. We had something unique and profound, and the rest of the world would never understand it. The idea of Miri not being with us pricked at this imaginary future I’d built where we all grew old together and reveled in our gifts until the end of time.
“What are we going to do about Miri?”
Lex narrowed his gaze and shook his head. “What about her?”
“The king is screwing with her mind, Lex.” I pointed to the stack of books between us. “Just like all those messed-up fairy tales. He lured her into a deep sleep, and what do you suppose he did after that?” I raised my eyebrows. She couldn’t remember, but it didn’t take a genius to guess. The lore was filled with stories of the fairy king drugging his human consorts and having his perverted rapey way with them.
Lex went eerily still, which wasn’t a good sign. When he got that villainous look in his eye, he wouldn’t stop until he got what he wanted. In this case, it was mutual: the king’s decapitated corpse.
“You can’t blame her for keeping it to herself,” I continued. “For thinking it was better to stay away to try to protect us.”
“I can blame her for whatever the fuck I want.”
“You need to apologize to her, make it up to her somehow.”
“I will,” he said. At my scowl, he cleared his throat and rubbed a thumb over his eyebrow. “Besides, Miri is one of the strongest people I know. We’ll figure it out, Chicago.”
“What about the king?” I raised an eyebrow. “What about how we can’t get in touch with Poppy?” I met his gaze, remembering he’d been teaching the changeling how to travel back in time. “Don’t tell me you didn’t plan for this.”
He made a noise and gave me a look like I’d lost my mind before adding, “Of course I did. We just have to fix her.”
The puzzle pieces fell together. “The queen? That’s your big move?”
Lex leaned forward over his books, eyeing me with that piercing stare. “Remember when we were in Faerie and I tried to use my gift on her?”
“Yeah.” The memory seemed comical now, considering all we knew. Lex had been arrogant and naive, and we were damn lucky she hadn’t ripped his head off, especially after she threatened to.
“She told me she was older than anything I’d ever seen, that she was the Great Source. All of it, everything, it lived inside her.”
I remembered that, too. Her power had been overwhelming and intimidating. It lured me in and frightened me at the same time. I thought she’d kill all of us as a show of strength. She hadn’t. Then the king had attacked, she’d shoved Poppy in my arms, and we escaped.
Lex pursed his lips, going back to his books. “The Great Source of what, I wonder. Fairy magic? Gifts? And just how old is she? Old enough to remember how the fairies trapped the king the first time?”
Good lord, he was right. I sat up straight, my mind racing faster than I could speak. “She must have been there. Siobhan said the king and queen were equals, that one could not exist without the other.”
“When he got trapped in Faerie, so did she,” Lex continued.
“When she got loose, he followed her.” They were linked by more than we could ever understand, but it seemed similar to what the four of us experienced. We couldn’t be apart. What affected one of us impacted the rest.
“This can’t be the first time a fairy’s mind has gotten fried.” Lex went back to flipping through his books. “There’s got to be lore about it. I saw everything from sacrifices to changeling children to getting stuck in Faerie forever.”
“Sacrifices?” My mind danced with images of medieval rituals and bloody still-beating hearts.
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing a hand back through his hair. “But who the hell knows what’s real and what’s fake. It could all be bullshit.”
I watched him while he talked, taking a moment to revel in our reconnection. I had missed him so much. I always did, but the ability to leave him was getting harder every time I had to go. I stood and moved around the dining room table, keeping his gaze as his eyes tracked me. I stopped right in front of him, taking the cigarette from between his fingers so I could have a drag before stabbing it out. Inhaling a deep breath, I ran the length of my disheveled king. Dark circles lined the bags under his eyes, and the crease between his eyebrows had grown more pronounced. And was that a gray hair by his temple?
“No one looks at me like that and gets away with it, Chicago.” He licked his lips and smirked, mischief floating just behind his gaze.
“By God, don’t start now.” I kneeled between his knees, mirroring his pose moments ago, and ran my palms up his thighs to the button on his jeans. He didn’t say anything, just watched as I pushed the metal through its hole and pulled the zipper down. Lex shifted his hips so I could yank his pants and boxers to his mid-thighs, freeing his beautiful half-erect cock. “You need to relax. We all do.”
I spat on my hand and grabbed his shaft, giving the tip a good squeeze that had him groaning and sinking farther into the chair.
“There’s a mad fairy king on the loose and you want to suck my dick.” He rolled his eyes and playfully scoffed. “Typical.”
“I think you’d move mountains if it meant you got your cock in my mouth.” I leaned over his torso, bringing my lips to his neck so I could kiss my way over his pulse. He still smelled the same, like cigarettes and deodorant and him, and I wanted to bury myself in it. It reminded me of the first time we hooked up, all those years ago in London. I’d been so wide-eyed and carefree, and Lex had barreled over my innocence with his extravagant debauchery.
He grabbed the back of my neck and brought his lips to mine, biting inside my mouth until he could wrestle my tongue with his own. I loved him like this, rough and hard, all sharp edges looking to polish themselves against my rock-steady grace. He coasted his fingers higher up my head, tunneling into my hair so he could fist a handful and yank my head back.
I hissed as agony zigzagged through my skull.
“You want my cock that bad?” Lex shoved my head into his lap, forcing his dick into my mouth. “Fucking take it.”
I did. I licked and sucked, a thrill shooting down my spine into my balls when he groaned and dropped his head back against the chair. He tightened his fingers, gripping me so he could angle me the way he wanted it.
I let him use me. It had been a stressful week resulting from a stressful four years. Even though it felt like it was all coming to a head now, we still had the worst of it yet to survive. These precious moments, these few hours when we could take our pleasure freely, they might be our last. And damn it, I was going to enjoy it.
“Fuck, Chicago,” Lex murmured, making me feel like a God. Look at how willing and pliant this monster became once I had my skin on his. When I gripped his balls and teased a finger farther back, he shifted his hips and spread his legs wider, urging me on.
I chuckled, and he must have liked the sensation because he hissed in a breath, his hazy eyes squinting as he watched me. I was about to venture lower down, but he yanked my head back and leaned down, bringing his face inches from mine.
“Stand up, pull down your pants, and bend over the table.”
I gave him a lazy grin and licked my lips, swallowing his lingering taste. “No.”
Oh, the look he gave me then—his jaw so tight, the muscle by his ear twitched, his eyes shooting daggers right through my heart. I would bet Lex had only been told no a handful of times in his life, and probably only by me and Weeds. How I lived to make him submit to me for a change. Lex ran his gaze over me, trying to decipher if I was drawing a hard limit or if I was playing the great game.
I let him see the truth, that I wanted him to let out some steam, and the only way he was going to do that was by opening the valve with me. He and Weeds had their own brand of roughhousing, one that had been there since they were children. But Lex and I were nearly the same height, and even though I’d put on some muscle for my job , he didn’t have to hold back with me. More importantly, I didn’t have to hold back with him.
“No?” Lex raised an eyebrow, his smirk indicating he had realized I wanted to play the role where he owned my body and I let him. “Carter Scott, get on your fucking feet.” He stood, dragging me with him to my full height. Even though he only had an inch on me, he filled the room with power, the proverbial Titan in a world full of peasants. “Pull down your pants.” Lex growled the words, sending a submissive shock down my legs. My knees trembled as I unbuttoned my jeans, tugging down the zipper before digging my thumbs under the waistband of my boxers. I intentionally moved slowly, trying to draw out the anticipation, but he’d had it. Lex shoved his fingers under the fabric and dragged it down, scratching the skin near my belly button with a satisfying burn.
My cock sprang free, throbbing and sticking straight out between us in an embarrassing display of arousal. Sucking Lex off always turned me on, and he knew it. So when he glanced down at the precum dripping off the tip, I swallowed my humiliation as he laughed and shook his head.
“Such a fucking slut for me, huh?” He grabbed my cock and I buckled at the hips, falling into his chest. That made him laugh harder, but in a cruel, sinister way that shamed me for being so damn in love with him that making him hard riled me up.
“I’m not the one so hot and bothered that I’ve forgotten about foreplay.” I pushed my hips forward, jerking myself in his fist. “I thought you were a gentleman.”
That made him almost break character, and he licked his lips and smiled. “When did you get so desperate for my mouth?”
I leaned in to taste the skin between his pulse and his clavicle, and then it was his turn to shake. He tried to hide it, but I felt it, and he shoved me against the table, my ass hitting the edge before he pushed my shoulders back and positioned my hands above my head.
“Don’t fucking move.” He leaned down to kiss me, covering my body with his before kissing his way down my neck and shoving my shirt up so he could drag his tongue over my chest. Last Solstice, I’d caught an early flight home and come here to spend the winter holiday with them. I’d walked in on Ivy tied to this very table, blindfolded and gagged. Lex had edged her for an hour beforehand, so when I touched her, she jumped. Every inch of her skin had been so sensitive that I thought I’d make her come just by ghosting the tips of my fingers over her arms.
Now that I found myself in her position, I didn’t know how she didn’t. Lex hadn’t even touched my dick yet and I was about to bust all over the place. Then, he looked up at me from between my legs and put a hand on my stomach to hold me down while he took me.
Fucking hell, my hips fought him on their own, seeking more of him, more of the slick warmth inside his mouth. He flicked his tongue over my cockhead, circling down and sucking back the way that made me tremble. He tightened his grip on my shaft as he worked me, and I threw my head back and closed my eyes, relishing in the euphoria cascading over my body.
“Fuck, DC,” I said, resisting the urge to run my fingers through his head of thick dark hair. Lex had been the first guy to ever do this to me, and if that eighteen-year-old boy could see me now, he’d be impressed with how long I could hold my load. I’d come in about a minute the first time, the temptation of Lex’s magnificence far too irresistible. Who wouldn’t want to shove their cock into the mouth of a man this powerful? That he was equally obsessed with me fueled a sick part of my ego, and I sometimes wondered if that made me a piece of shit. Maybe I’d stopped caring a long time ago.
When he’d had his fill, he let me go with a loud pop and stepped back, grinning like a thief who’d stolen the crown jewels and gotten away with it. He ran his hands over my abs and my chest, running them up my shoulders to my arms.
“Such a fucking meathead,” he said before flipping me over and slamming my torso back down on the hardwood. I winced at the sharp jolt that went through me, but that added to the pressure building in my balls. I loved him like this, and I loved to be used like this. And he knew it, which made it even more intense and overwhelming.
He stepped away, a cool rush of air taking his place as the sound of a drawer opening and shutting brought me back to reality. The click of a bottle lid echoed through the room, and Lex took his spot behind me again, his hard thighs pressed up against the back of mine. My cock was trapped between my stomach and the table, but even that felt like heaven when his fingers slid against my ass. I sighed and melted into the touch.
“There he is,” Lex murmured, “my pliant knight. So defeated now that I’ve got my fingers in your ass, huh?” He nudged inside me, his forefinger slick and hot. I pushed back against him, welcoming the touch, needing him deeper inside. Tingles shot down my legs when he hit the spot that drove me wild and I sighed, a soft moan echoing from deep in my chest. “Imagine how good my cock will feel.”
“So fucking good.” The words tripped over my lips, coming from a place only he drew out of me. I wanted to give in, to let him have his way, but I’d started this for a reason. I couldn’t lose my intention now. “But do you think you deserve that?”
“Deserve.” He repeated the word, not so much to question as to make sure he’d heard it right. “I took care of your precious Weeds the way you wanted. I held down the fort while you went off to play soldier on some soft-core porn TV show.” He leaned over me, his chest to my back, one finger becoming two inside of me. “I think I deserve quite a bit.”
Visions of a hot dorm room in Killwater came to the forefront of my mind. Me—holding him down by the throat as I fucked him into being nice to Ivy. Him—fighting how he felt about her the whole time but willing to do anything for my tongue on his cock. Not much had changed since then.
Once upon a time, he’d made me promise to come home to him and Ivy, that once I’d had my fill of Hollywood, I’d spend the rest of my life with them. I’d sworn my devotion at the time, but I thought I’d have decades until I’d have to pay up. It had only taken four years.
The long nights of filming for months on end had caught up to me. I hadn’t told them yet, but this tour was my last. I had negotiated a change in script that would allow my character to return home earlier in the story than planned. While they weren’t killing me off, I would only be needed for a few episodes in the next two seasons. It wasn’t over, but it was a reprieve, and that was what I needed.
“You were a prick to our princess,” I said. “Such a nasty fucker until she put you in your place. I should edge you all day to teach you a lesson.”
He snarled and yanked my hair, forcing me to stand upright, his body pressed so firmly against mine. “She put herself in danger .”
“She was scared,” I said, “and trying to protect you.”
“She hurt you,” he whispered, barely loud enough for me to hear, but the words broke when he said them. He snaked one arm around my torso, holding me tighter, as if clinging to me for strength. “Watching Ivy waste away nearly killed me. It doesn’t matter what he did to Miri. I’m…” He paused and let out a ragged breath. “I’m gonna gut him for fucking with her…for tormenting all of us.”
“It’s okay, DC,” I told him, grabbing his hand on my stomach to give him comfort. “We need each other. She’s home now. She’s safe.”
He pressed his forehead to the back of my neck and nodded, inhaling me deeply and gripping my fingers tighter. He kissed me, soft and sweet, before digging his teeth into the meat between my neck and my shoulder, half branding, half resuming our game. I groaned and sagged into the pain before he shoved me down on the table, gripping the back of my neck with one hand while he lined his cock up at my ass with the other.
“You fucking come before I tell you and I’ll make this last all night,” he said, squeezing more lube on his dick and down my entrance before sliding inside. The sensation of him filling me would never get old, and when he put a hand on my hip to hold me steady, I thought I’d never want to get up again. My dick squeezed between me and the hardwood, agonizing yet fueling my desire. I wanted it rougher, so I pushed back against Lex, who slapped my ass so hard Ivy and Miri had to have heard it upstairs. The sting sent a surge of lust up my spine and through my balls, propelling a laugh over my mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Nope,” Lex added, spanking the other side this time, thrusting to the hilt. “Just me, but he fucking wishes, right?”
Lex had taken me hundreds of times, thousands probably, but this felt more magical than any before it. It was a reclaiming, a reconnection, a grounding in ourselves. I reminded him to nurture our relationships, and he reminded me to fight for them. Together, we created balance.
It didn’t take long for me to come. A few thrusts and some dirty words had me nutting on our dining room table like a teenager. Every muscle in my body tightened with the release, at once mind-splintering and all-consuming. Euphoria and ecstasy skated through my blood, coating my insides with warmth and adoration.
Lex laughed in that sick, twisted way of his and said, “Look at the fucking mess you made.” He tsked his teeth, gripping my hips harder as he pulled out the slightest bit and spit on our connection. I vaguely heard the cap of the lube open again and more cool liquid hit my ass, but I’d been launched so far into another universe, I couldn’t do anything except lie there and shiver and take it.
“I’ve always loved fucking you, Chicago.” He spanked me again, harder this time, and I moaned as the vibrations went through my body. The sounds echoing off the wall were perverse and filthy, but I reveled in that, too. Lex always could turn me to mush.
Who knew how long he fucked me. Time had ceased to be real when this started. I came again and again, and he rutted harder inside me, stopping every so often to stroke my cock or tease my balls. Whatever frustration he’d been building inside himself at Miri’s absence, he took it out on me. I let him.
When he finally found his release, his teeth deep in my neck, his cock buried in my body, he collapsed on top of me, a heaving, sweaty mess, and sighed. I held him there, bearing his weight for both of us.
“I love you, Chicago,” he softly murmured. “Thank you.”
“I love you, DC,” I found the strength to say.