6. Stop That
Stop That
Irarely went more than a year without seeing Alluin after we reconnected.
Our duties still had us in very different parts of Stag Court, but it wasn’t as if we never had time off, and one benefit of Alluin’s salary as the General of the First Army was that he had enough coin to travel to whatever gods-forsaken corner of Stag Court I was inhabiting when our leaves intersected.
He had enough money to buy parchment and keep flicker-birds, too, so we started writing almost weekly—Alluin flickering me letters and me writing back on the reverse side, keeping my handwriting cramped so that I could natter at him about all my inane interests.
Though he seemed completely at ease around me, Alluin’s letters were terribly formal. His handwriting was perfect, his sentence structure would have been at home in some dusty scroll, and I had to do a great deal of reading between the lines to try to piece together what was happening in his life.
I’d once asked Alluin if he’d been stalking me, but the truth was, of the two of us, I was the one who was obsessed.
In person, he spoke freely, but on parchment he couldn’t seem to get out of his own head.
I filled in the gaps any way I could. Gossip, high society papers, and First Army requisition orders all became fair game in my quest to learn everything I could about the man I’d attached myself to.
It took me eighteen years to figure out that not only did he have a paramour, but that the two of them had actually gotten married, and another twenty-six years to determine that said spouse was, in fact, male—which was, frankly, an embarrassing amount of time.
Once I’d finally acquired that piece of the puzzle, the rest of it fell into place: the trips to an estate outside Lyraniorn, the brief mention of his inability to have heirs, and the many, many women the high society papers noted as visiting his manor while he was away.
If Alluin’s husband had merely wanted lovers, he surely wouldn’t need a parade of well-to-do women and well-bred ladies.
Given that I was a rake, I knew how men who enjoyed variety found their partners.
The only reason to entertain that many women of means would be because you wanted an appropriate woman for a long-term attachment.
Such as the mother of your child.
Alluin couldn’t give his husband heirs. They were both male. It wasn’t in the cards. Alluin’s husband was spreading his seed wherever it might take root, whether or not Alluin approved.
“How long’s the contract?” I asked him out of the blue on one of the rare occasions we had a building to ourselves. I waited until he’d had dinner and most of a bottle of wine, of course. I wasn’t a monster. “The marriage contract, I mean.”
He blinked those gorgeous hazel eyes at me like a doe, thick lashes sweeping down and ears dropping. “Oh,” he said, barely a whisper. “Who told you?”
“Nobody. I had to figure it out by myself, and it took me ages,” I said, cross about it.
I swung my legs up onto the couch and dropped them onto Alluin’s lap so that he couldn’t escape.
“That’s not very fair. I tell you about my relationships.
Some of them, at least. The ones that last more than a couple weeks. ”
I didn’t tell him that most of them were far too boring to bother with for longer than that. It was hard not to think poorly of the average fae when I was guiltily comparing them to the famously brilliant and unyieldingly attractive First General.
Alluin wilted back against the couch. Pain sank into his face. “I don’t have any marriage-marks anymore. The scars healed and the marriage lapsed centuries ago,” he whispered, his brow creasing. “Nyland didn’t want to renew it.”
“What? Why?” I said, so shocked I didn’t manage any sort of compassion.
Even the knowledge that Alluin had apparently married so long ago that they’d still been using the natural healing of scarification to mark the length of the marriage didn’t manage to make an impact, aside from the fact that someone hadn’t wanted to stay married to him.
A smile flickered across his lips, the corners of his mouth trembling and eyes squeezing closed. “He made me choose. Him, our marriage, all of it, or the Army.”
He said it with such despair, as if that had always been the inevitable end—as if it would always be the inevitable end.
How dare anyone make him feel like that?
Sure, Alluin hadn’t always been the General of the First Army, but it was a position that he loved, and one that he was damn good at.
How could anyone claim to love him and yet demand that he cut off pieces of himself to earn that love? That was cruelty of the worst kind.
I let out a careful breath, setting down my glass so that I wouldn’t break the stem. “Would you like me to throw him out a window or into a river?”
That sad smile twitched onto his face again. “You don’t have to do that for me, Zhi.”
“Ah. You misunderstand,” I said lightly, anger heating my skin. “Would you prefer it if I threw him out a window, or would you prefer if it was into a river? The throwing is non-negotiable.”
Alluin stilled. “What?” he asked, sounding baffled.
“You heard me.” I shoved myself up, scootching across the couch like a caterpillar until I had my thighs over his and my arm across his shoulder. “Keep in mind that the window is likely to be high, and the river may happen to involve several large stones tied around his ankles.”
He dropped his head against my chest. “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, the words muffled by my shirt and his warm breath soaking through my clothes. One of his hands crept up and hooked over my collar, holding me in place.
I rested my face against his dark curls and sighed.
He always smelled so nice—warm and clean and outdoorsy.
Even in the winter, like now, he had a hint of spruce and cedar on him from his soap, and he never smelled like musk.
I would have been happy to burrow my nose against his neck and stay there for the rest of the night, but that seemed a bit much, even for a close friend.
“Why are you still with him?” I asked softly. “How can you let him stab you in the heart and get away with it?”
Alluin’s grip tightened on my shirt. “I loved him,” he said in a voice thick with despair. “I loved him so gods-damn much, and I thought he loved me, too.” He shuddered, biting back a sob. “Godsdammit, Zhi, you had to wait till I was drunk to ask me this?”
My face heated. “Would you have told me if I hadn’t?”
“Of course I would have.” Alluin sat back up, meeting my eyes with tears making his shine in the firelight.
“But now I’m going to cry while I’m doing it, and I’m—” He took a heavy breath, a tear slipping from each eye when he squeezed them closed.
“Gods, Zhi, I’m lonely and tired and the man I thought was the love of my life smiles at me when I come home and fucks me like he loves me, and as soon as I’m gone he goes through women like you do—”
I flinched.
Alluin’s eyes flew open. “No, not like that, I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Well, it’s true,” I said, giving him a pained smile.
“Women, men, and everything in-between. But I’m not married, and I’m not trying to…
to breed them like some sort of animal in heat.
It’s a bit shiftless, I’ll admit, but hopefully not morally corrupt.
” I reached over and grabbed Alluin’s wine bottle off the low table, taking a swig before passing it to him. “You’ve gotta stop fucking him, Lu.”
His jaw worked and he looked away, but he also took the wine bottle and drank straight out of it, his lips where mine had been.
He had to look amazing with his mouth wrapped around a cock—was surely as dedicated and relentless in bed as he was in the field.
What I wouldn’t have given to be able to see that.
Fuck, to be able to feel that, all that warm skin on mine and the taste of his pleasure on my tongue—
He’s in love with his former husband, and even if he wasn’t, you’re not at all the kind of man he deserves, I reminded myself sternly, grabbing my sex drive by the scruff.
He was a paragon; I was a terminally unserious butterfly.
The downside of Alluin being drunk for this was that I was also drunk, and unlike Alluin, who mostly got more emotional and cuddly, I got horny and stupid.
The concept of fucking Alluin, as alluring as it was, was stupidity of the highest degree.
Even before I’d met him, I’d never really been one for long relationships.
A few years; a few decades, if I was lucky.
But more than that? And here we were talking about centuries—millennia.
I couldn’t do that to him. I wouldn’t break his heart like that.
Alluin tipped the last drops of wine into his mouth and dropped the bottle off the side of the couch.
“Being with him helps me forget,” he said quietly.
“When we’re together, it’s like… like it never happened.
I don’t have to think about anything else, and…
Gods, it’s so hard for me to stop thinking. I don’t know how to give that up.”
My brows drew together. “It’s not real. You have to know that. You’re surely making it harder for yourself down the road, and you’re not getting anything true in return.”
He slumped and looked down at his hands.
They slowly closed into loose fists. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the one with a piece of my soul missing,” Alluin said in a dead voice.
“I wish I was more like you. That I could…connect with people. But I’m…
” He dropped his head. A tear landed on my thigh, leaving a dark circle.