Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
Byron
MAKING MIA DIMITRIADIS scream and beg should not be working its way as high up on my list of favorite activities as it was. Neither should watching her take Luca apart—seeing those walls of his crumble to rubble, even temporarily.
I lay panting, glued tight to Mia by the knot she held clamped inside her hot body, not to mention a few patches of sticky cake residue sticking our skin together. For the briefest of instants, I wondered what it would feel like to let go of all the baggage that weighed me down... to surrender completely to the here and now, as she and Luca seemed to do in these moments.
What would be left? Who would I be, without the years and layers of pain that had formed me?
For one thing, I probably wouldn’t have been the asshole who fucked both Mia and her closeted husband in cheap hotel rooms to distract myself from my own pain. That particular comedy of errors had been a real kick in the balls, courtesy of fate—one I was desperately hoping wouldn’t come back around and bite me in the ass later on.
Nat Fucking Bell had been the kind of mistake that was enjoyable enough I’d kept making it multiple times. There was just something about forcing repressed little beta males to realize that they enjoyed taking it up the ass. It was a delicious sense of corruption... of bringing the rampaging hypocrisy of beta culture into the light, and tying a great big rainbow-colored bow on it for good measure.
I remembered the first encounter with unusual clarity. He’d had a sob story about how his wife had cut him off in the bedroom; how she wouldn’t even discuss the issue with him, and so an open marriage had been the only option to keep the union together.
It had been all I could do not to roll my eyes. He might as well have said, ‘ We’re barreling toward an ugly divorce; we just haven’t admitted it to ourselves yet .’
Then he’d proceeded to come three times in the space of three hours, eventually taking an alpha knot despite being an obvious first-time bottom. I’d been reluctantly impressed. When he asked for my number, I gave it to him.
The next two times we’d hooked up, I’d sensed that he’d jumped into the ocean of gay sex, fully expecting to hit some sort of barrier reef of personal humiliation that would catapult him back to the shore—wet and sputtering, but still safely straight . Except, it hadn’t ever come.
He’d been up for everything I dished out... and I did mean up . Nat Bell orgasmed like a man who’d been sexually pent up for years, and that fit neatly in with his story of spousal abandonment in the bedroom. He conveniently didn’t mention that his wife was an omega; one whose high-powered career as a celebrated chef prevented her from having regular natural heats.
Telling myself that Mia’s marriage wasn’t my problem—while I was balls-deep inside her and purring like a tomcat on steroids—had more than a whiff of dishonesty about it. But it wasn’t as though Nat was going to spill the proverbial beans to her... and I sure the hell wasn’t, either. What would be the point of hurting her over something like that?
Mia hummed and stretched. My knot had started to deflate after her muscles’ tight grip gradually loosened, and I slipped out of her body as she moved against me in a lazy arch. The hum turned into a noise of displeasure when our cake-stained skin pulled apart.
“God, I need a shower,” Luca said, sounding half-asleep.
He’d been dozing next to us on the chocolate-stained bedsheet, lost in post-orgasmic languor. One side of his hair was flattened and matted. I wasn’t sure how the cake had ended up there, but he was right that it was going to take shampoo and running water to get it out.
“I think we all do,” I said reluctantly, the purr dying in my chest. Somehow, I knew with inevitable certainty that this was going to end up with both of them in my bed again.
I should put up more of a fight about it, I felt certain. They both had nests to go to. They didn’t need to stay in my room.
And yet, thirty minutes later, I was supporting a half-asleep Mia out of the bathroom, both of us clean and shower-damp. Sure enough, Luca had already made himself at home on my oversized mattress after his own shower.
He cracked open one green eye as I paused next to the bed with my drowsy burden. “Too tired to go back to my room,” he said. “Just wanna sleep.”
Mia made a noise of agreement and climbed in next to him, burrowing under the covers and into his arms. They let out matching sighs of contentment, and within moments, they were asleep.
I stared down at them for an uncomfortably long time, good sense warring with whatever fucked-up system I usually used for decision making, and predictably losing the battle. With a sigh of my own, I crawled in next to them.
Settling on my back, I gave them a careful few inches of space—not that those inches had been much use the last time this had happened. I’d woken up in the middle of the night wrapped around Mia like a barnacle.
My left hand crept up to brush over the ugly scar in my side where a bullet had barely missed killing me. She’d asked about the wound. Not too surprising, since she’d seen it on a couple of different occasions by that point. The surprising part was that I’d told her—about the shootout, and about my dead gang.
I never talked about that shit with the people I had sex with. Never .
Luca only knew it was gang related because in this house, all of our fucked-up shit was gang related. It didn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that much.
God, I wished sometimes that I could wake up with the kind of selective amnesia that showed up in bad TV drama. With my past a blank slate, but all of my basic skills like walking and brushing my teeth and using a computer mysteriously left intact.
What a fucking relief that would be. Too bad amnesia didn’t actually work like that. So, instead I was left with casual sex as my narcotic of choice.
Except, of course, that I hadn’t gone out on the prowl in weeks. Not since a certain omega chef had crashed in Zalen’s guest bedroom and started upending all our lives, as it happened. I knew I couldn’t afford to examine that fact too closely.
Everything was shifting around me. I mean... Emiel in therapy ? Seriously? He was the asshole who was supposed to make me look well-adjusted by comparison. And now he was adopting rescue cats and making appointments with mental health professionals?
What the actual fuck ?
“You’re thinking really loudly,” Luca complained, his voice sleep-muddled and raspy.
Between us, Mia snored on, dead to the world.
“No, I’m not,” I shot back automatically.
He shifted on the other side of the big bed, getting more comfortable. “It’s all changing too fast.” He sounded more awake now.
I scowled at him in the late-night darkness. “I’m not the one inviting myself to sleepovers.”
“Fuck off,” Luca said, staying exactly where he was.
“You’re falling for her,” I accused.
“Of course I’m falling for her, you asshole,” he said, without missing a beat. “We’re all falling for her. And now what the hell are we supposed to do?”
I should have lobbed back an automatic denial. I was a loner . I did not fall for people . And yet, somehow, I didn’t have an answer for him.
“What’s there to do?” I managed eventually. “We’re the house of screw-ups. It’s not like we’re gonna put up a white picket fence out front and start squeezing out pups. Get real, Luca.”
He hesitated. “No... yeah. I mean, I know that.” Then he paused again, for longer this time. “But... Zalen might. Hell, at this rate, Emiel might. And then what would we do?”
I really hated that I didn’t have a good answer to that. In fact, as the silence dragged on, growing heavier and heavier, it became painfully obvious that I didn’t have any answer for him.
Between us, Mia Dimitriadis slept on, her damp hair spread across my pillow in a dark halo.
“She’s in our bed.” The words dragged themselves out of my throat on the back of a growl. “Not theirs.”
Luca breathed in sharply. It was only then that I thought back over what I’d said. Our bed . Not my bed . A twist of fluttery panic erupted in my chest like angry butterflies. I held my breath, waiting for the explosion.
“Guess so,” was all Luca said—but I could hear the deep misgivings bubbling away beneath his quiet tone.