Chapter 7
PERIS
Each footstep is leaden as I make my way back into the hotel. We won—but barely. I don’t even know how we managed to pull it out of our asses, but we fucking did, and that’s all I can be grateful for right now.
Well, that, and booze.
“Are you—”
“Back the fuck off,” I snap as I beeline for the bar and drop my ass into one of their nice, comfy chairs. Every muscle aches, I feel like shit, and I just want to not feel anything for a little while. Is that too fucking much to ask for?
“What can I get for you?”
“Vodka cranberry, hold the cranberry,” I retort, making the bartender snort. They pour my drink and slide it across the bar. I yank out my wallet and pull out my credit card. “Start a tab, would you?”
“Sure thing.” They take my card, and I’m left to my own devices. I lift the glass and inhale the burning scent of the vodka, and with a deep breath, I down it in one gulp.
“Another. And let’s make it a triple this time,” I say and watch as it’s poured from the small silver spout and into a fresh clear glass.
This time, as I bring the glass to my lips and start the resolute, burning chug, a flash of pink catches in my peripheral. I startle and nearly drop my glass. Instead, it clatters to the bar top, splashing liquid over the top and across my knuckles.
I follow the flash of pink as my heart beats an erratic rhythm in my chest. Each muscle in my neck protests greatly to the movement, and then, it all falls away at the sight of…
Of him.
There’s no fucking way…
It can’t be…
My brain refuses to comprehend what I’m seeing.
It’s been nearly two years, and he looks so different, but he also looks exactly the fucking same.
His body hasn’t changed at all from what I can see, but he’s got some muscle on his lean frame for the first time, and it looks good on him. His legs are bare because he’s wearing a fucking skirt and a black crop top, and Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t think.
There’s no way this is happening right now.
My mind is fuzzy, and I wish it were from the alcohol.
He’s not really here.
He doesn’t really have bright pink hair. He doesn’t have a fucking belly piercing. He’s not still wearing the shoes I got him, and he’s sure as fuck not wearing my goddamn necklace.
It’s that thought that has me downing my glass in one swallow and shoving to my feet and stomping over to him before I can think twice. I stare down at his crooked face, seeing it for the first time in nearly two years, and I suddenly can’t breathe.
I reach out before I realize what I’m doing, and my fingers trace the shell of his ear, over all of his piercings, and the stone plugs in his earlobes.
“What the fuck!” he shrieks, startled as he jerks away from the touch, and that’s when I notice the eyebrow piercing.
He looks so different.
He’s grown up.
Moved on.
Without me.
And here I am, still lost.
“Abel,” I choke on his name.
“What…” he croaks out, beautiful, wide gray eyes enlarging when he finally looks up at me for the first time in so long, and I can’t…
I can’t.
“Peris,” he acknowledges me after what feels like forever… and I guess it has been.
I can’t stand the sight of him. It’s all wrong and so right and fuck! My skin is crawling. I glance down, and my eyes catch on his exposed midriff. On the thick line of blonde hair I distinctly remember being matted with cum. Mine and his. And tasting so fucking good.
By the time my eyes make it back up to his face, that signature brow—now pierced with a silver bar—is perfectly poised. “What are you doing here?” I bite out, hating myself for my wayward thoughts.
“Working,” is all he says, not giving into my anger. In fact, he’s as cold as ever.
“What do you mean working?”
That brow waggles slightly as his lips twitch, like he can’t help it. My own furrow in confusion before it all comes crashing back around me.
A different hotel room on a different night. But the same two boys playing the same fucking game.
“It’ll never end, will it?” I ask, the words falling from my lips unbidden.
He seems to roll his words around on his tongue for a while, and oh, how I ache to taste them.
“Not likely.” And then, his phone buzzes on the bar top, making him tense.
He glances down at the screen and then back at me.
I watch as something falls from his lips, but I can’t quite make it out.
Then, “I have to go. Goodbye, Peris.” He stands, and now, we’re chest to chest, and my breath is gone, and what is happening?
“Wait,” I reach out, snatching his wrist on instinct alone. He hisses and yanks away as if repulsed. My stomach clenches, and heat blooms on my cheeks. Whether it’s shame or indignation, I don’t know.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
His eyebrows reach his bright pink hairline. “You lost the right to tell me what to do a long time ago, Peris,” he hisses in a sneer.
My lips curl inward. “You need—”
“I need to… What? Listen to you? Yeah, fuck that.” He whirls around, and as I watch that skirt flutter in the air, I lose my shit. At the possibility of losing him all over again.
My fists clench at my side, nails biting into calloused flesh. “How much?” I swallow grit.
He turns slowly. So. Fucking. Slowly. “Excuse me?”
I rake my fingers through my hair and sigh loudly. “Come on, Abel,” I spit out. “Don’t fuck around. I know you cost a pretty penny. So how. Fucking. Much?”
He regards me for a moment, and then, his puffy lips twist to the side in a smirk I haven’t seen in years—one I never thought I’d see again. I don’t think I missed it as much as I thought I did. “Depends on what you want.”
“I want everything,” I blurt the words without thinking. “And I’ve got enough. So, let’s go.” And this time, when I grab his wrist, he doesn’t pull back, only stumbles slightly as I drag him away from that fucking bar.
“You can’t just manhandle me,” he mutters as he tries to pull away. And I panic. I tighten my fingers, relishing in the feel of his skin against mine again, knowing it’s going to bruise in the pattern of my fingertips. Just like it should.
“Yeah, baby. I can. I just fucking paid to do whatever it is I wanna do.”
He snorts. “You haven’t paid shit yet.”
“You know I’m good for it.”
A long pause as I drag Abel through the lobby. A thought I never thought I’d have in my life.
“I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Guess that makes two of us,” I mutter under my breath as I slam my finger against the button for the elevator. My skin is buzzing, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t believe what’s happening. That he’s here.
My eyes keep dropping down, catching him in my line of sight, even though my fingers haven’t left his wrist and he hasn’t pulled away again.
My grip is tight enough for me to feel his bones grinding together, but still, Abel doesn’t say a word.
He just silently clambers onto the elevator with me and lets me take him to my floor.
The silence between us is pregnant with years apart and everything left between us. I don’t know what to say—or what to do. All I know is he’s here now, and I’m sure as fuck not letting him go.
My heart is hammering against my sternum, and its beat is so strong and erratic, I can feel it pressing into my throat, threatening to choke me with each breath I take. Abel’s skin is soft, and his bones are hard and delicate, and I want to fucking break them.
I want to break him.
Crush him and mutilate him for what he did.
Because who the fuck does that? Who just leaves someone broken and alone and—
“Peris…”
“Don’t say my name,” I snap, hating the sound of his voice as much as I need it. And fuck have I needed it. Raspier and lower than it used to be, but still exactly the fucking same as it vibrates through me and melts me from the inside out, twisting my organs around each other.
“What else am I supposed to call you?” he whispers, and I hate how insecure he sounds.
“What is wrong with you?” I ask as the elevator jerks to a stop and the doors open to reveal a couple cozied up together.
I meet their eyes accidentally and look away quickly, wincing at the sight of them loving each other.
When they catch sight of me and Abel, they also look away and shuffle to the side, letting us off before entering and pressing their own button to descend.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” he hisses, and I frown as I walk down the hallway, dragging him along with me. He stumbles a few times as I jerk him around, but otherwise doesn’t complain.
“You’re acting fucking weird with me, and I don’t like it,” I growl.
“How do you want me to act with you?” he asks softly. So softly, my footsteps falter, and I stop to look down at him. His lashes are dark with mascara, fanning his cheekbones as he stares up at me, blinking owlishly and making my heart hammer. The fucker.
I take a step forward, relishing in the bob of his throat. The way his sharp Adam’s apple dips before rolling back up. His chest hitches with his breath, and I can’t help the way my eyes linger over all of the tattoos covering his exposed skin—and there’s a lot of it.
His body is a work of art—his expression of who he truly is, and I missed the process of it, and that pisses me off, too.
I manage to tear my eyes away from his body to bounce them back and forth between his molten irises. “I want you to act like you,” I snap.
“I’ll be whoever you want me to be, baby. You want your puppy back? I can be that for you.” He juts his bottom lip out and gives me a flash of his pierced tongue and fuck. His words make my cock stir for the first time in what feels like years. Shit, it probably has been, at this rate.
I slowly back him against the wall with each step I take. “Don’t play with me, Abel,” I say roughly, jaw clenched tightly. My arm reaches up of its own volition, and my fingers find the sharp line of his jaw, tracing the skin there and finding it rough from shaving—another new piece of him.