Chapter Ten #2
I still haven’t said anything. I can’t figure out what to say that wouldn’t scare him off, and after he’s become dependent on me to keep him alive.
Shit.
Bel shifts again, his painted toes digging into the carpet, and drops his chin to his chest. It’s then I realize his tail—he has a tail—has been carefully coiled around his ankle this whole time, like he’s trying to hide it.
I take his chin between my thumb and finger and lift his face to me.
“Are you okay?” I ask him.
He sputters a wet gasp. “Am I okay? You’re the one who just got signed up to be my handler. Who’s going to have to share his house with me now. And who’ll get paid shit for it, by the way—Tem complained constantly about how little he was compensated for putting up with my annoying ass.”
My lip curls in a snarl. “One day, I’ll need you to tell me everything he did or said to you.
But for now, I need to know how you are.
Fuck the money; I don’t need the money. And I didn’t get signed up for any of this—I volunteered.
I want to do this for you. You, however, didn’t have much of a choice.
It was this or being shoved into a hidden safehouse for the rest of your life.
” I lower my hand from him no matter how much I hate not touching him.
“I won’t have you feeling like you need to continue our relationship in order for me to protect you.
My keeping you safe is separate from that.
” Oh gods; I see the conclusion I’m coming to like headlights on a car barreling toward me.
“We should … we should probably take it off the table entirely.”
Bel’s chest contracts. “What? Why?”
“I don’t want you to feel indebted to me, like your safety is contingent on us hooking up. What if one day you want to end things, but don’t because you feel like I’ll kick you out if you do? What if—”
“What if Galaxrien’s cultists find me tomorrow,” he cuts me off, “and I never knew what it was like for you to fuck me?”
I choke. Full-on attack of coughing and wheezing.
Bel gives me a satisfied, bratty little smirk.
“I don’t know about you,” he tells me while I do my best not to asphyxiate on nothing. “But I won’t be able to treat you like a handler. I won’t be able to live in the same apartment and not touch you. Kiss you. I want you, Orok, and—”
He stops abruptly. Like that same car I saw coming hits him, his shoulders jolting.
He glances down at his body.
“But I know … I don’t have to look like this. I have the illusion magic.”
He pulls a small spray bottle out of his pocket and uncaps the lid with shaking hands. Instantly, the smell of apples floods the space, and he hasn’t even used any yet.
I close my fingers over it. “No, you—wait. That’s why you always smell like apples?”
Eyes on the floor, he nods. “I got to pick a scent to cover the smell of the illusion magic. Are apples okay? I think Ilbryen could change it if you—”
“Don’t you dare.”
Those gold-black eyes lock on me. They aren’t the big brown eyes, but they’re still him, sweet and hopeful.
“Apples or not, demonic form or not, I want you,” I tell him. “As whoever makes you the happiest. Of course I want you. But it isn’t about me—I need you to feel safe. And I’m afraid, if we keep the physical side of our relationship, you won’t feel safe. You’ll feel obligated.”
He studies me, my hand still keeping the bottle in his grip captive. Without breaking eye contact, he frees his hand, recaps and pockets the bottle, and takes a step closer, his face tipping up, reaching for mine, open, raw, pleading before he’s even spoken.
“Maybe I want to feel obligated to you,” he whispers.
It shocks through me, an electric current.
No. No, I’m giving him the proper out. We can make this professional. We can—we need to—
“Bel—”
“Maybe I want to feel like I belong to you.”
I slam my eyes shut, rocking like the whole damn city got hit by an earthquake and I’m absorbing the impact.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” He doesn’t. He can’t know what a throughline his words have straight to the most unhinged part of me.
“I do,” he says, gradually more beseeching. “I want to feel like I’m bound to you.”
A shiver walks down my spine. Stop. Stop—
“I want to feel like I’m yours.”
He’s mine.
Entirely. Utterly. In every conceivable way.
The beast is raging, stalking, hungry; I freed it, why am I still holding it back?
Because Bel needs me to. Because this is the healthy thing to do. Because—
Bel braces his hand on my chest, his spot, and I don’t have to open my eyes to know he’s lifting up on his toes.
I pinch my eyes shut tighter, breaths coming in rough pulls that sound like growls; how is he not afraid? My shoulders are rising and my hands are in fists and I’m one trigger away from snapping, can’t he see that? Why isn’t he running?
Because he has no choice now. Because he can’t run. He’s trapped.
He’s trapped.
He can’t be taken from me.
Gods, I’m sick. I’m so fucked up.
And so gods-damned turned on.
Bel tugs on my neck until I lean down enough for him to brush his lips across mine, the barest hint, before he leans his forehead against my jaw. He’s trembling, whether from holding himself up or the stress of this morning coming to a head.
But when he speaks again, his voice is vulnerable in a way that’s my final undoing.
“Can I be yours, Orok?” he asks. “Tell me you’ll keep me.”
I palm the back of his head, fingers snagging in his curls, and my eyes rip open to his breathless expression, but I’m too far past gone to stop.
When I kiss him now, it’s unabashed and starving, brutal and beastly.
I hook my thumb around his chin to lower his jaw so I can plunge my tongue inside his mouth, tasting, tasting what’s mine.
He lets me, going pliant in a deluge of little whimpers and needy shivers as he cradles his body to me, drawing closer even though he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t want this.
“Last chance,” I tell him. It’s a lie. There are no more chances. “Last chance for this to be simple.”
But he’s shaking his head before I even finish talking, clawing at my shoulders, those whimpers never stopping. “No, no, please, Orok—please, I’m yours. Let me be yours, please.”
I devour his mouth again and he croons in restless relief before I’m scooping him up and carrying him through the bedroom and into the huge bathroom.
Tem didn’t actually touch him earlier, but I have the sudden need to scrub off their interaction.
I set Bel down next to the double vanity. The shower has a glass door that covers half the massive marble stall, and I reach in to get the water warming up. He hasn’t moved, staying right where I put him, and I tug at the hem of his silk tank top, my throat pulsating in a growl.
Pretty sure I’ll always be making some kind of sound like this around him.
Pretty sure I should be more worried about that.
He lifts his arms obediently, eyes heavy-lidded, and fuck, there’s that growl again.
“So good,” I purr. “So good for me, aren’t you?”
His eyes shut with a whimper that looks like it pains him.
“Open those eyes, sweetheart. I want you looking at me.”
A beat passes, and then he does, blinking as the room fills with steam and humidity.
I lift the shirt over his head, drop it to the floor, and—
The growl rips out of me this time, comes barreling past my lips, raw and grating against the hum of the shower.
Bel’s chest flutters in anxious breaths, making his skin shine—and making his body chain glint and glisten in the bathroom lights.
I hadn’t noticed he was wearing it again.
One of my fingers drifts down the center chain. It dangles off his neck with pieces that swoop around his shoulders, his ribs; delicate, impossibly thin strands of gold links. The center one continues down, down, vanishing below the edge of his pants.
“You put it back on,” I state the obvious.
He lowers his hands. “I thought … thought I’d be leaving.”
His eyes fly to mine, like that might somehow still be true, and his brows pulse in an unspoken plea to prove that he’s not going anywhere. That I’m keeping him.
“How far down does this go?” I ask, voice gravelly.
Eyes on mine, he undoes his pants, pushes the rest of his clothes to the floor, and kicks them away.
Maybe there really is an earthquake pummeling the city. Or maybe I’m the center of it, insufferable vibrations shooting out of me, more potent than the earth shifting.
The body chain trickles over his belly button, following the line of hair to his groin, his hard cock sticking straight out toward me. The chain divides around it to encircle each thigh.
What parts of me might have still been clinging to poise are demolished.
He’s naked for me, his rose-gold skin gleaming with the growing stickiness of the shower, but it’s that damn body chain that highlights every perfect dip and contour of his muscles, makes him look like a Grecian statue come to life.
The sight is ravaging.
Bel braces his hands on the vanity behind him, cheeks flushed, knuckles whitening, his tail coiled around his calf. His muscles strain the longer I look, let myself gorge on him.
“O-orok,” he stammers.
I peel off my shirt, push my sleep pants down, and it’s his turn to stare. He’s seen most of me already, but the flaring of his eyes and the way his knuckles turn even whiter on the vanity send a shudder like champagne bubbles from my neck to where my dick hangs hard against my thigh.
He’s soaking up the reverberations of this earthquake I’m emitting as I close in on him, letting my hand follow one of the chains around his thigh, to his ass, to where his tail connects out of his lower back.
A hiss slips through his lips, answering me before I need to ask, but I do anyway.
“Can you feel me?” I whisper.
He nods. Nods as I trail my fingers down his tail, gently prying it away from his leg. Nods and shivers and pinches his eyes shut in a restrictive collapse like he’s trying so, so hard to hold himself back.