62. Gideon
Chapter 62
Gideon
F letcher followed me to the library, making himself at home on the chaise lounge while I opened the bottom drawer of my desk. Things were out of place, which meant Bellamy had already done his snooping and come up empty-handed. I’d known, buried balls deep inside of him, that he’d been sent to spy. That he’d been here on a mission to steal from me, all for Fletcher’s gain. For Fletcher’s whims.
For Fletcher.
“Bellamy didn’t check for the false bottom,” I said, unlatching the secret compartment in my desk that kept the copies of my father’s financial records safe. I pulled the whole stack out and set them on my desk. “Everything your father will need is there.”
“I can’t believe your father trusted you with all of that,” he said, lips pursed. “Mine would never.”
“We have different relationships I think, Sin.” I kicked the drawer closed. “Has your father ever tried to kill you with his bare hands? Because mine has.”
“Not with his hands, no.”
I walked around to the front of my desk and rested my ass against the edge, crossing my arms over my chest and staring at the way he’d spread himself out against his seat. The way he looked from the books to me with a calm and calculated kind of interest. These moments were our last together in this version of our life. Once his father had the records of my father’s financial dealings with the Angelinis, a bomb would go off. I wanted to kill my father—and I was going to—but I had no idea what Fletcher planned to do with his.
“He’s known all along,” Fletcher finally said, almost under his breath.
“What?”
“About the Angelini debts…and a hundred other things.”
“How do you know that?”
He shifted from his recline, dropping both of his feet on the floor and bracing his forearms against the tops of his knees, staring down at me like the answer should have been as simple as me knowing the sky was blue or the grass was green, or that I loved him more than my own life.
“Why do you think I did what I did?” he asked me, bottom lip pushed into a dangerously kissable frown. “Back before, I mean.”
“Because you’re a Sinclair.”
His eye twitched.
“You had me, Gideon. You know that, right? You had me convinced that we were bigger than we thought. That we could change things.”
“We are,” I reminded him. “We’re doing it now.”
“But then, I mean. I thought…” He swallowed and caught me in his stare, eyes dark but clear. “I thought loving you was going to be enough.”
“Sin.”
He shook his head, tracing his tongue across the front of his teeth. Climbing to his feet, he stood tall, still shorter than me, but taller than most. He closed the space between us, coming to stand between my spread legs. The position giving him a few inches on me and, for the first time in years, he stared down at me.
“He was going to expose your father back then,” Fletcher said. “Not because he wanted to hurt your father, but because he wanted to hurt me.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I loved you then, because I wanted…because…” He exhaled and tipped his head back, exposing his throat. “Because united families was never something he wanted.”
“What are you saying?”
“He knew about us. Somehow. Or maybe it was a guess and my actions confirmed it for him. I don’t think I’ll ever know. He was going to ruin everything. He was going to ruin you and I couldn’t…” Fletcher’s voice grew thick, and he swallowed hard. “I couldn’t let him.”
“So you did it yourself instead?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he whispered. “I was in love with you, and I wanted you, and I thought I was keeping you safe.”
His words hurt more than the brand in the middle of my chest ever would, but I rubbed my hand across it like I was capable of easing the pain and the history between us with my fingertips.
“Is that what you still want?”
“United families?”
My throat was drier than the desert, and I rasped, “Me.”
Fletcher opened his mouth and closed it again, all his features going soft like he was on the cusp of crumbling.
“Gideon, I…” His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he shook his head. Slowly he let his hands fall to my legs, fingers splayed out against the top of my thighs. He touched me tentatively, like he had no right to it.
There was a flash in his eyes, a fleeting moment, where I worried he was going to say no. Worried he was going to tell me things had gone on too long and too far for us to find a way out of it. And in that flash, I imagined strapping myself to my father and taking us both down to the bottom of the pool because if the resolution of this stupid game left me alone again…
I didn’t want any part of it.
I pushed up from the desk, standing at my full height, towering over him. Fletcher tilted his head back and stared up at me, his jaw the only tight part about him. Our toes touched and we were sixteen again, except this time it was my hand in his hair, my mouth driving the kiss. I crashed our mouths together before he could answer because he’d taken long enough and I was tired of waiting.
I’d never realized how often I caught the smell of chlorine in my nose. How often my nightmares of my past held me prisoner in the present. But with Fletcher’s tongue in my mouth and the smell of him wrapping around me like the most delicate, golden ribbon, all of that was gone. I didn’t think about dying, didn’t think about revenge or power or money.
I thought about the only thing that had ever mattered in my life.
I thought about Fletcher Sinclair. I thought about him coming downstairs, fresh after fucking Luca and Daren. Thought about him rutting Bellamy into the forest floor on initiation weekend. Thought about all the other people he’d had over the last six years while I’d had no one before him.
“Do you still want me?” I asked again, pressing the question into the corner of his mouth with my swollen lips. My fingers tightened in his hair and he looked me dead in my face and told me the truth I’d been running from my entire adult life.
“No.”