Chapter Two #5
There were reasons why the tradition of willing human sacrifices existed.
There were reasons why lions needed the opportunity to learn how to be patient with humans, to learn to see them as pets that needed to be protected and humoured rather than as equals that could be held to the same standards as a lion.
It was because humans didn’t make any damn sense. They didn’t do what their instincts commanded. Arslan sighed as he turned a corner and steered his way back to his empty den, his empty bed.
Humans couldn’t be trusted. A lion would have to be a fool to fall for one the way he might fall for another lion, to expect the same from a human as he would from a feline lover.
A professor would have to be a fool to fall for a student, too—even a student of a different subject, a man who wasn’t that much more than half his age.
A boy who’d agreed to be thrown to the lions as if it was some silly little game, who had no idea what the tradition was supposed to mean, what it had meant back in the mist of time.
Of course, it didn’t make the least bit of difference if Arslan was an idiot, or if Ryland couldn’t be expected to act like a lion.
Ryland was his mate—Arslan had never been more certain about anything in his life.
Ryland not being ready to acknowledge that was irrelevant.
Human or lion, neither of them would rest comfortably apart for very long now that they had lain together.
All Arslan could do was be patient and give Ryland whatever time he might need in order to recognise the instincts that lying with his mate should have raised inside him, regardless of his species.
Stopping at a traffic light, Arslan dropped his head back and snarled at the roof of his car and the world in general. Patience was not one of his stronger suits.
*
Ryland re-opened the front door and peeked out just in time to see Arslan’s car turn the corner at the bottom of his street and disappear from view. He stood on the doorstep and stared after it for a long time, his arms wrapped tight around his body, hugging Arslan’s coat against his bare skin.
“You’re letting the cold in!”
Ryland sighed and forced himself to close the door.
One of his housemates, Fred, came out of the living room to join him in the hall. He looked pointedly at Ryland’s borrowed coat and at his bare ankles and feet. “Good night, was it?”
Ryland took a deep breath and let it out as another sigh. Leaning against the wall by the door, he tried to make his brain work and failed miserably.
Fred’s eyes opened very wide. “You didn’t…”
Ryland just closed his own eyes in response.
“Bloody hell! You did!” Fred said. “You actually did it.”
Ryland forced himself to open his eyes again.
Rather than meet Fred’s gaze, he stared down at the coat.
It was far too big for him. The sleeves covered his hands.
But it smelled like Arslan. For all Ryland knew it could have been months since Arslan had worn it, but in that moment, it seemed to hold some of the professor’s warmth as well as his scent.
Ryland pulled it even tighter around him, clinging to the faint echo of Arslan’s touch.
“Did you get paid?”
Ryland nodded, swallowing down the bitter taste at the back of his mouth. “Yeah, I got paid in advance.”
If you come to us willingly and of your own free will, with no thought for your own gain and only wishing to add to the pride, then you are welcome…
If you are who we think you are… A shiver ran down Ryland’s spine as he recalled that horrible moment when he’d realised that not every man who went to the lions went there as a cheap whore.
“How much?”
“Two thousand,” Ryland whispered. So maybe not cheap, but still a whore for all that. It had been just enough to pay the remainder of his fees. When Ryland finally lifted his gaze, Fred was right there in front of him.
He put one hand on each of Ryland’s shoulders as if he thought he needed steadying. “You okay?”
Ryland nodded. It wasn’t as if he could tell him the truth.
“They didn’t want you to do anything really weird, did they?” Fred asked, his huge green eyes opening wider than ever
Ryland shook his head. “No, it was…” Good? Perfect? The best night of his life? Fantastic because it was impossible to believe anything that involved Arslan could be anything other than fantastic? Ryland hesitated. What could he really tell his friend? “It wasn’t a problem.”
Fred didn’t believe him. Ryland knew that, but he had no idea what to do about it. Stepping to one side, he passed Fred by and headed for the stairs.
“Ryland?”
“I’m fine,” he said, not looking over his shoulder. “Just tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Fred said something, but Ryland couldn’t listen right then. He closed his bedroom door behind him and leaned against it for a few seconds before he forced himself to move across the room towards his bed.
He hadn’t bothered with the light. In the darkness, his feet kicked against a discarded pair of shoes. Fumbling at the bed, he pushed all the clothes he’d changed into and out of before his appointment with the lions onto the floor.
He bit back a sad little laugh as he lay down.
All that worrying about what he should wear had been a truly spectacular waste of time.
Curling into a small ball, he pulled Arslan’s coat even tighter around him.
The movement of the cloth against his skin brought his attention back to the scratches on his back. To the marks Arslan had left on him…
Biting down on his bottom lip, Ryland closed his eyes very tightly and did his best not to fall apart, not to give in to the sense of unaccountably deep despair that swirled inside him.
It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.
It was supposed to have been a stranger.
No one he cared about was ever supposed to know.
He’d expected to feel like someone who’d made the difficult decision to take money off a stranger who he would never ordinarily have sex with, the decision to do sex-work for the night.
But he hadn’t taken money off a stranger—he’d taken money off Arslan.
And he didn’t feel like a sex worker—he felt like a whore.
And there was only one way to fix it. When he said yes to Arslan, he had to mean it. He had to be able to look Arslan in the eye when he said that he didn’t want a penny off him and see that Arslan knew it was the truth. Arslan deserved that.
Arslan would never have forgiven him if he’d said yes to him based on a lie, if he’d said yes while he’d been taking money to be there.
Ryland knew that with a sort of certainty he couldn’t ever remember feeling before.
There were things a lion would forgive and things he wouldn’t—just like there were things a family would forgive and things they wouldn’t.
Ryland hadn’t been able to fix things with his family after he went off the script they’d set out for him, but he could fix this. He could be the person that Arslan had thought he was when he invited him to join the pride.
Ryland tasted blood as his teeth cut into his bottom lip. No matter how logically he tried to think about it, something inside him still screamed that he needed to be back with the professor now.
He wasn’t where he belonged. He had to be with Arslan. Then, everything would be okay. It was like a stabbing pain in a part of his mind he hadn’t even realised existed a few hours ago.
He didn’t know where the lion’s den was.
The breath caught in Ryland’s throat. A frantic scrawl through his memory of the journey back to his own home yielded glimpses of dozens of shadowy houses and scores of left and right turns.
But there were no street names, no road signs, nothing that could help him make his way back there.
Panic spiked inside him as the full implication of that sank in. He didn’t know how to find Arslan.
It wasn’t as if he could go there, it wasn’t as if he could just turn up on the professor’s doorstep and announce that he’d spent his first night with him as whore and simply beg his forgiveness, not without having first fixed all his mistakes.
But he should still know where Arslan was.
It was important. In that moment, it was vital.
Even if Ryland couldn’t go back to his family, he still knew where they lived. As the thought flashed through his brain, he couldn’t help but fall into thinking that it meant he had even less chance of being accepted back by Arslan than by his parents.
No. He shook his head against the pillow. The line of thought made no sense, but somehow, it still crept under his skin, sending another shiver down his spine.
No. Not knowing was a good thing. Anything that stopped him from running back to Arslan too soon was a blessing. When Ryland went back to him, he had to be able to tell him that he wasn’t the same man who screwed everything up last time he was there.
That was right. Ryland might not have felt like he had much of a clue about what was suddenly happening to his life, but he knew with an undeniable sort of certainty that he shouldn’t let himself set eyes on Arslan again until he’d worked out a way to fix the mess his life had spiralled into.
This was his chance. His family would have accepted him back if he’d been able to tell them he’d changed himself into the person they wanted him to be.
Maybe Arslan would, too, if he begged hard enough.
Ryland ran his tongue over the cut on his bottom lip.
It didn’t help it heal—it just made it bleed more.
There was nothing he could do that night. Wrapping Arslan’s coat even more securely around his body, Ryland closed his eyes very tightly and just tried to keep his mind from shattering into a hundred different scared little pieces.