Chapter 14
EVER
What?” I mutter, dazed and breathless. “It’s not my fault you’re thinking of me.”
Eli collapses at my side. I don’t know what it is about him that brings out the hidden parts of me, what makes me feral for the man.
I lie next to him, quivering and pulsing, yet untouched by his hands.
The silence thickens the air between us.
He glistens with sweat, curled up on his side and panting into my neck, only his breath allowed to make contact with my body.
“Never,” he says, and the depth behind it clips my heart.
I let out a tiny moan in response and tug my underwear back up. Why can’t I hold back with him?
Hot air tickles my ear. “That was…”
“Embarrassing.” I roll away, tucking my knees and giving him my back.
“—stunning.”
Oh, the anger. How easily it bursts inside my cells and takes me over. I flip back to glare at him. “I told you not to say shit like that. Not when you make me promise not to love you. You can’t have me if I can’t have you.”
He stiffens and pulls his head away, darkness slipping over his eyes. I can taste him in the air, like minerals and stone at the coldest depths. “So I think you finger fucking yourself is stunning. What does that have to do with love?”
Nothing. Maybe I am delusional. “You tell me. You were the one who brought up love while balls deep inside me only days ago.” I snatch his discarded shirt and wipe my belly clean… and everywhere else I spread his seed when I rolled over, then toss it aside.
“I can’t imagine a better time.” Not even the start of a smirk splinters his face.
I abandon my anger, letting desire leak from my heart. “Why did you make me promise that?”
He tucks himself inside his pants, pulls his sticky-looking hand back out then turns to sit with his back to me, as if that were an answer.
Or his way of telling me he doesn’t care about love.
Maybe I don’t either. But the sight further subdues my temper.
I have to form fists to keep my hands from reaching for those two black towers on his back.
Actually—close like this, with the lines of muscles and the post-fuck glow of his skin in my face—the tattoos don’t look like towers.
They don’t even look like tattoos. The tops and bottoms of each are rounded, and the skin appears more burnt and scarred than tinted with ink.
“Where did you—” I start.
A bang on the door rattles the thin walls. Kelter’s head pokes through the broken window, blocking the moonlight. His hands grip the sharp edges, and he climbs inside.
“Kelter!” I pull my shirt down over my exposed chest and scramble for a blanket to cover my legs. “You could have waited for me to open the door!”
He ignores me and storms across the room. Eli finishes wiping his hand on his shirt and throws it to the floor as he stands to meet him.
Flushed and freshly cut from the window, Kelter stalks up to Eli and socks him in the face. As Eli’s head whips to the side from the blow, Kelter grabs his own cheek as if he’d been hit.
“What are you doing?” I screech, but I’m nothing more than background noise as they pummel each other.
Fists fly. Muscular thuds and smacks of skin on skin fill the room.
Kelter’s long arms reach every which way, but Eli is a mass of muscles.
He takes Kelter down with an arm around his neck and sits on him.
Kelter fights on, his shirt stretching tight over his bony ribs as he tries to escape.
Deep maroon blood spills from the split in his lip, brightening as it trickles down the side of his chin.
“Are you done?” Eli says, holding Kelter’s arms in an X over his chest, his elbows bent at awkward angles. Both are smeared in Kelter’s blood from the window cuts. “You take every hit you give.”
“So do you. And what is wrong with you?!” Kelter tries to spit in his face, but only manages to send a splatter of blood raining over himself, like red freckles. He calms his body with a defeated breath.
“You didn’t seem so concerned when you were making suggestions.” Eli frees his arms, and Kelter clobbers his jaw immediately. Saliva sails through the air and wets the mattress.
“Then you took control! And can you blame me for enjoying it? That doesn’t make what you did right.” Kelter tries to evade a punch only to be hit in the ear.
“What are you guys even talking about?” I bunch the blanket around my legs and move to the edge of the bed.
“Would you quit already?” Eli hisses at Kelter, letting him out from beneath him. “This wouldn’t even be a fight if she wasn’t weakening me.”
Milo carefully drops through the window and takes a confused look around at the television and shadeless wall lamp before assessing Eli and Kelter.
It’s not surprising he’s unaffected after the amount of violence he’s seen.
He tilts his head to the side, frowning, and goes straight to yanking on the door handle.
With no success, he jiggles it one last time and turns around, leaning his back against the door, one ankle crossed over the other, and swipes a hand through his wild hair.
“Could you two stop your cock fight long enough to open this damn thing?”
“You don’t get to do that to her,” Kelter fumes, his fists a blur as he pounds them into any part of Eli he can reach.
“She did it to herself,” Eli grits out between the nauseating thumps of his return punches, targeted and brutal.
“Eli!” I yell. How could he tell him that?
“Liar,” Kelter growls, finally sitting back for a breath. “She was supposed to rest.”
Eli turns to look at me, his face already mottled shades of red and purple at the start of a new round of bruises. He smirks, raising one brow in amusement. “I guarantee she feels better than she has in days.”
A vision crawls in, stealing me away as Milo twists the knob of the final deadbolt and lets Kaleida and Sypher inside.
Kelter and Eli wrestle on a white tile floor, slipping and sliding in a marbled mix of blood.
Blow after blow, they roll and rise like one.
Teeth fly. Bones crack. Red and black smoke appears in wisps and swirls.
It ties knots around them, gossamer ropes forcing one into the other.
The brown and tan skin, the muscles and bones and the black and red blood fuse together into one magnetic man.
And he screams as though the entire world climbed inside him. Until death shows him mercy.
I fall back to reality, finding myself crouched over Eli’s writhing, groaning body in my underwear, a hand gripping his neck and buckets of light flooding the room. While the lifting of my hand is all it would take to free him from the torment that liquifies mind and bone, I can’t let go.
I leave him there a while longer, relishing in the tightness of his chest, his twisted, trembling limbs, the sweet agony on his face.
Not until his cloudy memories start to make their way to me do I pull away, horrified with myself.
I don’t want to take a single moment away.
He collapses onto the carpet, the light fading into his sweat-soaked skin.
I stare at my shaking hands, the rings, the lines on my palms. Why couldn’t I stop sooner?
Why do I want to hurt him? I sit back, legs open and bent, the soles of my feet touching.
It’s all surreal. I wiggle my toes, lost and blocking out my surroundings.
I liked the pain I caused, the way it was up to me to hold on or let go.
Maybe because I’m broken inside, beyond repair.
Or maybe, with the way death tracks me down and follows me through every hour, it’s because I feel a little more alive when I know I’m not alone in my pain.
Kelter lies on the blood-stained carpet next to Eli, panting and staring at the ceiling.
The scent of potatoes and butter and cheese brings me back in time and out of my thoughts.
Saliva pools under my tongue. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten something that didn’t crunch in suspicious ways.
Sypher holds a giant bag of takeout from my favorite restaurant while Kaleida sips on a straw as though it’s the most novel thing ever.
They take in the room with unblinking eyes, much more affected by the screen and electric light than the aftermath of the fight.
Milo is already elbows-deep in my mountain of books and movies.
Kelter pushes up, trembling, and we’re quiet as he finds his balance.
Blood drips from his mouth. He scowls at my bare legs, revulsion smashing his features together as he looks over Eli’s body splayed below him.
Then he stomps toward the door, and before he slams it shut, he tosses his heart on the floor with four simple words: “Some brother you are.”