Chapter Theo
Theo
I’m showered, I’m shaved, and I’m respectably dressed.
Inside me, however, all is chaos. I fucked up badly. So badly. I’ve made mistakes before, but this one is for the ages.
I’ve wanted her for months and last night—in a staggering abdication of responsibility—I let myself get plastered enough to stop caring about the consequences.
She and I will need to truly discuss it at some point. I haven’t even asked if she’s okay, but we’re ten minutes late as it is. I go to the gift shop while she’s still getting ready, and we arrive in the lobby at the same time.
“The two of you look a little worse for wear this morning,” Lars says with a brow raised.
“Unnhh,” I grunt, pressing a packet of Panadol in Bex’s palm before swigging my own with some coffee.
“Jesus Christ, the sun is bright,” hisses Bex, reaching for the sunglasses atop her head.
“You hit that sweet bar in your room a little hard, did you?” Caden asks, throwing an arm around her shoulders.
I want to put his face through the fucking door. And when the fuck was Caden in our room? I’m not going to bring it up, but it bothers me more than it probably should. So does that arm around her shoulders.
I follow her out to the van. Leave it alone, Theo. The day is bad enough already. Leave it alone.
“When the fuck was Caden in our room?” I demand the moment we’re both inside.
So much for leaving it alone.
She raises her sunglasses just enough to squint at me. “He dropped off our garment rack. What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t believe you let him into the room after the shit he’s said to you.”
She lowers the sunglasses again. “With all the mistakes we’ve just made, that’s what’s troubling you?”
Paula climbs up front with the driver, and then I enter a new level of hell, one in which my head is throbbing, annoying pop is playing at an ungodly decibel level, and I’m enduring it all with a woman I just…
It doesn’t bear discussing. I hope that Panadol kicks in fast.
The driver pulls as close as he can to the catacombs entrance. I can smell the alcohol seeping out of my pores as we exit the van into the sweltering July heat. Paula tells us to go inside—we can’t have the viewing audience thinking we sweat. Or make terrible mistakes.
How am I ever going to get things back to normal now? Not simply our friendship but also the way I feel? How do I put it all back in the box labeled “Really Bad Ideas” when I know exactly how good an idea it seemed last night?
We walk down the steps to the catacombs, where it is, thank God, dark and cool and relatively silent. Just as I think I might actually survive this experience, my gaze catches hers and I remember her looking up at me in precisely that way as she kneeled between my legs.
Last night is a windowpane shattered into a million fragments. I can’t take a single step without being pierced by a shard of it. The sight of her hand wrapping around my cock as she dropped to her knees. Licking the tip as if it were her favorite dessert, moaning that she loved the taste of me.
Fuck. I’m so hungover, I’m so furious at myself, and despite the fact that I clearly came about a million times, I’m getting hard at the thought of her on her knees.
We didn’t sleep together, the one small silver lining. Also the thing I regret most. Because how am I going to get through the rest of my life wanting that and never having it?
We avoid eye contact until Paula says we’re rolling, and then we start walking side by side through the first musty hallway of skeletons. This morning went so poorly. Probably because what I should have said and what I wanted to say were entirely different things.
“Hey, guys?” Lars calls. “Cameras are rolling. You know that, right? How hard did you hit it last night?”
“If you read about a Parisian alcohol shortage in the coming days,” I reply, “it was us.”
“I’d expect this of Rebecca,” Lars says. “She’s twenty-four. But you, Theo?”
Yes, we’re all thinking, But you, Theo? How could you? Me most of all.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Bex says. “I bullied him into it.”
I frown. Why the fuck is she taking the blame? I’m a thirty-six-year-old man who got completely plastered and did almost every conceivable thing to his former partner’s daughter—a partner whose final request of me was to leave that daughter alone.
“You didn’t bully me into anything, Bex,” I say quietly. “I’m not Jessie. You don’t have to fall on your sword the second something goes wrong.”
Her head jerks to me. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, and she grows silent.
“Give us one of your bizarre facts, Bex,” asks Paula. “Please. We’ve got nothing usable.”
Bex nods and forces herself to turn toward me. “You know why they created this? Because there wasn’t enough land in central Paris to bury people, and the stench of the dead was atrocious, so they dug up a bunch of graves and dumped all the bones here.”
“What an uplifting story.”
Her laugh is slightly hoarse. “It’s the catacombs. Were you expecting me to talk about drunken orgies?”
I raise a brow, but the comment about drunken orgies does not appear to be personally directed.
She seems to be recovering better than I am. Her eyes are bright, her skin glowing. If it wasn’t for that mouth of hers, still puffy from the abuses it suffered last night, you wouldn’t suspect anything had happened between us at all.
That mouth. Fuck me, that mouth. The way she kisses.
I knew she’d be like she was…playful and teasing when we were drinking in that bar, letting her mouth slide from neck to ear.
Ferocious in private. God, I wish I could remember more of it.
But that look on her face when she fell to her knees is enough.
I will jerk off to that look for the rest of my natural life.
And now we’re staring at each other and any second now, Lars or Paula is going to ask what the hell is happening. I need to say something and my mind is entirely devoid of topics that aren’t her.
“Though they did have parties,” she continues, her gaze awkwardly darting away. “They found one of the chambers had been turned into a movie theater. Screen, projector. It even had a restaurant.”
Bex is carrying this entire shoot single-handedly while I’m thinking about her mouth wrapped around my cock.
I unlock my jaw by force. “It seems like that would be difficult to get away with.”
She shakes her head. “It’s harder to catch people than you think. There are two hundred miles of tunnels to comb through. A hospital worker got lost down here once, and it took them eleven years to find him.”
I’d like to pull her into one of those secret rooms. I want to hear that gasp of hers again, the one she made when I first slid my tongue inside her. I want to pull her into one of those secret rooms and fuck her so hard that she’d—
Bloody hell. I’m surrounded by six million skeletons, and all I can think about is how badly I want to fuck my wife.
And that’s exactly how I knew it would be.
I’m a man who was thirsting for something. It took one drop to make me realize I’m parched, to make me want it to the exclusion of all else. We have to walk this back, and I have no clue how to do it.
I’ve known all along this was quicksand. And last night, I dove in headfirst.