71. Summer
Chapter Seventy-One
Summer
L ater that afternoon, I nearly stomp through the forest to meet the stranger, my mood no better than it was earlier. In fact, it’s worse. All day I’ve felt eyes on my neck thanks to the enormous hickey he maimed me with.
“Hello, princess,” he says smugly.
“You fucking marked me,” I growl. I stop across the clearing from him, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Is that a question?” he asks, prowling closer. “Or are you expecting an apology?”
“Yes, actually, an apology would be lovely,” I growl, narrowing my eyes in warning as he continues to advance on me slowly.
“You’ll have a long wait. An eternal one,” he says, stopping barely an inch away, hovering over me.
“You are not to touch me unless I give you permission,” I snarl.
“Oh, you begged me to, remember?” he says, his smirk lining his voice.
Over his shoulder, the spell starts to play, and I watch as his lips move against my ear.
I hear the need in my voice as I beg, “Please.” He shows me how my hand clenched his shirt in an iron grip, holding his body to mine.
It plays from his perspective, and I can see how completely undone I am, how wanton.
“Any other lies you want to tell me?” he whispers seductively. My core tightens, not just from his voice, but my body remembers how it felt when he was near me, when he was touching me, when his warmth infused my skin .
“Can we just train?” I ask, pushing down the memory. “I want to get home.”
The stranger nods, but I can still feel the smugness radiating from him.
I ignore it and close my eyes, and I immediately feel him start to probe at my mind.
He starts slow, his touch featherlight as he wanders.
I gently redirect him, and then he puts more force behind it.
He pushes a little harder, and I push him back, which elicits a growl from him, so I redirect him again.
Every time I allow him to get closer to the memory, taunting him with it, he finds it beyond his grasp.
I feel his frustration intensify, and he becomes more determined to reach the memory.
The tendrils of his power poke at the edge of it, and I shove him back so hard he stumbles back.
“Little fae,” he growls, and my fists clench. “You’re supposed to trick me.”
“You’re supposed to respect my boundaries, so I guess we’re both being annoying,” I growl back.
“Being annoying?” He crosses his arms over his chest. “You’re pissed about this morning.”
“Fucking right I am.”
He watches me. “What are you truly angry about? That I marked you as mine, which you are? Or that I didn’t fuck you as you crave?”
My core ignites with a mixture of desire and anger. “I don’t want you to fuck me.”
His power lunges at me, but this time, he isn’t seeking my memories. Instead, he’s giving me an image of his own.
I’m on the floor, on my knees, wearing lacy black lingerie that barely covers anything.
He reaches out and cups my chin, tilting my head up to face him before dragging his thumb along my bottom lip.
I watch him with dark eyes. Around my neck is a silver necklace secured with a small padlock, a sapphire embedded in the front.
“Fuck me, please, Stranger,” I say, my voice exactly like it was when I begged him.
I moan softly, and my knees buckle a little. His arms slide around me, supporting me.
“You were saying, baby?” he says, with that cruel, seductive smile in his voice.
Hearing the new pet name outside Hell shocks me from my stupor, and I slap him hard across the face, snapping his head to the side. A hiss whistles through his teeth, and then, like a viper, he strikes, grabbing my throat. His hand squeezes hard, and my lips part on a failed gasp.
“Careful. I will retaliate.”
“You going to hit me back?” I snarl, wrapping my hand around his thick wrist, struggling as he controls my airway.
He prowls closer, keeping his hold on my throat, forcing me back until I hit one of the trees. “Oh no, not hit you,” he purrs. “I’ll ruin you.”
“Release me.”
He places his hand over my eyes, and the smoothness of his avatar vanishes, replaced by a calloused palm.
“W-what are you doing?” I pant, staring into the blackness of his hand. No, not this again. I can’t keep doing this. I am not strong enough to continue to deny my feelings, the deep, so-wildly-wrong feelings.
He chuckles cruelly. It isn’t loud, but the sound echoes in the forest. His breath tickles my skin as his mouth moves closer to that mark he left on my neck.
I shiver, my hands scrabbling at his wrist and forearm. “Please.” Again, the word is closer to a longing plea than a rejection.
He hears it too, and he growls softly as his mouth connects with my throat, right over his mark.
I can feel his smile pressed against my neck as he sucks gently at the already exquisitely sensitive flesh, his stubbled cheek brushing against my jaw.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, keeping my breath shallow as I try to avoid brushing my chest against his.
“Because you love when I mark you,” he murmurs against my throat, flicking his tongue over the bruise.
“No-no, I don’t.” He kisses my neck again, and I manage to find my last shred of self-restraint. Releasing his arm, I shove hard against his chest. “No. Stop fucking marking me.” My voice is sharp but heavy with need.
“Is that truly what you want?” he asks.
He grabs one of my wrists with his free hand and lifts it above my head, taking care to keep my eyes covered. When I reach up to fight against his hold, he snags that hand too and pins them against the tree.
I moan as his body presses against mine, the sharp bark of the tree digging painfully into the back of my hands. He rubs his stiff cock against my stomach, and another moan escapes me, the vision he inserted into my head playing over and over .
Gods.
I push against him, trying to get him off me, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch.
“What’s the matter, little fae? The desire becoming too unbearable?
” His warmth disappears, and he pulls his hand from my eyes.
His avatar is now firmly back in place, but he continues to hold me by the wrists.
He cups my jaw, trailing his thumb along my bottom lip again.
“I know if I slid my hand down to cup that trembling pussy, you’d beg for me to make you come. ” He smirks. “Too bad.”
He vanishes, his avatar shattering.
Max rolls off me, panting, and we both stare up at the ceiling as we come down from our releases.
It’s been days since I last had any sort of release.
Days since I allowed the stranger as close as he was when he pinned me to the tree.
In truth, the stranger’s mood has been sour, and it hasn’t been difficult to keep him at bay.
When Max texted me, I couldn’t resist the offer of meaningless sex.
“Fuck . . .” Max groans.
I climb off the mattress and pull on his shirt with the sleeves cut off before walking into his bathroom, grabbing some things from my bag on my way.
I place the soap and towel in the bathroom before cleaning up.
The room is still depressing, but at least I’m able to disinfect my hands before I leave it.
When I wander back through to the main room, Max is sitting up, his back against the wall.
He’s pulled on his shorts, turned on the television, and is flipping through the channels.
“Pizza?” I ask, grabbing my purse and walking over to him. It’s easy with Max to just fuck and then casually hang out and eat dinner. It’s easy to see him as a friend who occasionally gives me an orgasm.
“Fuck yeah.”
I drop down beside him on the mattress as I order the pizza, and then I start to scroll through socials. EverydayEmrys has been much quieter since its secret owner left Avalon, but occasional notable sightings are still reported.
A loud scream from the television makes me look up to see a woman being chased through a wooded area by a large, bearlike creature.
It catches her without much effort and tears into her.
The gore doesn’t turn my stomach as much as it would have before last year, but it’s still not what I’d choose to watch.
I turn back to my phone and continue doomscrolling.
“What are you doing?”
I shrug without looking up. “Just scrolling.”
Max browses over my shoulder, but then someone knocks at the door, and I get up to grab the pizza. The student who delivers it looks at me nervously. I think his name is Kenny. He’s another of the shifter kids. I smile at him as I close the door.
“Pizza’s here. Oh, and I got you some other things,” I say, padding back to Max.
“Garlic knots? I know you probably can’t get them at home because of Alice,” Max asks, sitting up more.
I hand him the pizza box and pull a small succulent from my bag before settling back onto the mattress.
I offer it to him proudly, but Max blinks at it, still holding the pizza box. “A?.?.?. garlic plant?”
I sigh in exasperation. “It’s a succulent.”
“What do I do with it?” Max says with a frown.
I roll my eyes. “Water it and shit? I don’t know.”
“And then what do I do with it?”
“Look at it?”
Max’s frown deepens.
“I also got you a hand towel and some soap because you’re not an animal.” I stand up and put the succulent on his coffee table, and while it’s no miracle worker, it does brighten the place a little.
“You bought stuff for my apartment?” Max asks as I sit down on the mattress again and open the pizza box.
I pick up a slice and take a bite. “I wouldn’t call soap, a hand towel, and a succulent stuff ,” I say.
“But I would call it very?.?.?. weird,” Max says. He hasn’t even looked at the pizza, and normally it would be half gone by now. The male can eat.
I lift my eyebrows and finish chewing the mouthful of pizza before answering. “Well, the succulent was half-off, and it’s cute. Plus, you need something alive in this apartment, other than yourself. How else will you know it’s habitable?”
“Buying stuff for an apartment is very relationship-y,” Max says, and he looks like there’s a bad taste in his mouth .
“Max, you’re overthinking this,” I say, rolling my eyes.
Max stares at me, and then he blinks, looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there, which there isn’t. “Oh, I have to go. I have a date.”
“What?” I ask around my second bite of pizza, blinking owlishly at him.
Max clambers off the mattress with none of his usual grace, and I watch in confused disbelief as he scrambles around for some clothes, grabbing whatever he can find. “Yeah, I forgot. I have this thing. And you aren’t my girlfriend, so.”
I frown. “You invited me round for a quick fuck before you have a date?” His girlfriend comment also hurts a little, because I was just thinking how easy this is. How much I am enjoying being on the same page with him. How lucky I feel to have a friend like Max.
“Sorry, I forgot.” He has the grace to at least blush, but he continues to pull on a burnt-orange tank top and a pair of jeans. “Then I remembered.”
I look away, feeling really cheap and gross. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve felt that way, but this time hurts so much worse. I feel used as a friend.
“You can take the pizza. I’ll probably eat there.”
I stand up, crossing my arms over my chest, suddenly feeling very exposed. “You’ll probably eat on your date?” I ask, shocked by his audacity. “But I can take the pizza I paid for?” I blink. “Cool.”
Turning my back on him, I pull on my shorts and grab my purse. Still wearing his tank and leaving the pizza behind, I slam the door as I leave his room. I knew Max was a fuckboy, but I didn’t realize he didn’t respect me as a friend.
The second the early autumn air hits my cheeks, my annoyance with Max starts to morph into something else.
Max and I are just fucking, and the issue isn’t that he’s got a date with another female.
The issue is with how he treated me. Even if we were nothing more than just friends, he dismissed me so readily.
He threw the idea of me being his girlfriend at me with such disgust, which is not what I’m upset about.
It’s the way he thinks the things I do for him are even a fraction of what I did for Connor.
And then there it is. It sinks in. The deep sorrow of losing Connor, of how easy it was, how perfect.
How much I loved him. The effort we both put in for each other, though he always put in more.
There was no messiness with fuckboys. There was the stranger, but he was kept more at bay than he is now, and at the end of it all, there was Connor and me .
I stop on the path. The darkness is creeping into the lightness of the sky, and I try to identify the shadow that penetrates my grief.
There is something there, something I don’t want to identify.
As I focus on it, the fog clears to reveal the brutal truth, and there it is—that deep longing, that deep need.
That is what I keep trying to shove down and deny.
I need to finish this once and for all. I need to say goodbye not only to the stranger, but to everything he represents.
It’s time to end this because I cannot succumb to that dark lure.
To do so would mean losing all that Connor taught me.
I need to cling to him and that light he breathed into life in me.
With that realization, I start to mourn the part of me I have always refused and only just started to explore. The darkness and the stranger have to go. For good.