11. Parting Bite
Parting Bite
Elias
Desdemona, it turns out, couldn’t fake love if her life depended on it.
Her friends are all pressing in, trying to find out how this all started. Desdemona and me. I just watched her waste time maneuvering, feinting and equivocating her way out of questions.
I do no such thing.
“I’ve fancied her for years,” I tell my rabid audience of popular girls—girls who, before tonight, wouldn’t throw me a second look unless they needed me to steal something from their ex-boyfriends or piss off their rich controlling dads.
“Pretty much from the first moment I met her. She didn’t even notice me—but I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. ”
At my side, Desdemona twitches, squirming with unease.
What’s bothering her so much? That I’m saying those things, or that I’m lying?
“That’s so romantic,” Mira Rajahn sighs, palm in her hand. Her eyes, lined with fans of black lashes and gold eyeliner, are dreamy, slow blinking. “Nobody’s ever said that about me.”
“Don’t confuse flattery for real love,” Desdemona says shortly, breaking away from the group in a sudden restless motion.
Dimitri, who is slowly getting himself so drunk he can barely string a sentence together, lets out a bark of laughter. But Emerald throws Desdemona a sharp frown, and even Mira looks surprised. Both of them glance from Desdemona to me.
Maybe that’s when Desdemona realises she’s sabotaging us.
“Let’s go dance,” she snaps, grabbing hold of my wrist without looking at me.
She leads me away, through the press of fragrant dancing bodies, into a corner of the dance floor that’s velvety, pulsating with embracing bodies and pounding bass.
Desdemona spins around, gripping a handful of my shirt and yanking me to her.
“This isn’t working,” she snaps.
“How can it?” I reply. “You’re not letting it.”
“You’re throwing me off!”
“How?”
She gestures with an elegant hand, pearl bracelets catching the flashing pink and blue lights.
“You’re laying it on too thick. The compliments. The stories. The kiss.”
“What kiss?” I step forward, crowding her into a corner, away from the couples craning their necks to catch a glance at her.
“You shouldn’t have kissed me,” she says, and even through the music, there’s genuine anger in her tone.
“I didn’t kiss you, though.” I tilt my head, peering at her face in the changing lights, the dapple from the antique disco balls outlining her cheekbones, her lips. There’s colour in her cheeks that could just be all those shots Blaise made everyone drink…
Or something else
“I didn’t kiss you,” I repeat, and step forward again, because she keeps stepping away, but I want to look at her face. “Is that why you’re angry, love?”
“Don’t try to manipulate me,” she snaps.
“Stop worrying so much about what I’m trying to do,” I tell her. “And worry about yourself. It’s not me your friends aren’t buying, it’s you, because you’re acting restless and cranky and mean. So what’s making you restless and cranky and mean?”
“I’m not. My friends know you’re lying, you know that, right?”
“Your friends are wondering if I’m lying, because despite everything I’m telling them, you’re acting like you can’t stand me.”
“No, I’m not,” Desdemona says, and this time, we both know she’s lying.
“No?” I let out a sharp laugh. “That’s how you act when you fancy someone?”
“I—”
She cuts herself off. One moment, she’s glaring up at me.
And then, all of a sudden, she drops her gaze, turning away, hands rolled into fists. I watch the back of her neck, that delicate arc. Reaching over, I take her face in my hand, tilting it gently back to me.
“You don’t actually know, do you?” I ask.
My voice comes out low and rough—my heartbeat’s picked up, my breath grows short from the sudden, electrifying thrill of discovering something absolutely crucial.
“Don’t patronise me,” she hisses out. “I’m not some shy little virgin.”
“What’s the point of fucking”—I tilt my head—“if you don’t actually want the person who’s fucking you?”
Her cheeks go dark, the flush uneven across her skin. She hesitates, lips trembling, and for a second, I wonder if this is something she’s only just realising, too, if—
“It’s not going to be you.”
She whispers the words, deadly soft, with stone-cold cruelty.
Maybe I could find it in me to laugh, if my own pulse wasn’t hammering a hectic beat in my throat, crushing each breath into a hiss.
“No?” I whisper thickly.
She shakes her head. She makes no attempt to free herself from my grip. Her eyes stay on mine, a knowing look in them.
“You’re so damn arrogant,” she says. “You think it’s going to be you—that you’re going to teach me things I never knew, that you’ll make me feel emotions I’ve never felt.
Guess you’re not that different from all the others, after all.
” The corners of her mouth curve. “They all thought the same thing.”
She’d be so easy to hate, I realise, if she wasn’t so goddamn proud.
Her pride doesn’t make me want to hate her, or even hurt her. It only makes me want to humble her. Prove to her that she’s just as vulnerable to weakness and pain as all the rest of us mere mortals.
I slide my thumb up towards her mouth, tugging lightly at her bottom lip.
“I don’t need to make you want me,” I tell her. “I just need you to know how to pretend you do.”
I release her. My thumb is wet from her lip, a pink smear on my skin where I’ve rubbed off some of her lip gloss.
“I fully intend to keep my end of the bargain when the time comes, love,” I tell her with a shrug.
“You’re the one who’s not holding up your end.
You’re a clever girl, and I know you don’t like being patronised, so I don’t need to remind you what you have to lose.
I suspect you’re already all too aware of it.
If our deal falls through, though, you know it won’t be on me. ”
And with that, I turn and walk away, leaving her alone on the writhing, watching dance floor.
It takes Desdemona almost half an hour to swallow her pride and return to the booth.
I’m sitting with Blaise and Dimitri and the rest of the Brotherhood: Emerald’s arch-enemy and bitterest rival, Benjamin Montgomery, rugby captain Jamie Vale, and pale, stony Mikhail Rurik, rumoured political exile of some bleak little European country.
They’re making bets—who’s going to get laid tonight.
I suppress a smirk. How fun can sex be for any of them? Sex is only ever fun when it’s messy and dirty and a little bit humiliating. They’re all too self-aware and self-possessed to let loose. Talking of which—
Desdemona reappears after our confrontation looking utterly, rigidly perfect. She’s sobered up a little, and she’s rearranged her hair, and her dress seems somehow even more creaseless and impeccable than before.
With her spine poker straight, she crosses the dance floor, striding with measured, gliding steps where I’m standing with her feral, drunken friends.
“There you are,” I murmur softly when I see her, only half faking the pleased smile on my face.
She doesn’t stop when she sees me—she advances with fell purpose, fortresses raised sky high, armed to the teeth with determination.
And then, for the first time tonight, she surprises me.
She catches me by the collar of my shirt, yanks me down, and crushes my mouth to hers.
She kisses me like she hates me, and maybe that’s why my cock grows suddenly, convincingly hard. Alarm bells ring: pleasure should have nothing to do with this bargain.
Fuck.
There are whoops and cheers, and Dimitri’s hoarse voice bellows: “Fucking disgusting!” through a rasp of laughter. Around us, the crowd dissipates, Mira and Emerald dragging the others away as if to give us privacy.
When it’s just the two of us left, Desdemona breaks the kiss with an intake of breath that almost sounds like a sigh.
I have the urge to suck her bottom lip into my mouth as she pulls away, give her a parting bite, but I quickly remind myself that’s not what this is.
I let her retreat, the delicate string of saliva between our lips snapping.
And just like that, the moment is over—the curtain drops.
“Proof enough for you?” Desdemona says in a husky whisper.
I laugh, wiping my mouth with my thumb.
“Guess we’ll find out.”