Page 43

EIGHTEEN
Byron
MAKING MIA DIMITRIADISscream and beg should not be working its way as high up on my list of favorite activities as it was. Neither should watching her take Luca apart—seeing those walls of his crumble to rubble, even temporarily.
I lay panting, glued tight to Mia by the knot she held clamped inside her hot body, not to mention a few patches of sticky cake residue sticking our skin together. For the briefest of instants, I wondered what it would feel like to let go of all the baggage that weighed me down... to surrender completely to the here and now, as she and Luca seemed to do in these moments.
What would be left? Who would I be, without the years and layers of pain that had formed me?
For one thing, I probably wouldn’t have been the asshole who fucked both Mia and her closeted husband in cheap hotel rooms to distract myself from my own pain. That particular comedy of errors had been a real kick in the balls, courtesy of fate—one I was desperately hoping wouldn’t come back around and bite me in the ass later on.
Nat Fucking Bell had been the kind of mistake that was enjoyable enough I’d kept making it multiple times. There was just something about forcing repressed little beta males to realize that they enjoyed taking it up the ass. It was a delicioussense of corruption... of bringing the rampaging hypocrisy of beta culture into the light, and tying a great big rainbow-colored bow on it for good measure.
I remembered the first encounter with unusual clarity. He’d had a sob story about how his wife had cut him off in the bedroom; how she wouldn’t even discuss the issue with him, and so an open marriage had been the only option to keep the union together.
It had been all I could do not to roll my eyes. He might as well have said, ‘We’re barreling toward an ugly divorce; we just haven’t admitted it to ourselves yet.’
Then he’d proceeded to come three times in the space of three hours, eventually taking an alpha knot despite being an obvious first-time bottom. I’d been reluctantly impressed. When he asked for my number, I gave it to him.
The next two times we’d hooked up, I’d sensed that he’d jumped into the ocean of gay sex, fully expecting to hit some sort of barrier reef of personal humiliation that would catapult him back to the shore—wet and sputtering, but still safelystraight. Except, it hadn’t ever come.
He’d been up for everything I dished out... and I did meanup. Nat Bell orgasmed like a man who’d been sexually pent up for years, and that fit neatly in with his story of spousal abandonment in the bedroom. He conveniently didn’t mention that his wife was an omega; one whose high-powered career as a celebrated chef prevented her from having regular natural heats.
Telling myself that Mia’s marriage wasn’t my problem—while I was balls-deep inside her and purring like a tomcat on steroids—had more than a whiff of dishonesty about it. But it wasn’t as though Nat was going to spill the proverbial beans to her... and I sure the hell wasn’t, either. What would be the point of hurting her over something like that?
Mia hummed and stretched. My knot had started to deflate after her muscles’ tight grip gradually loosened, and I slipped out of her body as she moved against me in a lazy arch. The hum turned into a noise of displeasure when our cake-stained skin pulled apart.
“God, I need a shower,” Luca said, sounding half-asleep.
He’d been dozing next to us on the chocolate-stained bedsheet, lost in post-orgasmic languor. One side of his hair was flattened and matted. I wasn’t sure how the cake had ended up there, but he was right that it was going to take shampoo and running water to get it out.
“I think we all do,” I said reluctantly, the purr dying in my chest. Somehow, I knew with inevitable certainty that this was going to end up with both of them in my bed again.
I should put up more of a fight about it, I felt certain. They both had nests to go to. They didn’t need to stay in my room.
And yet, thirty minutes later, I was supporting a half-asleep Mia out of the bathroom, both of us clean and shower-damp. Sure enough, Luca had already made himself at home on my oversized mattress after his own shower.
He cracked open one green eye as I paused next to the bed with my drowsy burden. “Too tired to go back to my room,” he said. “Just wanna sleep.”
Mia made a noise of agreement and climbed in next to him, burrowing under the covers and into his arms. They let out matching sighs of contentment, and within moments, they were asleep.
I stared down at them for an uncomfortably long time, good sense warring with whatever fucked-up system I usually used for decision making, and predictably losing the battle. With a sigh of my own, I crawled in next to them.
Settling on my back, I gave them a careful few inches of space—not that those inches had been much use the last time thishad happened. I’d woken up in the middle of the night wrapped around Mia like a barnacle.
My left hand crept up to brush over the ugly scar in my side where a bullet had barely missed killing me. She’d asked about the wound. Not too surprising, since she’d seen it on a couple of different occasions by that point. The surprising part was that I’d told her—about the shootout, and about my dead gang.
I never talked about that shit with the people I had sex with.Never.
Luca only knew it was gang related because in this house,allof our fucked-up shit was gang related. It didn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that much.
God, I wished sometimes that I could wake up with the kind of selective amnesia that showed up in bad TV drama. With my past a blank slate, but all of my basic skills like walking and brushing my teeth and using a computer mysteriously left intact.
What a fucking relief that would be. Too bad amnesia didn’t actually work like that. So, instead I was left with casual sex as my narcotic of choice.