Page 35 of A Moth to the Flame (Utopia #1)

Chapter

Twenty-Four

CORDELIA

I awake with a jolt, and then immediately wish I hadn’t.

Everything hurts in ways I can’t process, like I went one round too many in a boxing ring when I had no business pretending to be a fighter in the first place.

“Shit. Sorry,” a soothing, low voice murmurs. “I was trying not to get your face.” A pause. “My face.”

I blink through the steam and damp that blurs my vision until my own face comes into focus.

My face leans over me with a furrowed brow and an expression of deep concentration.

It takes my groggy mind a few minutes to catch up, but when it finally does, I groan. “It wasn’t all a bad dream.”

Duke grimaces. “I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“Shouldn’t we be collectively against wishes at this point?”

A slight smile lifts the corner of my mouth. “We should.”

The rest of the past twenty-four hours slams into me. No wonder I ache in every crevice that isn’t even mine.

“We’re collectively against being mates,” I murmur .

He bites my lip and nods but doesn’t say anything. Just continues scrubbing off the filth that I covered his body with.

I glance around. We’re in the bathroom at Duke’s house. I’m in the tub, muddy water sluicing off his body as he hoses me down with the shower head.

I’m still naked.

On instinct, I lift his arms in an attempt to cover myself. The movement is sluggish and weighted. Then, I remember that he’s already familiar with his own bits.

“Do you want a towel?” he asks anyway.

“What’s the point?” I sigh, and then drop his arms to the side. “You’ve seen my naked body by now, too.”

He nods again. My expression is carefully neutral.

I don’t want to hear how grotesque he finds my body. How…lacking.

So instead, I say, “How did I get here?” The last thing I remember is falling asleep in the woods.

“I don’t know,” he admits quietly.

I glance around again, hoping that my new feline friend might have followed me.

“Have you—” I swallow thickly. “Have you seen a cat?”

He shakes my head, but my expression darkens. “Do you feel strong enough to wash my hair? Or do you need me to?”

I’d love to tell him that I’ve got it, but I absolutely don’t got it.

A tear streaks down his cheek.

He wipes away the tear. My palm comes away muddy.

“I know neither of us wants this, Cordie.” He inhales deeply. “But for as long as we’re stuck with it, would it be so bad to have someone take care of you for a change?”

I scoff, but it sounds weaker than I intend. “Don’t you get it? That’s exactly why I don’t want a mating bond. Not with you. You spent half my life tearing me down. You didn’t even ignore me like everyone else. You tried to break me.”

“I know,” he admits.

He says nothing else. No excuses, no apologies, just shame dimming my eyes .

“Do you?” I push. “Because last I checked, you claimed not to remember doing anything awful to me.”

“I wasn’t lying. I don’t have any memories of that.” He glances away. I see my own jaw tick in that distinctly masculine way that looks so out of place on my face. “What I do remember is that you have always been in my head, always, without fail.”

More tears spill down his cheeks. I’m too weak to try to hide them or stop them. “I might have quit believing in fairy tales a long time ago, but I never once read a book where a mate lashed out the way you did.”

He returns a blazing gaze to me.

“That was exactly why I hated you.” He works my jaw back and forth again. “I didn’t read books the way you did. I’d never heard of mates unless it had to do with animals. I thought I was losing my goddamn mind,” he rasps, before turning his attention to washing the caked mud off his chest.

His movements are still gentle, but they’re stilted now, clinical in a way that I recognize as a distraction from mental anguish.

It occurs to me that I’ve been so butthurt about my own problems that I’ve never stopped to consider his.

Even after all the things I’ve learned about him since sliding into his skin, I’ve lashed out, too.

Just differently. It was easier to continue viewing him as a villain instead of a multi-faceted human being with his own share of ups and downs.

The memory of the vision that I saw when I touched Staci Jo haunts me.

“Tell me,” I demand softly. “Explain to me what it was like for you.”

He shakes my head, smiles painfully, then lifts one of his arms to hose it down. “You don’t want to know.”

“I do,” I insist. “If we’re going to break whatever this is between us, then I need to understand why it was so different for us. You were never in my head,” I confess.

He glances my way. “Never?”

“Never.”

My expression crumbles the way it does when I’m fighting back tears. He nods slowly, then goes back to washing his body .

“I’m glad,” he says after a beat. “You had enough shit to deal with. At least you didn’t suffer through things the same way I did.”

It might be the nicest thing he’s ever said to me. I doubt those words would’ve been possible before he had to walk a mile in my shoes.

“Please, Duke.” His voice cracks. “I need to know.”

Maybe because I’m a masochist. Or a sadist.

If he’s suffered as much as me, it won’t even the playing field between us. But it might offer perspective, some way to move forward without wanting to claw his skin to shreds again.

I wince as he moves the spray over a particularly deep gash. That I caused, on purpose.

He swallows thickly, then blows out a long breath.

My voice is soft as he begins, “It started out like a regular crush, as much as I knew about them when I was fourteen, anyway.” A low chuckle.

“I was attracted to you. Too much of a chickenshit to do anything about it. That day you were assigned to help me in English class, I knew I was in trouble.” His expression hardens.

“Then my mama died.” He blows out another breath.

“Everything was a blur of pain for a while. The way I felt about you wasn’t enough to ease it.

By the time I could see straight again, I hated you.

” He tips his head to the side as if thinking, remembering differently after another sixteen years of perspective.

“It almost felt like a wall was between us. A before and an after.”

I remain silent, letting him work through it however he needs to.

I don’t feel anything about his admission of a young crush snuffed out before it could blossom.

I can’t blame him for reeling after his mother’s untimely end, and a part of me always suspected that was the switch that flipped his treatment of me.

“I got back to being a normal teenager.” He barks out a harsh laugh. “Or so I thought.”

A montage of stereotypical horniness, roughhousing with friends, boisterous laughter in the hallways, and skirt-chasing flits through my mind.

Normal teen life. Things I never got to experience.

Duke shakes my head, sharper this time. “Except I couldn’t stop dreaming about you. I didn’t want you anymore, but my mind never got the memo. I didn’t think much of it until?—”

“Until?” I press. I can barely move his heavy limbs, but I feel like I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting for the punch line with bated breath.

When he meets my gaze directly, it shocks like an electrocution. “Until the first time I had sex. With Staci Jo.”

The breath rushes out of his lungs in an audible wheeze. Because I already know what happened, but I’m still hoping he’ll tell me it didn’t.

“I was sixteen years old,” he grinds out, still meeting my gaze. “Balls deep in a willing, warm pussy, and I couldn’t come.”

I wasn’t wrong. The vision wasn’t wrong.

His muscles tense to the point of snapping.

“I knew then that I was broken, but I didn’t want to believe it,” he continues as he goes back to scrubbing. “Tried to chalk it up to first-time nerves. Convinced myself I just needed to practice some more with something other than my hand.”

“Wait,” I blurt. Hope flickers in my—his—chest. “You could orgasm when you masturbated?”

“Yeah.” He shoots me a deadpan glare. “When I was fantasizing about you .”

A sickening sense of foreboding skitters along his spine.

He swallows, retreating back into methodical movements.

“Nothing changed until the day you left town for good. The first time I filled up a condom inside another body, I wasn’t even relieved.

I still couldn’t kick you out of my head, and I—I didn’t enjoy sex the way I should, not like a normal man.

” He shakes my head again. “I’ve always known there’s something wrong with me, Cordie.

I just didn’t know why or what to call it. ”

His muscles shudder, like I’m experiencing all that confusion, agony, shame, and pent-up lust the way he did, in far less time.

He places a firm, stilling hand at the center of his own chest. “So, yeah. I’m glad to hear that you didn’t go through that, too.”

What if the only reason I didn’t go through that was because no one ever wanted me the way they wanted Duke ?

Another thought occurs to me.

“That was why you helped all those married women,” I breathe. “Because you didn’t want anyone else to suffer the way you were.”

He glances my way with slightly raised eyebrows. “How do you know about that?”

I wince. “After you got me arrested in town, I went to The Flame and pretended to be you for a few hours. The puzzle pieces sort of fit together."

A half smile cracks my lips before he rises, the showerhead still in his hand. “Close your eyes.”

I do.

He runs the warm water over his head, face, and beard, constantly asking if I can breathe okay.

When he’s thoroughly massaged his scalp and face, I blink up through droplets clinging to his lashes to see him frowning down at me.

“I gotta hand it to you,” he says with my hands on my hips. “You got your revenge, all right.”

I don’t feel all that bad until he says, “I think I have to shave my beard and hair.”

I burst out laughing.