He falls into contemplative disquiet. Beyond his shoulder, one of the patrons, an old, bent crone, returns to the bar with an empty glass.
Zephyrus steps closer then, his sternum pressing into my upper arm. “I apologize if I made you feel unwanted or undesired. That could not be further from the truth.”
I swallow so hard I’m certain he hears my throat click. I’m absolutely going to Hell for this, but I must know. “Then what is the truth?”
His eyes shine like fresh lacquer. If I were not staring so intently at his face, I would have missed the flare of heat there. “Do you remember your first visit to Under?” With hypnotic sensation, the tips of his fingers skim the flowing silk of my skirt. “The couple beneath the willow tree?”
Naked limbs and sweat-slickened skin. The forked end of a man’s tongue. My insides curl from the recollection, and I bite the flesh of my cheek, give a fitful nod.
“Do you remember what I said?”
“You told me closing my eyes would make no difference,” I whisper as his fingers sink deeper into the folds of fabric. “That I have already seen.”
“Indeed. And once I tell you, the truth will be known. Are you sure you want that?”
I used to regard truth as a burden. I chose blindness. I accepted what I had always been told, what I had read, what I had heard.
We are attracted to things that lie outside of our lived experience. We crave something deeper.
“Tell me,” I demand.
I startle as his fingertips alight on my outer thigh and begin to trace tentative circles there. “Shall I inform you of the nights whencamp was quiet,” he says, voice resonating like the lowest church bells, “and I watched you, asleep in your bedroll?” The touch skims upward, across my hip bone, where it rests, a scalding permanence.
My hands tremble. I clamp them together at my front. His allure unfolds with dizzying calculation. Bringer of Spring.
“Hours I spent in your company each day, watching the sway of your body as we hiked.” His lips brush the side of my neck. “What a temptation you were.”
Heat feeds into my bloodstream. I fight for air, or sanity, or both. I am Brielle. I have not forgotten. What manner of enchantment has taken hold?
“It was the most delicious torture,” he goes on, grasping my thigh with a firm hand. “In the evenings, I retreated to a quiet place to attend to my needs. I worked myself over slowly, wishing it was your hand around my cock.”
My stomach plunges straight through the floor.
Zephyrus turns his head, and his breath coasts across my naked collarbone, bare skin prickling in the wash of heat. “It was your face in my mind’s eye.”
“You—” My voice cracks. All that I might say turns to dust.
Up his hand drifts, across my abdomen, skirting the soft swell of my chest. For a moment, I’m overcome by the urge to angle my breast into his open palm. I question what he might do next. Squeeze the nipple, perhaps, or circle the nub until it aches.
“Someone will see you,” I whisper.
“No one is paying any attention to us.”
My cheeks burn, but I peek beneath my eyelashes, searching the room. He’s right. Everyone is too focused on gambling and drinking to notice.
“Shall I go on?” Zephyrus asks, a knowing gleam in his eye.
He must sense my yearning. He must smell it on my skin, taste it on my breath, feel the shuddering waves of longing running through me, down to the pit of my stomach, the soles of my feet.
“Shall I describe to you what it felt like,” he goes on, “imaginingthe expression on your face, the sounds you’d make, how sweet your touch would be—”
I slap a hand over his mouth, breathing hard. Our eyes lock and hold: green to brown, god to mortal, captive to the free.
I don’t know what to say. How does one properly respond to indecency of the mind? I’m afraid to admit to my cravings, to learn of those things, too.
Slowly, he lifts a hand, curls his fingers around my wrist, and pulls my palm away from his mouth. “You asked me why I run,” he says, “but perhaps the better question, darling, is why you run from something that cannot be denied? Do you not feel this?” He presses his hand against my thundering heart. “Do you not wish to see where it might lead?”
My mouth open, then clamps shut. I do, and I don’t. How to explain these complicated emotions?
