“Okay, sure.” I point my finger at him. “But whatever we say to each other stays between us. You can’t tell Lara.”
“And you can’t fucking tell Princess Lilly,” he counters.
“Tell Lilly you and I communicate about emotions and shit?” I shake my head. “That’s the last thing I need. For all she knows, we work out together in silence. That’s it. If she knew we spoke, she would never let me live it down. She would berate me with question after question. She’s not hearing a damn word from me.”
“Best leave it that way.”
“Good.” We head to the barbells together and each pick up a set of forty for bicep curls. “How am I feeling?” I ask. “Not fucking well.”
“You don’t say?” Look at that, the man even has some sarcasm up his sleeve. Who would have known?
Weights at my waist, I flex one up and switch to the other arm. Ottar does the same. “Not being able to be with Lilly at night doesn’t sit right. I feel itchy and not because I have to . . .” I glance at him. “I know I’m talking about the future queen, so excuse my language.”
“How about we just treat her as your girlfriend, future queen not in the mix.”
I nod at that. “I would say it’s not like I have to fuck her every night to feel right, but not having her near me when I wake up and when I go to bed makes my skin crawl with a combination of aggravation and need. I feel like I can’t protect her the way I want.”
“I can understand that feeling.” We both set our weights down and head back to the bench. “It’s like you’re unsettled until you have eyes on the person you’re supposed to protect.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And now with the popularity of the engagement and the wedding planning, the past three days have felt like a whirlwind that I couldn’t stop. I feel out of control.”
“Have you spoken to King Theo?”
After a drink, I set up on the bench again for another set. Ottar racks me up. “I haven’t. I thought about asking him if I could stay with her and promise not to be intimate, but I know how that will go. I don’t believe either of us will be able to behave. Especially Lilly. She has a hard time following directions, which of course turns me on in some fucked-up way.”
“I see.” When I lie down and pick up the bar, Ottar rubs his hand over his face. “Seems like you’re going to have to just deal with the hand you were dealt.”
I puff out a few breaths, push the bar up and down three more times, and then I set the bar on the rack. Staring up at the ceiling of the gym, I say, “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
I hate feeling out of control. I like to be able to have my eyes on everything, everything that matters to me. I realized that when I first started dating Lilly. I’m more comfortable when I know where she is, what she’s doing, and that she’s protected at all costs. The anxiety I feel when I don’t have that under control brings me right back to the day I watched my parents’ living quarters burn down with them inside.
I couldn’t control the situation.
I couldn’t get them out.
I just stood there, completely helpless.
We switch positions, and while Ottar gets ready, I say, “What about you and Lara? She won’t say a word to me about your date. Did it not go well?”
Ottar is a large, behemoth of a man, bald, built out of steel, has a bicep almost as big as his head, and as Lilly has put it, he can crack a walnut with his ass. But the moment I mentioned his date, I saw him transform into a puddle of a man.
“No, it went amazing.” He lifts the bar, and I know he doesn’t really smile, but as he raises the bar up and down, the slightest of smirks crosses over his lips. So light that if I wasn’t paying attention, I would have missed it.
When he’s done, he stands from the bench and doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he moves us back over to the barbells.
“Uh, is that it?” I ask.
“Yup,” he answers.
“You’re not going to say anything else?”
“Nope.”
“How the fuck does that track?”
“It doesn’t,” he answers and then hands me some barbells. “Now get to work. You have an appointment in an hour, and you still owe me pushups.”
Jesus Christ, does everyone in my life know how to play me?
