6
EMBRY
Mateo had a secret.
Alexei was right. Disquiet shuddered through me. Then relief. He was about to tell me, so it didn’t fucking matter that it had existed in the first place.
Too easy.God, I knew it. Nothing about Mateo was ever so simple. But huddled in the cave where my cousins had taught me to inhale when I smoked, I craved something uncomplicated as much as I yearned for him.
I leaned closer, an unconscious action that was so painless when we were away from the four walls of my bedroom. “Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”
“Okay.” Mateo’s eyes gleamed like embers in the cosy cave. “You’re the only dude I’ve ever wanted to fuck. How do you like them apples?”
I blinked. “What?”
“You heard.”
I had, but the words swam, nonsensical. Mateo wasn’t like Rubi or Cam. He’d never outright admitted he was bi or fluid or whatever and told the whole world to fuck off and deal with it. But I’d always taken it as a given. As something unsaid. Something withhistory, even if I’d only ever seen him pick up women and heard stories about him fucking them on the clubhouse pool table, bringing that big-dick energy so hard every old lady in the club gave him a second look from time to time.
A third.
A fourth.
It had made sense to me that the dudes were lined up elsewhere. Grindr. Scruff. The dirty clubs the MC owned throughout the South West. And I hadn’t thought about it too deep. Hadn’t wanted to.
Now, though...
I edged even closer. “Just me?”
He nodded, doing that thing with his thumbs again. That soft and gentle swipe that got ever closer to my bare skin with every pass. “Yup. Never crossed my mind. Then you rode into the yard behind Cam, tearing the place up on that fucking rocket, and I’ve been a fool for you ever since.”
He said it with a smile, but I wondered how deeply he felt that: that he was a fool. He still fucked other people—othergirls—we both did. But despite the heady thrum in my pulse right now and the tightness in his jeans he was trying to hide, he wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about the irrefutable fact that he loved me.
Words he’d never spoken, but I felt every time he speared me with those fiery amber orbs.
Did he think he was a fool because I’d never said it either?
Or because he’d committed his heart to platonic sleepovers and fucked-up kisses that got him decked in the face?
At least he was still getting laid. It had been months for me. Longer. A year? Fuck. Sometimes it was hard to remember my life before that crazy cunt McGif had dug his knife into my guts.
Twisting the blade.
Smirking.
“Em.” Mateo sat up a little. “Hey. Come back.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
His gaze liquified, disbelieving and fierce, before he tempered himself. “You know you space out more than Cam does these days and you said he needs therapy.”
“What’s your point?”
“Self-explanatory, innit.”
“Going cockney on me?”
“I’m from Islington.”
