Zayn:Fine. You know I adore you, right?
Winter:Never in doubt.
I smiled to myself, then grabbed my hoodie, and I was out the door.
Zayn was staring again.
Just like he’d done throughout breakfast earlier.
And not in thatI’m-desperate-for-you-to-shove-me-to-my-knees-and-make-me-choke-on-your-delicious-cockway I was used to from him. Especially lately, since he’d accepted that about himself and gone all in with his sexuality with our foursome, no regrets.
Jeez, get a hold of yourself.
So the horny thing was very real.
Some sort of reaction to the Ruxnoth dreamscape thing from earlier.
Not to him. Never to him.
It was a trauma response, I was concluding.
Touch was a way for me to… connect.
I’d always been touchy-feely, something Zayn, of all people, could attest to. And when sex was involved, it could be intense. Far from being just during. In fact, more so afterward. And now I was with the three of them, the immersion of it was all-consuming.
A connection like this was something I’d always wanted. They’d even all acknowledged me in the proverbial daylight. There was no more of me being kept as a dirty little secret like there had been on Zayn and Evira’s end before. They accepted me, they were with me through everything, and they weren’t even pulling away with this nightmare hanging over me. They were drawing me closer and lavishing me with support—and love.
Love.
And I guess, because I had to mediate my emotions and what I put out there, my appreciation and reciprocating love for them was coming out sexually. It seemed safer. I’d already shown vulnerability, instability to them, and this feeding situation was making it difficult to temper that.
And I had to. I fucking had to.
When I’d told Ruxnoth the reason behind me taking off my mom’s necklace, it hadn’t really been a lie to appease him.
A part of me, a big part of me, could only see one end to this situation with him, to this threat. And let’s just say that saying goodbye did actually factor in.
So me being so… needy and channeling it into sex and this barely controllablehorniness…I guess it was me trying to hold onto what I had while I could still have it. To drown myself in my loves so… so I had something amazing to hold onto when… when it was taken away from me.
When I had to allow it to be taken away from me.
To protect them and my family.
To protect every fucking one.
So… there was a lot going on.
And I suppose it couldn’t all be slotted into a single box the way I wished it could be.
I gritted my teeth.
I’d thought at least telling Zayn I didn’t need to feed this morning would help to calm any concerns about that. And now I could because of what Ruxnoth had “gifted me”—providing me the warmth for much longer. Gifted… what a load of heavy-handed manipulation that framing was. But instead it had set off alarm bells.
I needed to keep away from feeding completely, then, so it reinforced that the escalating need had leveled off, then dissipated, that it had only been a temporary thing. So long as what Ruxnoth had done lasted long enough and I could keep it up without experiencing side effects that would be noticed, it would also take pressure off Vax’s mission to find a solution for me.
I couldn’t tell him I now had the means to work on it. It would expose him to Ruxnoth. And if Vax touched that living equation, Ruxnoth could find out with how close the fucker wasmonitoring me. Then he’d hurt Vax—or worse. He’d already made threats as it was to harm the people I loved if I didn’t comply, didn’t keep contact, didn’t keep quiet, didn’t obey. Ruxnoth wouldn’t be alerted to me tampering with the living equation myself because I could keep up the mask by hiding behind the Spiral Thorn connection he’d made to me. It wouldn’t be discernible from that.
I just needed time to develop the solution. Not just to the warming sensation he’d gotten me almost addicted to. Now I had his magic and I’d trapped the essence of the connection he had to me, there was a lot I could determine. There was vulnerability to be found in it—a vulnerability on his end.
