My throat is raw. That’s how I know I was screaming his name.
In the aftermath, we’re a tangle of skin and flesh and shoved-aside clothes, breathing too hard in the dirt.
I want to curl into him. I want to hold him and reassure him—and me—that we’re going to be okay. That what I’m doing is the right thing, except I know that he doesn’t think so.
That’s why we keep coming back to this place again and again, and will keep coming back to it.
For a moment, that feels so heavy that I worry I might cry.
I sit up, wiggling to get my jeans back up and zipped. He grunts at me and runs his fingers through my hair, making a fist to hold me where I am.
“Where do you think you’re going?” His voice is low, but he’s not redline furious anymore.
This is the Ty I know best. The Ty I get in private. Resigned and not happy with me, sure. But still mine.
Always mine.
Nonetheless, I choose violence. It’s that or sob.
“I don’t like it here,” I tell him, and watch his eyes blaze. “You know I don’t. I came for the moon. I honored the full moon, and now I’m going home.”
“Home?” His growl is edgy. Dangerous. “You don’t have a home that’s not with me, Maddox. You never will. Don’t make me prove that to you in a way you really won’t like.”
3.
“Don’t.” I don’t say that loud. It’s more of a breath.
Ty doesn’t back down, so I push away from him, entirely too aware that he lets me go. He watches me, his dark eyes assessing. Always appraising everything and everyone, and me most of all.
I learned a long time ago that he sees everything, and sometimes I’ve wished with every part of me that he didn’t. Especially when the fact that he sees everything doesn’t always mean he sees it my way.
He doesn’t say anything as I shove the heavy weight of my hair away from my face. I sit back on my heels and look at him, still lying there, stretched out like some kind of god on a rest day in between playing games with worlds. His jeans are still shoved down, and he looks perfectly able to carry on a conversation with his cock hanging out. He is.
One thing about Ty is that he embodies the best parts of being a wolf. Part of that is having absolutely no shame. About anything, but especially his body.
Not that hehasanything to be ashamed about, particularly not that cock of his that I can still feel—
But I can’t let myself get distracted any more than I already have tonight. And when all I do is sit there and gaze back at him, he sighs. He buttons himself up and then props himself up on one elbow, still stretched out there beside me.
“Time is running out, babe.” His voice is low. Serious. I can feel how serious like concrete inside me. “You know it as well as I do. Youcan feel it, same as I can.” He doesn’t look away from me as he takes his free hand and holds it over his chest, where I can feel the same longing and need in him that I have in me. “We’re reaching the end of this grace period, whether you like it or not.”
There’s a moment here. A possibility for the radical honesty that I know he wants from me. I want it too. Or we bothsaywe want it when the other one is in a different place, like that intimacy might shatter us both.
Anyway, that’s what I tell myself. That’s what I shy away from.
“You know it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I like it,” I say instead. I don’t like the way he phrased that. Since it’s part and parcel of the same story the pack likes to tell about me as it is.Flighty Maddox. Selfish Maddox. Little Princess Maddox who takes and takes and never gives anything in return.
Sometimes when I say things like that, it makes him mad. Tonight he sits up, reaches out, and puts a hand on my arm. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I like Ty rough and overbearing. I like him wild, showing off all that power he wears so easily. I love him with his hands on me, twisting this passion between us whichever way he sees fit—and me with it.
ButthisTy makes everything inside me ... shimmer.
“Things have been a little intense lately,” he acknowledges, still in that low, solemn way that makes that shimmering within me ... brighten. “Death goddesses and oracles and vampires and shit. But at the end of the day, you know the only thing that matters is this. Us. I told you that a long time ago. It hasn’t changed.”
That hurts. He meant for it to hurt. “I know.”
“This has always been a finite situation. And the shit’s hitting the fan, baby. I know you know that too.” His dark gaze is direct. Unflinching. “So what’s it going to take? Because after all of these years, it’s starting to seem like it’s me you don’t trust.”
