The question is too soft.
That’s what makes me turn my head and look down at him.
His face is half-shadowed. Hair still damp from the shower. The mark on his neck from my knife just barely visible above the collarbone. He looks younger like this, somehow, and more ruined at the same time.
“Yes,” I say.
It comes out too fast to be entirely true.
His eyes lift to mine. I feel the lie in the air between us immediately.
So does he.
I push up higher on my elbows. “I’d hate that you’d force it or didn’t ask.”
That lands. Harder than I expect.
His jaw shifts once. And there he is again—that brief flash of something underneath all the arrogance and teeth, something too still and too deep to name.
Then he smooths it over.
“I would never ask.”
“I know.”
The answer leaves before I can pretty it up.
His mouth curves at one corner. Not quite a smile. Not kind.
“Good,” he murmurs.
I should push him off me.
Instead I reach up and drag my fingers through his damp hair, because apparently some part of me enjoys making bad decisions when he’s looking at me like that.
“You’re not strapping me down and tattooing me by force, psychopath.”
A dark laugh vibrates out of him, low against my skin.
“Who said anything about strapping you down?”
I slap the back of his head lightly.
He bites my thigh for it.
Not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to make me jerk and curse at him, which only makes him grin into my skin like a fucking menace.
“See?” I mutter. “This is why you don’t get permission for anything. You’re violent.”
“No one gives me permission, Beda.”
There’s something in the way he says it that makes me pause.
Something true.
My fingers slow in his hair.
He must feel it, because he lifts his head and looks at me again, the rooms gone softer around us from alcohol and low light and the long drag of the day finally settling into our bones.
