“Alright?”
Cas. Fucking Cas.
“Shouldn’t you be talking to sponsors?”
“I was. I was just… taking a break—”
“Well, don’t.”
He lets out a sharp breath before walking away, but I can’t bring myself to even look up. Let him think I’m an asshole. And anyway, I don’t want him near me. I’m so fucking jealous of him. Cas going back to Robin’s room every single night. The one place in this entire city I can’t go. And the only place I want to be.
Somewhere he’d whisper more of his beautiful promises in the dark. Somewhere it wouldn’t gut me to imagine there’s any truth in any of it.
But it’s all lies. And it’s beginning to eat me alive.
I should never have let him touch me again. But I needed him. Tonight, more than ever, I needed Robin. I needed him to take that control from me. All the decisions I’m so sick of making, all the pretending, all the awful things I have to act like I want. I needed him to make me forget. Needed his protection, the safety I only ever feel when his arms are wrapped around me.
The truth of it claws at me, tearing at me from the inside out. I wish I’d never met him. I wish I’d never felt this way.
Because now he’s gone. And I’m back here on my own.
“Haven’t seen much of you tonight.”
Fucking Jason.
Give me a fucking break.
“Why would you have seen me?” I turn away from him, leaning slightly back against the table in an effort to control my body. I’m still on fire after Robin. My hands are shaking. I must smell like him. Fuck, I wish I was still out there with him.
“Where have you been?”
The audacity of the question snaps my head across. “That’s none of your fucking business.”
Jason keeps his dead eyes cool on the people milling past. “The Emperor’s been in here. He was looking for you.”
A crawling dread scratches its way across every inch of my skin. I was sure the fight with Julius would have kept him longer.
As if I was thinking at all.
“So then I realized you weren’t with him,” Jason goes on, like he’s willing me to punch him.
“Can’t a man get a breath of fresh air?”
“Is that what you were doing?”
At that exact moment, Robin walks in. He does it as discreetly as possible, but not discreetly enough. His hair’s still mussed, his shining laurel not half as neatly entwined in his sandy locks as it was before.
Jason’s eyes bore into him. Cas beelines for him. He looks up, and I meet his eyes for one stupid, fatal moment.
Everything—the whole fucking world between us—is in that one look.
I hate the way he wants me.
I hate the way I want him back.
And it makes me fucking sick that neither of us can ever, ever have what we want. Because everything he said to me tonight… He knows. He knows the way I adore him, and I was never supposed to let him know that.
“I see,” Jason mutters. “Fresh air. Something new.”
