We avoid eye contact until Paula says we’re rolling, and then we start walking side by side through the first musty hallway of skeletons. This morning went so poorly. Probably because what I should have said and what I wanted to say were entirely different things.
“Hey, guys?” Lars calls. “Cameras are rolling. You know that, right? How hard did you hit it last night?”
“If you read about a Parisian alcohol shortage in the coming days,” I reply, “it was us.”
“I’d expect this of Rebecca,” Lars says. “She’s twenty-four. But you, Theo?”
Yes, we’re all thinking,But you, Theo? How could you?Me most of all.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Bex says. “I bullied him into it.”
I frown. Why the fuck is she taking the blame? I’m a thirty-six-year-old man who got completely plastered and did almost every conceivable thing to his former partner’s daughter—apartner whose final request of me was to leave that daughter alone.
“You didn’t bully me into anything, Bex,” I say quietly. “I’m not Jessie. You don’t have to fall on your sword the second something goes wrong.”
Her head jerks to me. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, and she grows silent.
“Give us one of your bizarre facts, Bex,” asks Paula. “Please. We’ve got nothing usable.”
Bex nods and forces herself to turn toward me. “You know why they created this? Because there wasn’t enough land in central Paris to bury people, and the stench of the dead was atrocious, so they dug up a bunch of graves and dumped all the bones here.”
“What an uplifting story.”
Her laugh is slightly hoarse. “It’s the catacombs. Were you expecting me to talk about drunken orgies?”
I raise a brow, but the comment about drunken orgies does not appear to be personally directed.
She seems to be recovering better than I am. Her eyes are bright, her skin glowing. If it wasn’t for that mouth of hers, still puffy from the abuses it suffered last night, you wouldn’t suspect anything had happened between us at all.
That mouth. Fuck me, that mouth. The way she kisses. I knew she’d be like she was…playful and teasing when we were drinking in that bar, letting her mouth slide from neck to ear. Ferocious in private. God, I wish I could remember more of it. But that look on her face when she fell to her knees is enough. I will jerk off to that look for the rest of my natural life.
And now we’re staring at each other and any second now, Lars or Paula is going to ask what the hell is happening. I need to say something and my mind is entirely devoid of topics that aren’t her.
“Though they did have parties,” she continues, her gaze awkwardly darting away. “They found one of the chambers had been turned into a movie theater. Screen, projector. It even had a restaurant.”
Bex is carrying this entire shoot single-handedly while I’mthinking about her mouth wrapped around my cock.
I unlock my jaw by force. “It seems like that would be difficult to get away with.”
She shakes her head. “It’s harder to catch people than you think. There are two hundred miles of tunnels to comb through. A hospital worker got lost down here once, and it took them eleven years to find him.”
I’d like to pull her into one of those secret rooms. I want to hear that gasp of hers again, the one she made when I first slid my tongue inside her. I want to pull her into one of those secret rooms and fuck her so hard that she’d—
Bloody hell. I’m surrounded by six million skeletons, and all I can think about is how badly I want to fuck my wife.
And that’s exactly how I knew it wouldbe.
I’m a man who was thirsting for something. It took one drop to make me realize I’m parched, to make me want it to the exclusion of all else. We have to walk this back, and I have no clue how to doit.
I’ve known all along this was quicksand. And last night, I dove in headfirst.
Bex
The guilt is eating himalive. I should find one of those secret rooms and tell him it’s okay, explain to him that this really is my fault and he doesn’t need to worry because I know he’s with someone else. I’d turn it into a joke if I could find a single thing about this amusing. If I could stop forgetting for one goddamned second the things he said last night. The way his gaze fell to my mouth as he said, “You’ve made me come so many times I’ve lost count.”
What I really want to do is ask him why he can’t care about me enough to do it again. I know I’m not the sort of girl he grew up around. I picture hiscomplication—probably some duke’s daughter who moonlights as a part-time model. She’s nearly his height in heels and they look like they belong together. She doesn’t mispronounce French foods and always has the perfect hostess gift when he brings her to a party.
