“I would save you,” he cut me off, the intensity in his voice like gravel.
“I’m not going to stop fighting for this,” I whispered. “For us. For our freedom.”
He gripped my cheeks, pulling me close until I could taste the honesty on his lips. “And I will always make sure you’re safe first.”
Tears pricked my lids. “So…what does this mean? We’re on opposite sides again?”
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t fight with him again.
He drew me closer, our foreheads pressed. “It means we love each other madly. It means we’re soulmates. It means we’re always on the same side, even when we’re not.”
“You said you could let me be Atlas,” I whispered.
I felt his brow furrow against mine. “I don’t know how to do that, Snitch.”
Sadness settled as dew on my heart. The seconds stretched into infinity as we stared into each other. I forgot where we were, the day, the time.
I think Grayson got lost too, because when the moment shattered, I saw it clearly in his eyes.
“This is really touching.” West’s bored voice drifted from behind us. “But the fireworks are over, so unless you want everyone to know what the fuck we’ve been up to, maybe put a cliffhanger on the melodrama.”
Grayson’s grip slipped from my cheeks to hold my biceps, his gentle touch now a vice. “Don’t fucking do it.”
“What choice do I have?” I begged. “I’m his mistress. And we are…” Smoke. In my lungs. Burning my throat. “We are nothing. So.” I swallowed.
The anguish in his eyes seeped like acid into me. “You’re my w—” he caught himself.
Because even now, we couldn’t say it.
Not in front of West.
And that’s why I had to do this; we’d been stuck in this black bubble, never moving forward, too afraid to do the necessary things to pop it, too afraid to be covered in the sludge.
I didn’t want to sleep in West’s bed.
I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
“If you try to send me away, I won’t go. I’ll stay with him. I’ll fight for this even if you won’t.”
“You don’t think I’m fucking fighting, Snitch?” he snarled.
The same circle.
The same nightmare.
Over and over again.
Maybe we really were like mother, like daughter, but my brand of heroin tasted like whiskey and lollipops.
I shoved Grayson with both hands, stumbling free—but the cruel part was that I know he’d let me go. This decision rests on my shoulders.
West held out his hand, waiting for me. His smile was so wide, I swore the fucking moon caught the white canines. “My bed has been really fucking empty without you.”
Just as my hand enclosed in West’s, Grayson fisted the shirt he’d given me, pulling me to him by the bloody fabric at my chest. West still held my wrist, keeping me tethered to him.
“What are you doing?”
Grayson growled against my lips, so West could clearly hear. “Giving my wife her New Year’s kiss.”
He crushed his lips against mine, mean and vicious, bleeding his anger into his kiss. He curled the fabric of my dress until I heard another tear, until I had to arch into his kiss. Into this pain. My shoulder screamed as West tugged me back.
Held between the two of them as they fought bloody for scraps of my body.
“These are my lips.”
He commanded with just the kiss, every brutal swipe of his tongue calculated torture. Even as another man held my wrist, I knew only Grayson—hot, demanding, vicious.
“Mine to mark,” Grayson said between his teeth, dragging my bottom lip out.
“Mine to ruin.” Then he bit. Hard.
My gasp melted into a groan, ripped and ravaged from my lungs.
“Give your groans back to me.” He sounded demonic. “Give them all back to me.”
Then Grayson shoved me off, dragging his thumb across the blood on his lower lip, glaring at me as he shoved his thumb into his mouth.
I finally got my New Year’s kiss with my husband, just as I was being sent away to the bed of another man.
Grayson went inside without another word.
The wind whipped the dark soil around West like some monster in an old black and white movie. A thing that lured maidens in fairy tales.
He dragged a knuckle down my flushed skin. “The look on your face was spectacular, Angel.”
I saw the triumph in his eyes, and I tore my face from him. “I didn’t choose you, West.”
He grinned. “But you didn’t choose him.”
Thirty-Nine
Dear Atlas,
I am your snitch and I’ve come to whisper secrets I can’t even say to myself.
Why can’t I see him as the villain?
Since that night, a briar has grown untamed inside of me, the feeling that refuses to die: I want more.
It drips ink into my blood.
Is it the shame that makes my fantasy so poignant?
I want him, but I don’t…want him. I want to carve the rust off my heart.
I am your nun and I have come to pray at your altar.
Atlas, please carve out the humid sweetness from that night that keeps rusting along the curves and crevices of my beating organ. Use reality’s jagged knife.
With ugly.
With mean.
With fucking.
Bruise me and make me bleed until I don’t see anything but the truth.
I don’t want him; I want a safe facsimile, some effigy I can use to scrape the doubt and rust from my heart.
Do my wicked fantasies make me wicked? Does my shame make me shameful?
I can’t get that night out of my head.
I can’t get him out of my blood.
I am your wife and I have to come beg at your feet.
Be my puppet master, make me dance with your desire and bleed on your stage.
Ruin him with reality.
Ruin me.
Please.
Forty
STORY
January faded into February. I was five months pregnant and it showed—five months pregnant, and in West’s bed. Grayson and West snuck me to the necessary doctor’s appointments, and with Beryl and Arthur gone, we’d fallen into comfort as we grew used to this new normal, a world where I woke in another man’s bed.
A comfort like the warmth before dying from hypothermia.
Deadly. Wrong.
I held sheets to my chin, staring at the faint crack on the soft eggshell paint in the ceiling. That was how my heart felt.
Maybe I should’ve been grateful West hadn’t tried anything…but every time I go to bed, I wonder: is tonight the night his hand finds his way to my inner thigh? But then he just slid into bed and wished me goodnight.
I hated it.
He always kept his phone next to him on the nightstand. Most mornings—and some nights—I could get to it and try a few passwords.
Now, slowly and quietly, I lifted the blankets off to reach for it—
“I know you’re awake,” West said, opening his eyes and stretching.
I dragged my hand through my wild curls—as if that was what I’d been planning.
I hate that I know what he looked like in the morning. I know how the color in his eyes deepened when he was sleepy. There was a question burning in my chest now. It wouldn’t leave, and the longer I stayed, the deeper it burned.