“I can’t ignore that anymore, Kira. You want to replace me with Duke or someone else? I’ll step aside, but I won’t stop coming. Not unless you tell me no.” His eyes watched everything as his thumb pressed to the seam of my lips, widening when I parted them, my tongue flicking out to caress the tip.
“Tell me no, Kira.”
I smiled around his finger, a not entirely friendly thing.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Tell me no. Tell me Duke would be a better consort. Stop me, Kira.”
“And why the hell would I do that?”
I didn’t know Billy. We’d spent very little time together and what we had was often confusing to me, but sometimes you meet complete strangers and something…chimes within them, an answering call, letting you know in advance that this person, this was a soul like yours. Billy was my dark mirror twin, and I very much liked seeing the cracks in this reflection.
“You saw the darkness in me,” I said, and he nodded. “You saw the strength.”
“That’s there, no matter what. Pre-transition, pre-Lilith. I tasted your soul. If that all goes away, you will remain.”
His hands had to move as he spoke, pushing my hair back, stroking my face and tracing the shape of it, like he needed to memorise it for later.
“So if I don’t stop you, then what?”
He smiled then, and it was such a rare thing, it immediately tugged at my heart. I knew what was coming, my mouth filling with want for him before he dropped his lips to mine, kissing me oh so thoroughly. First, with little brushes that made me growl, my hands fisting in his shirt, sliding under it and just staying there for a moment, feeling his hot, hot skin. Then I slid them around his back and shoulders, opening my mouth to force his tongue in, his fingers digging in my hair as those kisses became an undertow of long, slow, sucking things.
“Fuck…I dream of your taste. Wake up panting with you on my lips and my hand on my dick.”
Mm…that was a damn fine idea. My hand slid down the front of his pants despite his cries, his pulling away, his body going perfectly still when my fingers closed around him.
Fuck! He wasn’t as long, but he felt twice as thick as some of the other guys. He’d hurt going in, and I’d love every fucking minute of it. I rubbed my thumb over the pre-cum slick head to the musical sound of his groans, only to have my wrist pulled away and both pressed against the wall.
“Johnno was right—there’s no self-control around you. Only…” His teeth ground together, his eyes flashing with a fire I’d very much like to warm my hands by, but he just stared at me. “Ask me the question.”
“What?”
“Ask me the fucking question again. Ask Johnno, Jake, any of them. Ask me the question, Kira.”
It took my mind a moment to work out what he wanted, that Kira feeling like she was a million years ago, but my lips curved when I realised what he wanted.
“What do you ache for, Billy?”
“For you, Kira. Every single one of us does. We’re clumsy boys with it, tearing the wings off butterflies because we don’t fucking know how to deal with the beauty in front of us, but that’s OK, because you’re not a butterfly anymore.”
“No, I’m not.”
My mouth felt overly full and sharp as I said the words.
“You made yourself our queen, then fucking rule us. Take us in hand, make us what you need us to be, because I can’t bear this any longer. I can’t sit there, watching you take another’s lips, another’s hand, leaning into them, trusting them. I know it’s going to take time…” A wash of pure shock made me feel cold all over as he looked away, a curious glittering desperation in his eyes. “Give me time. Give me something. I don’t have anything to drown out the ache for you anymore.”
A cough jerked our attention sideways to find a stricken looking Jake standing there, pale as a ghost. He flinched at our collective gaze, then straightened.
“They sent me to find where you got to. Ashanti’s got…”
His words fell away when Billy held out a hand for him. He didn’t take it but he moved closer, Billy’s arm going around his shoulder, drawing him close until I was surrounded by the press of warm male bodies. Did the other man catch the slight shudder that went through Jake at that contact, the flash of pure naked need in his eyes before he mastered himself? I didn’t think so, but Jake had it under control by the time he looked at me.
“I heard…most of it. Sorry, I didn’t want to break the mood.”
“You’re not really,” I said.
“No, I’m not. Kira, we have to find a way through this. I…like the ache.” His hand dropped to his pants, pressing down at the lump there. “It’s always been a familiar thing, so it doesn’t claw at me like it does them. Well it does, but to me, it’s a good thing. The others… There’s so much, it beats within me. All the fear and anger and mistrust and the aching.” His hand thumped on his bare chest to punctuate each word, and I knew it for what it was.
“That’s the beat you always follow.”
“That’s the beat I always follow. When people hit me, lash out, at least they’re finally acknowledging it. When you forced Liam to his knees, I damn near came on the spot. There were no more bullshit moony eyes and sniping mouths. You were the queen, he was the penitent, and it was all fucking out there. You could have unzipped your fly and forced him to lick your cunt, and he would have been so fucking grateful for the opportunity, because all this damn build up would have actually gone somewhere, rather than in tighter and tighter circles. Because every single one of us fought the urge to lick Johnno clean when he got his taste. Line us up on our knees, make us perform for you, one after the other, just take us in hand.”
I blinked, struggling to get my head around everything he’d said, Billy having gone characteristically silent again. Jake put everything out on display, while Billy put nothing. Well, except for today. His rasping words stuck in my head, more so due to his reluctance to say them, so I reached out, my hand feeling like someone else’s as I did, and touched one long strand of black hair.
Why did it just feel like hair? Soft, smooth, with no split ends whatsoever, but still just hair. Shouldn’t it have felt like raven’s feathers or panther’s fur, smoke or the feel of the night air on your skin? How could something like Billy just feel like everyone else? His eyes darted up warily. Jake had meant well, but he’d silenced his band mate as effectively as a ball gag.
Or perhaps that’s how they worked. He’d drawn Jake closer and had to have known what the other would say, that all those sharp, intense feelings of Jake’s would come rushing out, taking all the air from the room.
“Tell me what you want next,” I asked Billy, putting up a hand when Jake went to speak. I pressed a finger to Jake’s lips and felt the rough feather of his breath at that small gesture. “You tell me you ache for me. Do you want me naked on the bed? Want to try and fuck this out of us, once and for all?”
Billy just stared, on and on, the moment just stretching out until he laughed, a dark bitter sound I remembered well.
“How do you fucking do that?” He shook his head in disbelief. “I want that more than anything, just as I know it won’t work. Getting inside your hot little cunt would be fucking heaven, but it won’t change things. I won’t have you. Look at Johnno, mooning after you like a puppy and desperate for scraps, even as he knew he had a beating coming. Jake will do you absolutely any way you want.” The other man whined in response to that. “There is literally nothing he won’t do for you, up to and including killing himself. But that’s not gonna cut it. You’ll get up from our beds, slip from our fingers like smoke, and be gone again, nestled in tight between Marlow and Aen and looking at them with love in your eyes.”