Blinking, she asks, “Why?”
“Because you make me…” My voice trails off, partly because I can feel her clenching around my dick, but partly because I don’t think I can put it into words. “You make me wish I could be different. Do more. Be less. It’s hard to explain.” Laughing darkly, I add, “You called me empty once, but I have no fucking clue how. I feel so full of this shit that its gotta be bleeding from my ears.”
She reaches up to touch my mouth, fingertips resting lightly on my lips. Frowning, she breathes, “I don’t think you’re empty.”
“No?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “What’s all this about, anyway?” My fingers slide down her collarbone, trailing along her sternum. I graze my fingertips over the scar, tracing the letter I’d carved there. “You already know you’re mine. Everyone does.”
She chooses that moment to rock against me, her hips undulating in a short, lazy rhythm. “I am yours,” she replies, winding her arms around my neck. “But you’re not mine.”
“What?” I’m already guiding her hips, distracted with the push and pull. “What are you talking about?”
“All of you,” she clarifies, eyes falling closed as she rocks into me. “There’s nothing tying you to me. Not really. You could—” Her lips part on a gasp when I push her down, grinding her against me. “Killian has that girl tattooed on his arm, and you have an actual professional after you. Any of you could go to someone else. There’s nothing to stop you. Even the contract is just…” She doesn’t finish, her pussy clenching around me.
“That’s what this is about,” I realize, breathing hard into the space between us. “You don’t think I’m yours?” I want to tell her she’s crazy, but I doubt it’d be taken very well. “You’re the only girl any of us have fucked in months, and most of that was basically spent celibate and fucking miserable.”
“Exactly.” Her chest hitches, forehead screwing up in pleasure as she rides me. “Someone like Augustine wouldn’t—you wouldn’t ever be celibate or miserable—oh, god, Dimitri…” The last part results from me flopping back, planting my feet, and driving my dick into her hard.
“Look at me, baby.” I wait for her to meet my stare before asking, “Do you want me to be yours?”
She rolls her hips when I push them, only to pull them back. “I-I don’t—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.” Sharper, I add, “Don’t lie to yourself. Do you want me?”
There’s a beat where I think she’s not listening because her eyes are so glazed with the way I’m pushing my dick into her. But then she nods, voice quiet and ragged. “Yes.”
The problem with this whole arrangement is that it’s always been hard to know. She came back—she wanted to stay here, to be ours—but it was tied up in revenge and vengeance. Now that we’re past that, there’s a distinction to be made between being wanted and wanting.
It isn’t until something barbed and tense unwinds in my chest that I realize how bleak I’d felt about it all. The things we’ve done to her… there’s no taking them back. There’s no changing them or turning them into something that isn’t ugly. I figured they were much like those scars carved into her chest—a permanent mark of something mangled.
I shove my hand beneath my pillow, not having to fumble to find what I’m looking for. I’ve slept with it for weeks now, tucked beneath my head as I laid here, night after night in the silence and fog of too much liquor. I pull it out now, the blade glinting in the low light of the lamp, and Story freezes, thighs clenching.
Before she can react, I grab her wrist, pressing the knife into her palm.
She looks at it, still perfectly frozen. “What…？”
“Then do it,” I demand, curling her fingers around the handle. “Right here.”
Her eyes grow wide when I guide the tip of the blade to my chest—to the exact same place my initial is carved into hers. “Dimitri, I—I can’t just—”
“Yes, you can.” I let her hand go and clutch at her knees, bracing myself. “I did it to you, didn’t I?”
There’s a long pause where she just stares in bafflement at the blade against my skin. “You want me to cut you.”
The answer comes out easily. “Yes.”
“You want me to cut my initial into your skin.”