Page 78 of Bitter Burn
“You’re so beautiful,” she murmurs. “Like a painting.”
For some reason, that makes my chest ache. She thinks I’m beautiful like a painting; she says it like she’ll never have another chance to say it.
Cool, slick fingers work me open as I rest my cheek on the leather table, facing her. I brush the hair away from her temples as Mark pushes a finger all the way inside, and then a second.
She’s on her back and I’m on my stomach, and we’re close enough to touch each other’s lips and eyelids with wonder like Adam and Eve discovering each other in Eden, and it occurs to me as Mark presses the head of his cock against my opening that this is very nearly the same position we were in on the roof in Belgrade. The night our god announced how he’d punish us for tasting the fruit of the forbidden tree. Isolde is wrung out and supine rather than sitting up, and we’re not surrounded by rolling fruit and splinters of glass, but it’s still very close. There’s still that same jealousy, clinging like a winter mist, and there are still secrets strung between our words like pearls on a necklace, and our love is still a tessellation of obsession and misery. But something is different tonight. Perhaps it’s that we know that the tessellation does add up to love.
Or perhaps it’s that we know the correlating and bleak truth: love isn’t enough.
Not for us.
But it’s still a moment of bliss and peace when Mark brings himself inside me as I stare into Isolde’s eyes. When Mark leans forward with one arm sliding under my torso and the other gathering Isolde close. The kind of peace that the Church promises, that I used to think was waiting for me at the end of a storied career in the Army. The kind of peace that no one can ever, ever hold on to, no matter how hard they try.
The lingering discomfort of Mark’s entry is barely legible to my body as anything unpleasant, I’m that relaxed and dosed with every kind of endorphin, and with Isolde’s face so close to mine—with Mark kissing my temple while he squeezes my hip, with the dazzle of lights from the club making everything dreamy and unreal—the coarse pressure of him can only feel beautiful and godlike.
And the pleasure comes as it always does, a questioning curl in my belly, a sidelong graze along my thoughts, tensely braced muscles transmuted to quivering eagerness. Then pleasure is all I am, and peace—and maybe this can be enough. Maybe if the three of us can find our way back to each other, if we can find a way to hold on to each other through the fire and the hail, then peace will be waiting at the end. Not peace like stillness, like calm—never that with Mark—but peace like a cold and lustral sea crashing against the rocks, peace like rain at Morois, thunder probing between the trees and rolling over the moors.
“If I could contain what I feel for the two of you,” breathes Mark, “if I could even express it, if I could even shape it to myself…my God. You have unmade in months what took years to create, and fool that I am, I am letting you.”
His grip grows tighter, and the delicious violence of his sex grows erratic and desperate. Raw, urgent sensations overtake me, a brutal euphoria with every thrust, a looming orgasm knotted so viciously around my prostate that I’m surprised I’m not mortally wounded by it.
“Dreamed of this so much when you were gone.” The words are a series of serrated grunts. He’s fucking the air right out of my lungs and maybe his own lungs too. “Having you bent over just like this. Isolde watching. Breeding—fuck—I—fuck.”
I think I’ve already started jetting seed onto the floor—everything below my chest is one vindictive snarl of pleasure, of gorgeously agonizing release—but if I hadn’t already, I would merely by listening to Mark chase down his orgasm like a mortal enemy. The table jolts across the floor; he growls and bruises; his cock is splitting me in half, and I want to worship him for it.
With a series of thrusts that would earn him damnation even without the rest of his ledger available to heaven, he swells and then begins pumping me full. Bare and wet and shameless, so fucking shameless, and my mouth is open, my face pressed into the table, and he makes sure to use me all the way through it, pinning me down as he strokes a few times more to milk the last of it into my ass. Pinning me down as if I’d ever voluntarily leave.
And at last, it’s finished. The lights scatter over us, and Isolde traces my mouth. Mark is still inside me, draped over me, crushing his wife close.
I can almost hear the sea.
I can almost count the spaces between the waves.
Mark eventually pulls free, furnishes warmed wipes from somewhere, and we’re cleaned as carefully and lovingly as the family silver. He helps us upright and checks us over. Aside from the suspension for Isolde, the night hasn’t involved anything more kinky than what our bodies can do on their own, but that’s never mattered for Mark. Both Isolde and I are as wrecked as we would be after paddles or binder clips or whatever other torments he could conjure.
He finishes and steps back to eye the both of us. Somehow Isolde and I have ended up holding hands. I’m not sure how.
“Bed, I think,” he says after a minute. “Let’s fight the clock a little longer yet.”
So we nestle in bed, the three of us, Isolde in the middle, her head on Mark’s chest and my head on her chest. Under the heated blanket, I draw sleepy circles on her abdomen.
For as long as we’re there, we don’t sleep and we don’t speak. What is there to speak about? What can there be to say? Nothing’s changed from this morning to tonight—Isolde is still safer at Lyonesse than anywhere else, and she’s still safer when I’m away. We can’t trust Mark, and he can’t trust us, and there are many minutes in the day when I’m not sure if I can trust Isolde either.
But the thing that stitches us together is older and deeper than trust…older than love itself, maybe. I used to believe in fate, in destiny. It was easy to believe when I was the basketball star, the prom king, the favored son of West Point. Easy to believe when your life is made of trophies and roses blooming on the side of a sturdy white farmhouse, when you wake up to the bleating of lambs in the spring but you’re only three stoplights away from a brand-new coffee shop, when you’re good at singing and school and push-ups and making people smile. It was only watching McKenzie Reed’s heart drain its freshly oxygenated blood right into a puddle that I realized what I’d been calling fate had been a brightly painted backdrop—a lie. A lie that almost grew hilarious when people tried to repeat it to me.
You were meant to be there, someone told me with complete certainty after I shot Sims. The universe made sure you were.
But the universe didn’t shoot Sims in the throat last year. I did.
And it wasn’t fate or destiny that killed McKenzie on our first deployment—it was body armor that was designed with a male chest in mind, it was McKenzie’s quick reflexes that had her returning fire before the rest of us, it was hasty intel or bad intel or incomplete intel from someone in an office somewhere half a world away from that wet alley in Kraków.
But right now…right now I can almost believe in it. Not the fate of fairy tales but the fate of myth. Inhuman and unyielding. Impossible to deny.
Even through the thick window glass, we hear the hall counting down to midnight, the numbers dropping into the single digits.
“I’d like a kiss,” says Mark after the crowd cries three! And what argument could there be to that?
Who would want to make it?
