Page 70 of Bitter Burn
“You shouldn’t be up here,” my husband says calmly.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Tristan replies.
Mark’s arms tighten around me as he draws a quivering, gut-deep breath. “Good.”
Twenty-Six
Tristan
The only illumination in the room comes from the club itself, glowing and flashing through the interior window, and then from a tall lamp in the corner, its light subtle and golden. I approach the chair, reminded strangely of the thrones on Samhain, and stop just in front of it.
I want to commit this to memory, this very sight: Mark’s wide shoulders and bare feet, Isolde’s large eyes and tousled hair as she’s curled up in Mark’s lap. She’s a whorl of platinum hair and fuzzy blanket, but anything adorable or domestic about the scene is belied by the presence of a single exposed ankle, rope-kissed and delicate.
And perhaps the thin, scarlet line on Mark’s throat. The closest Mark might ever come to wearing a collar.
“I asked Dinah to smuggle me up here,” I say. My heart hurts, being alone with them, and it already ached watching Isolde tremble and suffer onstage. It throbbed as Mark fucked her brutally and wonderfully, and I coveted everything about it. The tears soaking her blindfold, the ropes biting into her skin, the hard, slapping claiming after. I wanted to be her and to be him and just be with them, and there is nothing worse than loving a married couple, nothing more pathetic, because it’s a love destined for the edges, for stolen moments and snatched time. It’s a forever voyeurism that only gets sung about when it’s time to sing something sad.
But if this is a pathetic life, then I’ll live pathetically, and if this is love on the edges, I don’t know that I can endure love in its glowing, fulsome center. I’m named for sadness after all, and maybe I could never have loved happily, never been inside one of those fairy tales where the ending is as simple as a kiss. If I ever thought I could rescue the damsel, I know much better now. Of the three of us, I am the damsel. And if I could, I’d lock myself into the tower of my two villains and throw away the key.
Mark’s fingers are tangling gently in Isolde’s hair, sifting and playing. “You sure you weren’t seen?” he asks. “Being backstage is one thing, but coming alone to a playroom is much harder to explain away.”
“I’m sure.” I can’t stop watching his fingers in her hair. It’s mesmerizing. Erotic beyond belief. “Dinah brought me up through the staff hallways. And I won’t be missed. Hugo gave me the night off, and I told everyone I was going to bed early.”
“That means we have you all night?” asks Mark silkily.
“Do you want me all night, sir?” I sink to my knees, already knocked sideways with prostrating desire. I’m between his planted feet, bracketed by his knees. Isolde is close enough that I could rest my forehead on her thigh. “You can have it. You can have anything you want.”
His chest lifts once sharply, and his eyes glitter from above Isolde’s head. “You think I don’t want you for as long as I can have you? Tristan.”
“I won’t pretend that I’ve earned your forgiveness. That you don’t still hate me for…everything.”
“Isolde and I have decided to set ideas of forgiveness aside for now,” he says. “It seemed easier.”
“How long is for now?”
“Am I being interrogated?” asks Mark, amused. “If so, we need to work on your technique.”
“What would you work on?”
“Firstly”—a professorial eyebrow—“you shouldn’t pose your questions so broadly. Stay specific. Ask ‘Does for now last until morning?’ Or ‘Will for now last until I go back to Montreal?’ Don’t give me room to wander too far away from your question, and don’t give me room to build a little palace of hedges and half-truths, because I will if given the chance.”
“Is there a secondly?”
The lights from the hall flash on white teeth. He’s smiling.
“Secondly, don’t ask questions with such a tragic pout. It lets your interrogee know what answers you’re afraid of.”
“And I suppose you know then?” It might have come out grouchily, but before I can finish speaking, he’s reached out to run a light finger along the bow of my lower lip. He could have his hand down my pants right now for how lewd that feels.
“Puppy,” he says, half scolding. Behind my zipper, my erection surges. “Don’t pretend that you didn’t come in here with all sorts of thorny hopes clutched in a bleeding fist. Don’t pretend you weren’t watching from the wings tonight and having to strain all those pretty muscles of yours to keep from charging out onto the stage.”
His smile widens, and I realize that I must have pouted even more.
“It’s not fair that I’m such an open book to you, and yet I never know what you’re thinking.”
He presses down on my lip enough to see my tongue and then lets go. “No one is really an open book, Tristan. And I can tell you exactly what I’m thinking right now: that I’d like to see how sweaty I can make you in the next two hours.”
I take a sharp breath.
