Page 52 of Guardian of Exile

“Valerie would probably fall at your feet if you offered her a single insight into your life, but I’m guessing you’ve never so much as had coffee with her or anyone else who knows what you can do. Am I right?”

His eyes blazed. “Maybe.”

“You didn’t bring me home with you because you cared what I had to say. You brought me here because I knew what you were, and for once in the last fifteen years, it felt like someone actually saw you. Like you didn’t have to hide because I already knew who you were and some part of what you’d done. So you could finally tell someone the whole of it and maybe they wouldn’t run away screaming.”

She stepped closer, into his personal space, enough to feel that electric charge that came from being in close proximity to someone else and not knowing what would happen now that you were there. “You let me come here because you’re lonely, and for one fucking night you didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t tell her to leave, either. So she took a deep breath and said the rest of it. “I told you I know what it feels like to have your foundation ripped away—I do. And I would do almost anything to not feel that way again. I would pay any price that was mine to pay to have back what I lost.

“And that’s how I know you’ll come back with me. Because you have that chance. Because you’re broken and lonely and it kills you inside, and every second that goes by you’re wishing for anything to make it sto⁠—”

His mouth crashed down on hers, rough and hard, cutting her off and jolting her like an electric current. He pulled back just as abruptly, his eyes wild. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

She surged onto her tiptoes, taking his mouth to finish what he’d started. In the back of her mind, she heard herself telling Seth I don’t want to be alone tonight. Heard his answered Neither do I. But we don’t have to have sex to not be alone. That had been true only because it had been Seth. Because they had had something deeper than sex, even when she couldn’t fully remember it. Because he’d known her and he’d loved her.

This was different. She didn’t know Tristen any more than he knew her. Love wasn’t even in the realm of possibility, and she didn’t want it to be. But they understood each other. They both recognized the damaged center of the other.

So she kissed him and he kissed her back, teeth scraping teeth and tongues tangling together. She felt as if they were both trying to slip inside the other, to inhabit a space that was the mirror of their own. She pressed her body against his and reveled in how utterly foreign it was. How he might look like Seth, but felt nothing like him. Tasted nothing like him. Kissed nothing like him.

Gloried in the way it felt like Tristen was pouring every unwanted emotion and desire he had into her, because it meant she could do the same to him in return. Because his emptiness didn’t hurt her any more than hers could hurt him, and it was bliss to trade her pain for someone else’s. When his hand slipped under her shirt and he dragged her against him, she knew she was going to follow this bad decision through and fuck the consequences.

The skin that brushed against her own was smooth, with none of the callouses gained from years of sparring with swords in a dusty training ground in the Middle of Nowhere, Dead Earth. So different from the man Tristen looked like. And when that same hand came up and brushed the tears running down her face, when he pulled back to give her the chance to say this wasn’t what she wanted after all, he groaned when her answer was to bite his lip until she tasted blood.

She didn’t quite know how they made it across the multiple living rooms and into his bedroom, but once there she only paused long enough to say, “You know this is just sex, right?”

He laughed. “Woman, I don’t even know you.”

And it was the fact that they didn’t know but still understood each other that made this exactly what she needed right now. And she knew, as they came together, that it was the first time in recent memory that either of them hadn’t felt utterly alone. It hurt all the more, somehow, to know that Seth would understand. That he would never judge her, that if he’d known he was going to die, he would have wanted her to be happy again.

She wasn’t happy. This wasn’t happiness. This was being miserable with someone else. But it was feeling something that wasn’t pain or anger or sadness, and she would take it.