Page 61 of Ruthless Game

He rolled his hips, pressing his cock against my belly, as evidence. I shivered.

When he’d finally pushed the ring to the base of my finger, he held my hand in his, and then pressed a kiss to the top of the ring.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” I whispered into the dark room.

“It means whatever we want it to mean,” he said. “And for me, it means a fuck of a lot.”

Shocking me, he sucked my ring finger into his mouth, running his tongue around the ring. Tasting it. Forget shivering, my whole body trembled, coming alive in the way he’d described. Hell, had I been alive the past three years? Or just killing time, same as him?

And then he leaned down and kissed me, hard and claiming, bruising and punishing. I kissed him back just as ferociously, pouring my anger into his mouth, biting his lip in reprimand. He growled and copied me, and then we were grappling again, this time not for the ring, but for something intangible, something I couldn’t put words to. Maybe it was for which of us got to decide the future.

Or wrote the story of our past.

For once in my life, I want to be the winner, he’d said so long ago.

Sick of this, I bit his lip again.

This time, I tasted the sick-sweet copper of blood.

The moment he released my mouth, the questions poured out of me.

“Why do you refuse to listen to me when I talk about the past? Why are you so obsessed with maintaining the narrative that I cheated on you? Because that way you win? You’re the better person? Because otherwise, you’re the cheater. You’re the one who fucked up. You’re the one who hurt me, hurt us.”

“Emma—” he warned.

But I wasn’t done.

“It must have been so easy for you to sit here for years and think, ‘Oh, Emma is terrible. Emma betrayed me. Emma threw away the person she loved most in the world to fuck some asshole on another hockey team.’ So much easier than to say, ‘Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I fucked up huge, and shit, there’s no way I can fix it.’”

I glared at him through wet, blurry eyes. I hadn’t even noticed I was crying.

“No wonder why you want to let the past go. Because you’re starting to doubt yourself. You’re a goddamn coward, David.”

Instead of answering, he kissed my cheeks, catching my tears with his lips.

“Even your pain tastes like Starbursts,” he said.

Momentarily stymied, I asked, “What else tastes like Starbursts?”

He chuckled, running his thumb down my cheek to rub away the tears he hadn’t caught with his tongue. “Your pussy.”

This time, I snorted. “My vagina does not taste like Starbursts. You’re just being weirdly poetic or whatever.”

“First, please god never call it your vagina, ever again. Real mood killer. Second: Me? Poetic? I’m a hockey player and history major, Emma. I don’t even know how to rhyme shit. No, your pussy distinctly tastes like yellow Starbursts. I think you’ve eaten so many of them throughout your life, it changed your pH balance, or whatever.”

I giggled despite myself, and he laughed with me. We hadn’t laughed together in so long, and I forgot how good it felt, like a soft, thick blanket enveloping us both.

But the laughter and banter couldn’t last, and neither could us getting along, because he reminded me, “I saw the video.”

“And I told you, it was faked.”

“How, Emma? You claimed this back then, too. And trust me, I wanted to believe you. I still do. But AI wasn’t good enough back then, and as far as I know, you don’t have some evil twin who pretended to be you. That was Ralphie Watson from Buffalo’s team and you. I recognized his scar and your star birthmark. Ralphie confirmed it, even though he knew I’d beat the shit out of him for it. So tell me, how the hell was it not you in that video fucking some random asshole, when you were supposed to love me?”

I must have looked like a fish from the number of times I open and closed my mouth. It hadn’t been me. I knew it hadn’t been me. But there was no way to prove it, and he was still so convinced.

“You cheated on me,” I pointed out.

He hesitated, then rolled off me.