Page 45 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
Grace and I both paused, and then we were looking at each other, and she was laughing. She was laughing with her red-orange hair spilled around her head in a halo, laughing as the grass drifted in the breeze, the sound of the stalks shushing together a comforting melody. In the distance, I could hear a winged demon sing, the sound like a songbird, the ocean as its backdrop.
All of those pretty things infuriated me.
How dare the world seem so bright and beautiful when my fate was set, signed, and sealed? One of us had to suffer; one of us had to pay for the sins of the rest of the world with our joy and our future.
There was no choice in the matter: it could only be me.
“I knew they liked honey, but women’s underwear? That’s perversion on a whole new level.” Grace snorted and reached up, threading her fingers together on the nape of my neck. I shuddered and closed my eyes for a moment.
This memory was taking on a life of its own; that wasn’t supposed to happen.
We weren’t supposed to be making new memories here. That was counterproductive to everything that I’d been through, everything that I’d endured up to this point. My being here was just another slice of suffering that I had to forge through, the last piece of the puzzle. Once the Fire Veil was closed, Grace and I would be separated forever.
“Don’t love me, Grace,” I warned her, dropping my head down so that I could nip and tease at her throat with my teeth. “Despise me. If you do, it’ll be easier that way.”
“How could I ever truly despise you?” she questioned, frowning hard and trying to pull me closer, to bring our bodies front to front, to absorb the natural chemicals in my skin. For me to hurt her, for my body to become a weapon, I had to work at it. Like this, the musk in my skin was just an extra plaything, an aphrodisiac, a nip of foreplay. “No matter what you do—”
“Don’t say that when it’s a lie,” I growled out, trying to pull away from her. She refused to let me go, clinging stubbornly to my neck so that she was hanging off me as I tried to sit up. Again, not at all like the memory this day was based on. We’d had our first time together, twined up in love and obsession.
Right now? I wasn’t sure what we were doing, only that I was supremely annoyed by it.
No, not annoyed. Devastated. I’m flaming devastated.
I cursed every god I knew and then some.
“Don’t you get curt with me,” Grace barked out in her best high priestess voice, authoritative but almost unerringly calm. Her emerald eyes, these two glittering jewels in a pale face, glared up at me. Her magic was sparking in fits and spurts, little flames that teased up against my own. “I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t want to be with me. Otherwise, you’re not leaving.”
I hesitated. I should tell her that. I’d done it before, over and over again until she believed it. What was different now? Why torture myself?
But then she released me and allowed her body to fall back onto the blanket with me hovering over her. Her lips were parted, cheeks flushed, expression stuck somewhere between angry and turned-on.
“You’re telling me you want me right here and now?” I asked again, aware that I was inviting my own doom, my own sense of rejection, my own pain, and yet unable to resist.
“I’m telling you that if you don’t fuck me on this blanket in this beautiful field, I’m going to put a hex on you. Actually, in my most recent research, I came across a hex that causes permanent erectile dysfunction.” She held up a finger. “Is that what you want, Grand Prince?”
I smirked at that. I should want that. Because after this was over, I likely would never have sex again for the rest of my natural life—however short and miserable that might be.
“Admit it: that spell would cause you deep, soul-crushing anguish,” I teased, and then I was snatching her wrists and pinning them to the blanket as she gasped. My head descended, and I bit down on one of her hardened nipples, teeth clenching it through the soft fabric of her dress. Grace moaned appreciatively, digging her fingers into my long hair and pulling me closer, asking for more without words.
The dream shifted slightly, rolling forward to a later memory, one that mixed with that of our first time until both memories were indistinguishable from one another. In the strange and impossible way of dreams, it all made sense. Logically, it was a mess. None of that mattered to me. I didn’t care that we were in the field where we’d first made love, but that we were about to fuck the way we’d done on an entirely different day.
