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I come back down slowly, shivering into the crook of his neck and trying desperately to pull in a lungful of air that isn’t obstructed by the lump in my throat. I swallow several times in hopes of clearing it out, but the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach lets me know it’s not going anywhere.
Not before it destroys me.
Panic grips me first. Rooting me in place so guilt and shame can latch onto me with ease, washing away every remnant of the thrill and exhilaration I felt just moments ago. Without the fuzzy haze of lust clouding my mind, I can’t hide from them. I can’t beat them back or shut them down, and I feel like I’m being eaten alive.
My heart starts to pound. Tiny beads of sweat dot my hairline. And I still can’t fucking breathe. I’m vaguely aware of my arms dropping from Dominic’s neck, of my hands at his chest pushing him away from me while tears slip down my face.
Stay calm. You’re okay. You are okay. The rational part of my brain croons, but the other part—the part screaming for me to get far away from this man so I can cry my eyes out—is louder.
And I have no choice but to let it win.
.
17
Dominic
Now
Sloane’s desperate pants ringing in my ears are the only thing tethering me to Earth. I’m vaguely aware of the praises spilling from my mouth and skating across her skin, but even I don’t know what I’m saying. I just can’t stop talking to her, can’t stop thanking her for giving me all of the things I resigned myself to never having the moment I saw her smile at Eric with the whole world shining in her eyes.
I’ll never forget walking into our dorm that day and seeing her sprawled out on his bed, a goofy smile curving her perfect lips, and a question about finishing what I’d started hanging in the air between us. Except none of it, not the question or her smile, was meant for me. It shouldn’t have hurt—weeks of listening to Eric talk about her and seeing pictures of them together on social media should have prepared me—but in that moment all I felt was pain.
Pain that increased tenfold when Eric walked in on us arguing and turned the scowl she was giving me into a smile that made her eyes glow in a matter of seconds. And that same smile killed all of the hope I’d foolishly held onto for months died because out of all the things I saw shimmering in the dapples of gold the night we met—joy, wonder, lust, intoxication—she never looked at me like that. Like I was everything good and right in her world.
Eric’s presence soothed her. His touch smothered the flames of the fire I was all too happy to ignite. Watching them together was hard at first. Knife sliding into your heart and twisting deeper and deeper with every breath until your body is nothing but a gaping wound, hard. Leaking blood, spilling hope, love, and any desire for happiness on everything you touched, hard.
And then the dreams started, glimpses of the future I forfeited flashing through my mind on an endless loop. All of them starring my best friend’s wife: the woman I pretended to hate in the light of day but made love to in the darkest corners of my mind every night.
I should have felt guilty. Eric was my brother in every sense of the word and coveting the love of his life should’ve been more than enough reason for me to hate myself. But in true Alexander fashion, I didn’t. Instead, I rationalized. I told myself the dreams were okay because Eric got to have her. He got her smiles, her laughs, her soft moans, and breathless pleas for more. He got everything.
When those thoughts still weren’t enough to assuage the guilt, and I could barely look myself in the mirror, I went dark, telling myself we should both be glad I wasn’t more like my father. A man who would have never stepped aside and settled for dreams when there was a chance he could have the real thing.
Somehow, probably just to spite the strands of Gabriel Alexander’s DNA coursing through my veins, I managed to survive. Living off of scraps that were unsatisfying and apparently inaccurate because even the most explicit ones couldn’t hold a candle to what just happened between me and Sloane in this bathroom.
My heart is pounding in my chest, smacking against my rib cage while every drop of blood aches painfully inside the erection I still have pressed against Sloane’s stomach. Another bead of precum leaks out of my tip, and I know I have less than a minute to disentangle myself from this woman before I lose my shit and take her against the wall.
Sloane doesn’t give me the chance to move. Her hands come up to my chest and start pushing. Gently at first, and then with more force, like she can’t wait to put some distance between our bodies. I pull back, expecting to see her flushed and sated, eyes still hazy and soft with lust for me. Instead, I find tears streaming down her face and a sullen expression marring her beautiful features.
Shit.
She’s still shoving at my chest, so I lower her gently to the ground with a slide of my leg. The empty look in her eyes and the deafening silence in the room makes moving from between her thighs awkward as hell. Once I’m free, my hands bracket her waist just long enough to make sure she’s steady on her feet, and then I drop them.
It hurts to let her go.
Especially when she looks like she could use a hug like the one I gave her on Friday when she was upset about that fight with her mom. But today it seems like I’m the source of her tears, which makes my chances of being the person to comfort her significantly lower. I probably have a five percent chance of not having my head bitten off if I try to touch her right now, but I’m willing to take the gamble if it means getting rid of the storm cloud that’s gathered over her head.
I reach out, putting my hand gently on her forearm. “Are you okay?” She shrugs me off before my brain even registers our bodies have touched. The tears are flowing freely now, rolling like waves while she looks everywhere but at me.
“What’s the matter?”
It’s such a dumb question because anyone looking at the panic creeping into the corners of her eyes and the dejected slump of her shoulders would know what I’m too scared to hear her admit: she’s ashamed. The guilt of what she just did, and who she did it with, is threatening to eat her alive.
I know that’s what it is because I feel it too. A millstone around my neck that’s never really gone away but gets a bit heavier every time I see her and my heart skips a beat just to remind me she’s the only person who’s ever truly owned it. It started in on me the second she walked in the room with James today, looking all annoyed with him but blushing every time I glanced at her. I wanted her then, even though I had no reason to hope she would let me have her.
And now that she has, she regrets it.
Why wouldn’t she? It’s not like you’re Eric. You’re not the man she swore her life and love to. You don’t make things better for her. You just make them more complicated.
