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Tell me if this is a knot, he’d said, pulling open his fly and showing me his impressive erection. That what they look like?
I’d clutched the wine, violently turned on, staring at him.
Maybe you show me yours and we could compare? He’d given me a wicked grin.
Now, Sinclair’s strained voice was barely audible in the back of the car. “What the fuck are you thinking about that’s making your scent do that? Her?”
I smirked. “You.”
He glanced at me.
I shrugged. “I was thinking about that time on the balcony after my coronation when you whipped it out and wanted to have a dick-measuring contest.”
He cringed. “Oh, fuck, you would bring that up, wouldn’t you? I was so drunk. I can’t believe I did that.”
“You’re embarrassed? Do you get embarrassed?”
He dragged a hand over his face, groaning.
“You didn’t seem embarrassed at the time,” I said, remembering how he’d taken the wine bottle from me, set it down, and gone to work on my fly himself. We’d kissed as we’d jerked each other off, everything adolescent and clumsy and heightened and intense. I’d never kissed a man before.
Not that we were men then. We were still boys, really.
“At the time, no,” he said. “Embarrassment happens during the hangover, as a general rule.”
I barked out a laugh.
He laughed, too, a nervous laugh.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen him nervous. I studied him in the darkness, the lights of the city going by as we drove through the streets. Did I even know this man?
“Look… Devlin…” He sighed heavily. “All I do is fuck things up.”
I could have reassured him, told him that he didn’t do that, but it was sort of true, so I didn’t know what to say. “Maybe you don’t mean to.”
“No, I do,” he said. “I fuck things up on purpose. I always have. My therapist says it’s some hurt child part of me that learned that it was the only way to get attention. She says that I was mostly ignored when I was small, and I internalized an idea that I wasn’t important. She says that part of me is still devastated about that.”
“Bad attention is better than no attention?” I said, raising my eyebrows. I didn’t comment on his being in therapy, because he was always being sent to therapists. Admittedly, he usually didn’t say back any of the things they told him. Usually, his therapists quit because he wouldn’t take the therapy seriously or because he was always skipping out on sessions and that kind of thing.
“Bad attention is the only attention I deserve,” he said quietly. “I exist only to fuck things up. It’s my role in life.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but instinctively, the way he made me feel frightened, I couldn’t. So, I only gazed at him silently.
“I don’t know,” he said. “People expect something of you, and you start fulfilling their expectations. At some point, it becomes your identity. At least it is an identity. Otherwise, it’s like you don’t even exist.”
I huffed, because I got that. “Yeah, not existing? That was my childhood.”
“And then you were the alpha prince, heir to the throne, and everything changed.”
“Except it didn’t,” I said. “Because I was defective.” I shrugged. “You saw that about me.”
“What?” he said, confused. “What do you mean? I never thought you were defective.”
“You’ve never submitted to me,” I said. “I didn’t even know what it was to be an alpha until Rohan and I interacted. I thought it was like whatever we had, sparks and friction and butting heads all the time. But then I experienced him and me together, and it was, you know, easy.”
“Everything’s easy with Rohan,” said Sinclair fondly. “But I still don’t get it. I never thought you were defective. You’re fucking perfect. Everything about you is exactly the way a prince should be.”
“No,” I said. “Because if I could have made your alpha submit to my alpha, then we would have worked. You couldn’t and that’s why you ultimately rejected me.”
