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“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “Help me understand.”
He tugged the blanket up to his chin. “Well, that’s going to be hard to do, because I don’t know why I did it.”
I sighed.
“That’s what you’re going to ask, right? Why I took her out there into the snow like that?”
“You have to have some idea why you did it.”
“It just… called to me. It glittered.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
“Because it was dangerous.”
I kept shaking my head.
“You have to feel a little of that, right? The call of danger? It has to excite you in some way.”
I considered. “Maybe,” I said. Everyone felt that way, at least a little bit. “But sex in the snow? No, never, not at all.”
He let out a helpless laugh, collapsing into the couch. “I know, right? What the fuck?”
I regarded him. “But if you’re like that about it—”
“I know.” He groaned. His hand came up out of the blanket and he dragged it over his face. “Look, let’s be real, Maguire, I don’t like myself very much. I’m not good to myself, and sometimes, you know, I’m not even good to the people who I love. I can be… a trial. It doesn’t even really make sense to me why anyone likes me at all. If I were you guys, I would not have let me into this pack. I would never have let me bite her.”
I grimaced, because I really didn’t like hearing this from him. On the other hand, I also knew, deep down, he was an integral part of the pack. “You belong with us,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I mean, I get that. It’s different now. Different for a lot of reasons. I did pull back, you know. When you found us, we were coming back inside.”
“Right,” I said.
“But I can’t promise that’s always going to happen,” he said.
“Why did it happen?”
“Because I realized that they needed me to pull them back in. They were just feeding off my crazy,” he said. “I was glittering, and they were going to follow the glitter right into the frozen crystalline center of the end of it all. Devlin was subjugated to me, and she… I mean, her and me together, it’s…” He sighed. “I’d like to say that I’ll always pull us all back in time, but—”
“I will,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “You will.” He licked his lips. “Or Rohan. He can collar me, too, if necessary. But… the way it works with Devlin and me, he needs me to unlock him.”
“He is wound tight,” I said. “You give him a release he won’t allow himself. I see that. I wouldn’t deny him that.”
“You’re in love with him,” he said. “So am I.”
“I think… I mean, it sounds crazy, Sinclair, because we don’t really know each other, but I think I’m in love with you.”
“Yeah, ditto,” he said. “Fuck, that moment when you told us to hand Eleri over to you, when you appeared in the snow from the cabin and rescued us? I think it happened then. What would we have done without you, Maguire?”
I snorted. “Yeah, you don’t have to worry about that. You’ll never find out.”
He pulled aside his blanket, beckoning me.
I laughed, but then I got up and came over and we got under the blankets together. I put my arm around him and he tucked his head in against my chest and kissed my collarbone. I pressed my lips into the place where his curls met his forehead. “You know, I’m not even gay.”
“Oh, me either,” he said throatily.
