“No,” I insist, feeling his anger in the depths of my bones andlovingit. “I didn’t meet up with anyone else last night.”
Which is not a lie. Technically, whether or not it was him not in control of his own body or a shape-shifting monster, it wasn’t another person.
“Don’t fuckinglieto me,” he demands.
Atticus’s fingers are digging into my hip, his other hand now firmly wrapped around my throat as if to hide the mark from the world around us.
The pain triggers something in me. I’ve missed this—his control and even his fury—but the false accusation is pissing me off so badly that I want to lash out.
How dare he think that I would stray after how pleading and desperate I was last night? Does he truly think I’m that horrible?
Well, fine then. I’ll let him believe whatever he likes, as long as he keeps touching me.
I’m a walking contradiction.
“I’m pretty sure that what I do stopped being your business a long time ago,” I repeat his words from last night back to him, and Atticus snarls.
In a flash, his mouth is pressed to my neck, right over the hickey I was given last night. His lips latch on, sucking angrily as a small grunt leaves me, my body immediately crumbling and writhing against him.
He nips and sucks until I’m sore and raw, and as Atticus raises his head and appraises the spot, he’s panting and glaring. A string of spit hangs from his bottom lip and connects gently to my skin.
His hands twitch. “How can it not be my business when your body reacts as if I still own it? As if it’s mine to take, to mark?”
My chest tightens, reacting to his words as thoroughly as his touch. Pain is blossoming within me, and it has nothing to do with his teeth or his lips and everything to do with what we’ve lost. Of what I threw away in my attempt to keep him all to myself.
If I had trusted him to deny Cassie, would we be somewhere else entirely?
Suddenly, all of my anger is gone, and all that’s left inside of me is longing, desire, and an angry misery that is eating me alive.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out, feeling my eyes grow wet and hot. “I’m so fucking sorry for what I said, Atticus. I just didn’t want to lose you; I didn’t want to spend a single moment imagining you with someone else.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he murmurs, his glazed eyes still locked onto the column of my neck.
“I like that you’re controlling. I like that you’re aggressive and demanding and possessive. I want your touch, your words, your guidance.” The words are pouring out of me, as if this will be the very last time I’m able to confess them.
To gift them to him in desperation and fear.
I’m so fucking terrified that the only version of him I’ll ever touch again is the cold, disoriented version that’s visited my bedroom.
Atticus groans, turning that glare onto my pleading eyes as he fumbles with the button of my jeans. “You’re cruel, Cameron. So incredibly mean.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, my tears now falling steadily. “Please don’t leave me.”
“Leave you?” He drops to his knees before me, startling the very depths of my soul with something hot and confusing, considering the current conversation we’re having. “Youleft me when you reduced me to a crazy, repulsive monster.”
“No,” I cry, my hands fisting at my sides as he rips my jeans and briefs down my thighs. “I didn’t leave! I begged you to stay.”
I’m embarrassingly hard from all the throat sucking he just did, and he eyes me hungrily, though the anger never leaves him.
Not for a moment.
“You can beg all you want, sweetheart,” he tells me, “but all I can hear is your voice tearing me to shreds.”
The endearment, the nickname he gave me so long ago, sounds sosweet. So intimate and intentional that it makes this entire situation so much worse.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I whisper, jolting as his hand wraps around the base of my dick. “I wouldneverintentionally hurt you.”
Atticus doesn’t reply to that. Instead, he sucks my tip inside his mouth, hollowing his cheeks as if he’s trying to pull the truth from inside of me.
