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I felt him settle over me, most of his weight not on my body, but on his arm. Now, he was lying against me.

I knew if I opened my eyes, his face would be close, his mouth kissably close. I did not open my eyes. “You said it before we came here anyway, that you wanted to defile me. It’s what you like doing to me.”

“And you,” he said, very affectionate, “like being defiled.”

“It’s an omega thing?”

His mouth on mine.

I kissed him, my tongue in his mouth. We kissed for a while.

When he stopped, grabbing one of the pillows and putting it under his head, I opened my eyes. He got me a pillow, too.

We looked at each other.

“I’m not perfect,” I said to him. “You said that stuff about me being innocent and sweet, and it wasn’t true.”

“But Leo—”

“We were both innocent,” I said to him. “We were all innocent. Opal, too, maybe. But the opposite of being innocent, it’s growing up. It’s maturity. We got hurt, we went through things, and we lost our innocence.”

“No, I don’t accept that. The things that I did to you—”

“I forgive you,” I said.

“No, you don’t.”

“I feel bad for you, anyway,” I said. “It wasn’t fair to you, all of that on your shoulders when you were barely pubescent. You don’t do that to a boy who just lost his mom and dad. You don’t say, ‘Here she is, your future wife, the future mother of your children, don’t fuck it up.’ That was the pressure, not me.”

He sighed. “Yeah, okay, maybe.”

“And the cyning stuff? The shaman picked you because Hank told him to,” I said. “Maybe not explicitly, I don’t know, but Hank let him understand that you’d be the right sort of guy. You were malleable. You had no parents. You were the right age for Opal. Hank could make you over into whatever he wanted. You weren’t going to push him out before he was ready like some cyning candidates might. When you did take over, you’d do what he said.”

He shut his eyes, and he made a noise in the back of his throat. “Stop.”

“I know you want to believe that you are the magically chosen one,” I said. “Like King Arthur or some shit.”

“Leo, you don’t understand.”

“But it’s not true,” I said. “It’s never been true, and it’s not good for you.”

His eyes were still closed. “It is good for me. If I hadn’t had that on me, I never would have stepped up. I’d have been like Vincent or something.”

I ran my hand through his hair and wished he hadn’t said his brother’s name, not after that awkwardness at lunch with him, not after that line in Opal’s manuscript. But I couldn’t think about that right now, not while we were knotted together. “Did you step up, though? Or did it just come out of you in other ways? Maybe she’s not wrong, about you needing some place to put your darkness.”

His eyes opened. “Into you?”

“Into women,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t accept that. This, with us, it’s alpha-omega shit. And with Opal, same thing, only…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You said you were brutal to her.”

He looked into my eyes. “You want to talk about this now. While my cock’s inside you? You want to talk about her, about me having my cock in her?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You want to hate me,” he said softly.