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Athena
Victory.
I could have laughed out loud in sheer glee at Dean’s behavior tonight, but I don’t. That would ruin the moment—for him, anyway. Not for me.
I felt him starting to waver the other night when he helped patch me up in the bathtub. He was gentler than he’d been before, kinder. Concerned about me. Of course, when I’d tried pushing him on the topic of me leaving Blackmoor, he’d clammed right up, ordered me to his bed, carried on like usual.
It’s impossible to tell myself that I don’t, on some level, enjoy all of this. The constant back and forth, the fighting, the games, the punishments, and the hot sex—all of it pushes buttons that I never even knew I had. It’s not just that I enjoy the dirty sex with Dean—I came harder today over that desk than I think I might ever have in my life, just from his careless, quick use of me—but I want more—with all of them. Not love, I don’t think—I’m not even sure how I really feel about them half the time, but I want more of the pleasure they give me. More of the twisty, tangled feelings that make me feel as if I’m losing my grip on reality.
How can I be the kind of girl who wants three guys at once? Who doesn’t actually want to choose between them, not because of a stupid archaic game, but because there’s something different about each one of them that intrigues me, and I’m not sure I want to pick one over the other.
Especially if leaving isn’t an option. If I can’t leave, then there’s only one thing left for me to do.
Make sure I’m the one who wins the game.
Before, I would have said that Jaxon was the only one I had any real interest in. But Dean’s softer side has made me wonder how much of him is truly the arrogant, cruel man that I’ve seen and how much of that is who he’s been told to be. And Cayde? The scars on his back told me that something awful had happened to turn him into who he is now.
I’d planned to do exactly as Dean asked tonight, for a change, instead of fighting him on it. I figured that would throw him off a little—but instead of lingerie that screams sex, I just put on my usual clothes to sleep, curling up in his bed like any good little girlfriend waiting for her boyfriend to get home, trying to tug at those urges that I know he’s trying so hard to suppress. And it fucking worked.
He’d gotten into bed naked—and I can’t pretend that I wasn’t instantly wet when I felt the smooth, hard slide of his cock against my ass—but I’d stayed pretending to be asleep, making little noises and soft moans. I could tell he was fucking into it. He was loving the idea that he was fucking me while I was out of it, that I was wet for him even in my dreams, that his hard thrust into me was what woke me up.
I’d half expected him to roll me over then and fuck me in his usual hard, cruel way, but he hadn’t. Instead, he’d spooned me from behind, cradling me in his arms, almost making love to me, if the thought of Dean Blackmoor making love to anyone wasn’t so fucking hilarious. He’d acted as if he cared about my pleasure, as if he’d wanted to be close to me.
Which seems completely insane—but I saw the way he looked at Winter earlier, and I saw the way he looked at me. He might tell himself that he wants to own me, that I don’t mean anything to him beyond a possession that he can control, but he’s obsessed with me.
And tonight just pushed that obsession a little deeper.
All the proof I need is that right now, he’s still inside me, and I’m sleeping in his arms.
What is that, if not boyfriend/girlfriend type shit?
* * *
What Dean doesn’t know isthat the outfit I was wearing when he dragged me into that classroom—a skirt and thigh-high socks, so different from my usual clothing—is all part of my plan. Not for Dean, necessarily, although it worked out nicely. But for Cayde—and in a way Jaxon, although I’m pretty sure he won’t fall for it—I’m turning up the heat. Tight jeans and crop tops and short skirts and stockings at school when I might run into one of them, yoga pants or low-slung sweats with tight cropped white tanks that show the outline of my nipples at home, and tight shorts that barely cover my ass and sports bras with no top over them at the gym.
All three of the guys notice the change in my wardrobe—I can see their eyes following me at breakfast when I come across them on campus, at dinner. But the gym clothes drive Jaxon wild the most, which I take a certain petty pleasure in since he’s rejected my advances so thoroughly.
Still, I can’t fault his training. I know our sessions are at least half the reason I was able to fight off my stalker, and I can feel myself getting stronger every day. The amount I can lift and my number of reps go up, I’m not completely breathless after cardio, and I hold my own against Jaxon in the ring better every time we spar.
I can feel the tension between us every time, the way his hands tighten on me when we touch, the way he breathes faster in a way that I know has very little to do with physical exertion and everything to do with the fact that I know he wants me.
The first day that we worked out together after my fight with my stalker, Jaxon couldn’t help but notice the bandages on my face and neck. “Dean better not have done that,” he snarled, looking at me from across the ring, in an ironic mirror of what Dean had said when I’d come up the stairs. “If I find out he hurt you—”
“He didn’t,” I said sharply. At least, not like this.
“So who did?” Jaxon circled me, eyeing the bandages. “Who did that to you, Athena?”
I’d contemplated lying to him or giving a half-truth, at least like I had with Dean. I still wasn’t about to tell Jaxon about the letter—part of me wished I hadn’t even told Cayde. I wished I’d just kept it to myself. “I have a stalker,” I said simply. “And she followed me here a couple of nights ago and jumped me. I fought her off.”
I saw something in Jaxon’s face that I hadn’t seen in either Cayde or Jaxon’s faces—pride. Pride in me, in the fact that I’d won, that I’d fought her off. Pride in his training and my ability to actually use it.
As always, I was struck with that feeling that I so often get with Jaxon, that under different circumstances, in a different life maybe, we could be good friends. Maybe even more than that. There’s so much in him that I like, and I think he likes me too. More than Dean or Cayde, at least.
But as the days pass, I can feel him closing down, shutting off around me. His responses are blunt, his training harder, his tone snappy. Jaxon has always been a bit of an asshole at times, like any of them, although never as much as Dean or Cayde. But I can feel him getting angrier and taking it out more on me, yelling at me when I miss a strike or fail a rep, telling me that I’m weak, that I should just give up whatever I have in my head and go back to being Dean’s pet.
I can always hear the acid resentment in his voice when he says that last part because he knows if he hadn’t rejected me, it would be his bed I’d be in right now.
And he also knows that if that had been the case, the game would be over.
