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Hercules isn’t uncomfortable. He’s making a decision. I can almost hear his thoughts spinning in his head.
Then he leans down, his hands cupped around the bowl, veins in his arms showing under his tattoos. This man knowsexactlywhat he looks like. He knows he looks rough and beautiful and strong, like the world broke him and put him back together again for me.
God. Anotherridiculousthought.
“Baby.” His voice is low and warm and teasing, and that’s it. I’m done. I’m ruined. I don’t even like being calledbaby. I don’t like it at all. “Tell me what the fuck has been going on. And be careful with your hands.”
He goes back to cooking pancakes, leaving me in relative privacy to discover that I’m gripping the countertop on the kitchen island for dear life.
“I was born on a mountain in New York.”
Hercules waves a spatula in a hurry-up circle. “Skip to the relevant parts.”
“I moved here because the nightmares were getting worse, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hide them.”
“How long have you been trying to kill yourself?”
He’s so blunt about it that my face freezes like a cartoon. It takes a beat to unfreeze it. “I’m not trying to kill myself.”
Hercules’s eye-roll is mostly in the set of his shoulders. “You were weird for several days, and then you walked out into direct sunlight in the middle of the afternoon. That doesn’t sound dangerous to you? Not at all?”
I begged him to fuck me last night, so there’s not much point in hiding anymore. At least…not from him.
“I’ve survived every seizure I’ve had so far.”
“You’ve survived every nightmare, too.”
“Yeah, but I can’t feel my impending death once I black out from a seizure. I feel it the whole time I’m in the nightmares.”
His eyes meet mine, a pancake sizzling in the frying pan, and I wonder if he’s seeingmeor a memory.
“Is that what they’re about, then?”
“Pretty much, and—” And talking about it summoned one. I can almost see it. Icansee it. There’s the gates, the black stone floor, and the kitten’s eyes glowing in the dark.
I don’t know I’m on my feet, standing there with nowhere to run, until Hercules takes my chin in his hand and kisses me.
Hard. With teeth.
I bite him back on instinct, my entire body lighting up in a way that feels both foreign and perfect.
“You don’t do that anymore.”Thisis how he sounded in the Army. This. Right here. There’s no room for argument in his tone. “You tell me the second it starts to happen. And you don’t walk out in the fucking sun. I’ll fuck you all day and all night if I have to. I don’t care. Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me not to hurt you.”
“No.”
The pancake in the frying pan burns to a crisp while he fucks me over the kitchen island.
* * *
“How has the situation gotten worse?”
Hercules asks the question when he’s inside me. His handprints burn on the skin of my ass, and I am bent as unceremoniously as possible over a stack of pillows. He fucks me with agonizing patience.
“You were right. It doesn’t—it doesn’t always have to hurt.” I didn’t actually realize, on a practical level, that intensity doesn’t always meanpain.
