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“It was hours, Valor.” I tamped down my frustration. This wasn’t his fault, it was mine. The devil on my shoulder was trying to tell me that Valor shouldn’t have opened the door if he didn’t want me to walk through it, but that wasn’t fair.
“I got your messages, but I thought you were joking.” Valor rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Why would I make a joke about this?” I hissed at him, anger bubbling to the surface again. I struggled to push it down. It wouldn’t fix anything. “Where have you been?”
“I was in the middle of a meeting when I saw your first message. I thought you were being funny to get my attention.”
“When, in the history of our relationship, have I ever played practical jokes on you?”
“There was that time you told me you got us a puppy.”
“That was April Fool’s Day when we were seniors in high school.”
“Yeah, but money was tight. That puppy was going to break us.”
“There was never a puppy! Do you have any idea the hell I’ve been through in the past few hours, trying to figure out whether or not I was doing the right thing?”
“Yeah. Your orgasm sure sounded like you were going through hell.”
Guilt stabbed through me. He’d listened to the whole thing.
“How hard would it have been to tell him no?”
I swallowed. “Did you want me totell him no?”
He blew out a breath. We stared at each other. My heart had paused, waiting for him to answer.
More useless tears welled in my eyes and overflowed to my cheeks. This was like a game where only Valor knew the rules, and it didn’t matter what I did, I was going to lose.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said flatly.
The phone jerked in his hand. Images rushed past the screen, as though he had dropped the phone and picked it back up.
“What did you say?” His eyes were wide.
“I can’t do this anymore, Valor. You can’t play games like this with me. Either you tell me the rules or I don’t do anything at all. You can’t change your mind when it’s too late. We already discussed that, remember? You promised me you would be able to handle it.”
He swallowed. “I didn’t know how this would feel. I didn’t know that I would call you back, and he would still be there, and you guys would be…”
“You set me up to fail. You gave him my phone number, you arranged for him to fuck me after the convention, you encouraged me to see him again, then you ignored my messages when he fucking showed up.” I wiped my face with the edges of my robe. “You can’t expect me not to break your rules if you never tell me what they are. I hate that I fucked up, but I’m the one who tried to talk you out of this game—multiple times.”
He fell backward on something—the sofa in his office, from the looks of it. He was still wearing his suit, although he had taken off his jacket. His tie was loosened, and his hair was rumpled.
“I don’t know. I figured we would feel our way through things.”
“That’s damn hard to do without you being in the room with us, isn’t it? I can’t read your mind if I can’t even see your face. It felt like I was cheating on you, and I wanted to stop, but he and I both thought I was doing what you wanted. I’m done. We can be monogamous or we can split up and youcan find someone else to play little head games with, but if you want to keep me and do this, we need to discuss our limitsin detail.”
“Are you threatening to leave me?” he growled.
“Are you even fucking listening to me?” I demanded. I’d never taken such a belligerent tone with him, but I was more upset than I’d ever been in my life. “You put me in an impossible situation and then pulled the rug out from under my feet. You can’t say there are no rules and then blame me because you changed your mind without telling me.”
“You could have waited!”
“And you could have excused yourself for a moment and shot me a text! There are words like no, don’t, or stop that would have taken you three seconds to send.”
We stared at each other. We’d never really had a fight before—not like this. My stomach was twisting and sick. My supper was threatening to come back up.
“Maybe you were just waiting for an excuse.”
