AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Annie had been concerned and apologized for making them go. Lancelot assured her that she did no such thing. No one could make Arthur do what he didn’t want to.
And that had always been the crux of the problem, hadn’t it?
He made himself come here. To face the fictional portrayal of his past, but it was his past nonetheless.
Lancelot told her that they would likely not join the group for supper as usual before hastily following Arthur out of the museum. She advised that they could simply “order up room service on the phone”; everything was paid for.
Lancelot nodded, but couldn’t imagine that either he or Arthur possessed much of an appetite at the moment. He felt the need to purge himself of what he’d seen. Arthur likely felt worse.
The King didn’t immediately head home. He walked briskly, his long strides eating up the ground, toward an unknown destination. Or, perhaps he simply walked.
To get away, to let off steam, Lancelot did not know. He only followed, as he always did.
“Stop following me,” Arthur growled beneath his breath, somehow knowing that Lancelot heard him, despite the distance that separated him.
“The Bond—”
“Fuck the Bond.”
“I cannot be more than twenty feet from you,” Lancelot said matter-of-factly. “Our bodies—”
Suddenly, Arthur reversed directions and came at him like a hurricane, shoving him backwards with his sheer physical presence, though they did not touch.
If not for the shock, Lancelot would have held his ground. Arthur never acknowledged his presence these days. It was as if he wasn’t even there. Simply a shadow that never left the King’s side.
“What do you know about our bodies?” the warrior king seethed, getting into Lancelot’s face, their mouths only a hair’s breadth apart. So close, Lancelot inhaled Arthur’s breath as air.
“No one asked you to save me. I don’t need your protection. I can bloody well run in front of one of those speeding vehicles if I choose to. I don’twantto share your life force. I don’twantto be tied to you.”
This time he shoved out with hands to Lancelot’s chest, hard enough to make him stagger back a step.
“I don’t wantyou.”
Lancelot didn’t know whether he reeled more from Arthur’s vehemence or the fact that he voluntarily touched him, even if it was in violence.
Something inside of him pinged with a sharp ache, but he could not make sense of it. So, he ignored it, as he always did.
Wordlessly, he stood there, waiting for Arthur’s next move. If the warrior walked away, he would follow at a farther distance. The farthest possible without feeling the pull, like a dog on a leash.
“Don’t follow me,” his King snarled, as if reading his thoughts.
“Leave me be.”
Arthur turned abruptly and walked on.
Lancelot waited until the milling crowds had almost swallowed him up before following again. Perhaps he would not notice if Lancelot kept his distance, unseen in the weaving people in what appeared to be a very busy part of town.
But as he rounded a corner Arthur had taken only moments before, he was yanked by the neck of his shirt into a deserted alley surrounded on three sides by stone and brick.
It was an extremely narrow passage, allowing only one man to enter comfortably. Now that there were two of them, and both of them broad and muscular, it was a very tight squeeze.
Lancelot found himself shoved against the unyielding brick at his back, with just as an unyielding wall of muscles at hisfront. Their bodies were flush from head to toe. Arthur’s hands were flattened against the wall on either side of his head.
His fiery heat surrounded him. Burned him. The way one’s nerve endings burned after being frozen, as they slowly regained life.
And Lancelot suddenly found it impossible to breathe.
“I told you not to follow me,” Arthur rumbled low, his voice savage deep.
