My first thought on waking up was that I wished I hadn’t. Unconsciousness had been suiting me just fine.
Holy God.
Everything hurt. Literally everything. My stomach, my head, my throat. Even my fingernails were throbbing. I tried to open my eyes but my eyelashes had been replaced with needles and the light sliced right into the squishy bits of my face.
I would have groaned but it was absolutely beyond me.
Rolling over, I nudged my head under the pillow, finding some small solace in the darkness there.
Which was when it hit me: this wasn’t my bed. This wasn’t my room.
I had no fucking clue where I was.
Ahhhhhh.
I spread my arms. Then my legs. Didn’t even get close to the edge. The covers felt crisp and light and smooth against my skin, the way only really expensive stuff does. Certainly not like my budget duvet and inevitably unwashed sheets.
Against my skin?
Oh fuck. Nakedness.
I was naked.
What had I done?
I eased the pillow off my head. Unlocked my eyes. Tried not to whimper as the light came at me again, brighter and harder this time.
Gradually, though, my vision cleared and I managed to focus on a glass of water standing on the posh table thing next to the bed. It looked like just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Clear and cool and perfectly pure.
I groped for it, motor functions also somewhat compromised, and took a swallow. It settled a little uncomfortably in my stomach, but it tasted amazing. It tasted of nothing. Of clean. In the filth that was my mouth.
And left me feeling at least 20 percent alive.
Then I heard the rustle of a page turning. I had another go at looking and the middle distance resolved itself into a hotel suite. Not a room. A suite. A really posh one if the chandeliers were anything to go by. French doors led from the bedroom bit, where the ruin of Arden St. Ives was to be found, to the living area, where Caspian Hart was sitting on a purple damask sofa, reading the Times.
Images from last night hit me like shrapnel: being carried in his arms through the foyer of the Randolph Hotel, the press of his body against mine as I blundered through the streets, the alley behind the club, the boy I’d pulled—
God.
All disordered fragments.
And too many gaps.
“So you’re awake.” Caspian didn’t glance up from the paper. He seemed slightly more rumpled than usual without his tie and jacket, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to show his forearms, all sinewy loveliness, flecked by dark hair. But even a little bit undone he was unassailable. Exquisite. A study in absolute assurance.
“Um.” It came out as a croak. “Yeah.”
The nakedness thing was rapidly becoming a big deal. Parts of my body I’d never previously considered—my elbows and knees and flanks—were getting prickly and self-conscious. “Look, uh, why are you…I mean…why am I…did we…”
He put down the paper. Turned the impossible blueness of his eyes on me. All ice this morning. “Arden, are you seriously asking if I fucked an inebriated child immediately after extricating him from a situation that would very likely have devolved into rape?”
Well at least he hadn’t been put off by the vomiting.
“I’m not a child,” I mumbled.
“Then stop acting like one.”
“I’m pretty sure that going clubbing and getting drunk are PEGI 18 activities.”
“Being immoderate, undisciplined, and incapable of taking care of yourself, however, are not.”
I tugged the covers up to my chin. “I can take care of myself. That guy wasn’t going to…going to do anything.”
“Considering how excised you were when you thought I’d offered your college a donation in exchange for a blow job, I’m somewhat surprised at your willingness to sexually barter yourself in an alley.”
“I wasn’t bartering.” I tugged at my hair, which felt awful and smelled worse. Clubs and smoke and sweat and other people’s hands. “I just…I just didn’t want him to fuck me.”
Caspian sighed. The sound felt familiar somehow. He rose with easy grace and came into the bedroom. There was something weirdly normal, even domestic about it, as if I were his lover and this a morning in our life.
Except none of that was true. This was a hotel room. He was Caspian Hart. And I was naked and ashamed.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you no means no?”
“I’m not an idiot or a psychopath. I was taught that at school, by my parents, by my own conscience. I would never—”
“I meant you.”
I flinched from the way he was looking at me. Sometimes his gentleness was the most terrifying thing of all. “I wasn’t saying no.”
“Did you want to have sex with him?”
“Well, no, but that’s not the point.”
“What was the point?”
“I…that way…I wasn’t…” I was way too hungover for this. “I was still in control, okay? It was still my choice.”
His mouth tightened but it seemed his annoyance wasn’t for me. For once. “I could kill that boy.”
“I’m okay. He was just…a bit…”
“Violence is not the only form of coercion, and coercion has no place in sex. And you shouldn’t do things you don’t want to do. Ever.”
“I know. It’s just…” I picked at the snowy white sheets. “I don’t want to be punished for liking sex. It’s not my fault the world is fucked up.”
Now it was his turn to glance away. “And I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“No offense, but that’s pretty ironic coming from the man who rejected me twice.”
“That was…I thought it was for the best.”
“And you know something else?” It was hard, after last night, to have much by way of credibility, but I was still the same person who’d been thrilled to suck him off on a balcony. Who’d chased him to London. Who’d hurt myself for his asking and my own pleasure. “Yes, last night wasn’t what I wanted. He was wrong and I was messed up and I’m glad nothing happened. But I know what I’m doing and I know what I like and sometimes”—it was even harder saying this shit to a man’s profile—“with the right person when it’s done in the right way…that can include…I guess…certain types of coercion.” Like your hands on my wrists, your voice on the phone.
I waited for him to get it. To understand. To admit the connection between us.
Instead he was silent for…well…basically ever. And then, “So you intimated last night.”
Not what I was looking, or hoping, for.
And…wait…I did what?
Sorting through last night’s memories was like peering into a stranger’s sock drawer.
And then: me, him, this bed, with its canopy and pristine sheets. He was trying to get me to drink water, exasperated with my drunkenness, my lack of caution, my lack of self-restraint. And I—oh God—I’d sprawled over his lap, offering myself up eagerly for any punishment he wished to bestow.
He hadn’t of course.
My arse clenched in shame.
“Why don’t you take a shower?” he asked, dismissal couched as a question. “You’ll probably feel better after.”
“Okay.” Like I was ever going to feel good again.
He disappeared into the living area, closing the doors behind him. There was a fluffy hotel dressing gown at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d worn it as I shambled over and struggled into it. Then shuffled miserably to the bathroom.
It was all shininess in there, hurting my eyes and making my head ache.
I curled up in the bottom of the bath and let the shower pound me. It was so typical that, after three years of student facilities, I wasn’t in any mood to appreciate the awesome on offer here. I’d missed really hot water and really clean baths. And hotels were exciting: all those little bottles of luxury shampoo and conditioner and body wash and moisturizer, jewel-bright in the gathering steam.
Right now, I was too depressed to even think about stealing them. I wished I could swirl away down the drain with the rest of the dirty water.
And I couldn’t help indulging myself with a mean little fantasy that, maybe one day, somehow, Caspian Hart would be vulnerable, exposed, and I would be the one choosing to be kind.
Except it would never happen. I was the faller-over and the fucker-upper, and he would never, ever be vulnerable to me.
And I owed him. I owed him big-time.
It was the hollowest feeling of all: gratitude to this man—this beautiful, cold, unexpectedly compassionate man—who didn’t want me.
I turned off the shower and toweled myself dry. Wrapped myself in the dressing gown again and went back to receive my third…fourth…fifth rejection from Caspian Hart.
He was sitting on the sofa again, his face turned toward the bow window, beyond which I could see the leafy boulevard of St. Giles and the intricate carvings of the Martyrs’ Memorial. It was a little odd to be parallel with the top of it. I’d eaten kebab-van chips on the steps often enough.
On the table in front of him was a properly impressive breakfast, complete with little baskets of pastries, racks of perfectly browned toast, those individual pots of jam I’d always found super tempting, and a collection of shiny cloches concealing what was probably full English deliciousness. I could smell bacon and while the spirit was definitely willing, the flesh was slightly dubious.
Caspian’s attention flicked from the picture-postcard vista to the decidedly less picture-postcard me.
“Um, hi.” I was all covered up, but there was something startlingly intimate about damp hair and bare feet.
Even more so when his eyes lingered on me. “You look different.”
Try defenseless. Without my tight jeans and my engineered hair, my jackets and my jewelry. My armor of queerness and accessibility. “Thanks for last night. I’m really sorry for putting you to all this hassle.”
“It was nothing.”
“How did you even find me? Were you looking for me?”
“I…yes. You’d posted pictures of your activities on various social media platforms, so you weren’t exactly difficult to track. I arrived at the club just as you were leaving with your…with your swain.”
“You didn’t have to do all this though.” I gestured at the room. “I’d have been fine.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t feel comfortable leaving you alone.”
Oh wow. Way to make me feel even more of an unpleasant imposition. “Look, I should, um, go—”
“Sit down, Arden.”
The command crackled up my spine. And, for once, I resented it. He didn’t get to do that. Not now. “Where are my clothes?”
“I said sit down.”
I sat down mutinously. Fuck.
Then he went all quiet on me. There was water on the table, in one of those classy-looking misted bottles, and he leaned forward to pour me a glass. “You should keep drinking. And maybe try to eat something.”
“Right.” I didn’t want to be snapped at again and it was good advice. Only semi-mutinously, I took a sip of water. Wishing he would get on with it. Whatever it was.
But, for some reason, he still wasn’t saying anything. He was just sitting there, watching me, as unreadable and unreachable as ever.
Except, there was a tightness to his jaw, to his carefully positioned hands. And I wasn’t sure, but his foot was…not quite moving, but twitching as if he was trying very hard to keep it still. It was my first true glimpse of the restless boy he’d told me he used to be.
It softened me toward him.
Even if I was still confused and hurt and embarrassed and epically hungover.
“Arden,” he began.
“Still here. Sitting as ordered.”
“Arden, I want to fuck you.”
He wanted to…Gosh. Well. I hadn’t been expecting that.
Especially not when I felt—and probably looked—like I’d been shat out by a gastrically distressed camel.
But it was Caspian Hart. Offering me something I could barely even begin to imagine. Would he fuck me like he kissed me? As though I were his world to be conquered? Come undone as he had with his cock down my throat? Passion-flayed, whispering my name like it was the only word he could remember.
“Um, sure, okay.” I stood and undid the cord of the dressing grown. “Let’s go.”
He recoiled a little. “Not now. Not like this.”
“Oh.” I grinned hopefully at him. “Are you going to take me to dinner first?”
“Please sit down. And be serious. This is a negotiation.”
I hadn’t been aware of being unserious but I sat down again, not sure I was entirely happy with where this might be going. “Sleeping with me is a negotiation?”
“Well.” He crossed one leg over the other, his whole body taut now, a bow bereft of an arrow. “You said yourself there is a spectrum between casual sex and a relationship. I require neither, but I do wish to have sex with you on a short-term, prearranged basis.”
Was I dreaming? Or still drunk? He wanted me? He really wanted me? Wait. He wanted me on a…short-term, prearranged basis? “Wow, you could turn a boy’s head with dirty talk like that.”
He gave me a look that probably made him the terror of boardrooms from here to New York: banked ferocity and merciless conviction. But it was so…so practiced, I wondered if he was nervous.
Nervous?
No. Caspian Hart would never be nervous.
“You have expressed quite plainly your desire to sleep with me on no less than three occasions. And on at least one of them you were sober. There’s very little purpose in dissembling now.”
He was right. But also wrong. It wasn’t that I was unconvincingly attempting to play hard to get. It was just difficult to get all that excited about negotiation. “I’m sorry, I’m not dissembling. I’m just, you know, swept off my feet here by the passion of your invitation.”
“I would not be suggesting it if I did not want this very much.” He sounded faintly irritated. As though admitting he wanted me was some kind of concession he’d been obliged to make. And his foot did this jerky little tap that he stopped almost at once.
I tilted my head, instinctively quizzical at all the contradictions here, and then wished I hadn’t because it made my dehydrated brain flop around painfully. Was this why he’d come to Oxford? To arrange to have sex with me? Or to actually have sex with me, only to discover I was pissed off my head and about to go down on another bloke? “But you said no before. What changed?”
“Nothing changed. That is”—he hesitated a moment—“what changed was my understanding.”
“Um, I’m going to need more than that.”
His fingers twisted. Knotted. Turned white at the knuckles. “I’ve always wanted you. I just overestimated my capacity to resist it…resist you.”
“And me throwing up all over myself totally sealed the deal? Because I’m pretty sure some people would have been put off.”
“You were worried about that?”
“Well, yeah, just a bit.”
He gave me an odd, soft smile and this whimsical “abracadabra” gesture. “It’s forgotten.”
I found myself smiling. The most painful thing about Caspian Hart wasn’t desiring him; it was liking him.
“And while,” he went on, “I would prefer you didn’t make a habit of inebriation, I found far more to dislike in the way that boy was touching you.”
“I wasn’t too keen on it myself.” Trying my best to make light.
“I hated it.”
The fervor in his voice surprised me. I glanced up and discovered him looking particularly wolfish, eyes burning with this possessive, predatory light I—honestly—found wildly exciting. And felt bad about finding wildly exciting. “Um, sorry.”
“I hated his hands on you. I hated seeing you on your knees for him.”
God. Moral quandary. On the one hand, this was way better than negotiation. On the other, it seemed mean-spirited to feel good about someone else feeling bad. Although maybe if he’d sounded less irritated about being into me, I wouldn’t have been stuck hoarding scraps of jealousy. “I wasn’t really on my knees. I was more sort of too drunk to stand.”
“I’ve never struck anyone before.” Some of the wildness faded from Caspian’s expression, leaving him the closest to flustered I’d ever seen him, a flush caressing the arch of his cheekbones. “It was inappropriate.”
Surely he wasn’t embarrassed?
“Oh no.” I slipped from the edge of the chair where I’d been perched and knelt down next to him. Not in a subby way, just in a needing to be close way. I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t quite dare. If he’d been a different man, if we hadn’t been negotiating, I’d have propped my chin playfully on his thigh like a puppy. As it was, I just smiled up at him. “It was heroic. The most heroic thing anyone has ever done for me. It made me feel like a princess.”
He laughed, the flush deepening and spreading beautifully. I wondered if he would blush like that when I touched him. Life breathed into marble. “I’m afraid I’m a poor choice of knight. I don’t think punching people lies within my skill set.”
That was when I noticed the mess of his knuckles. “Oh, Caspian.”
He covered one hand with the other. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” I reached out and he drew away. “You’re hurt.”
“Faces seem to be harder than hands. Teeth especially.”
“Can I see?”
“It’s hardly—”
“Please.”
He wouldn’t look at me but he let me uncurl his fingers. Rest his palm lightly on mine as I contemplated the damage. Truthfully, it wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that he’d earned those wounds for me. He’d cleaned himself up, but there was still some swelling amid the scraped skin and the shadows of burgeoning bruises.
He had such gorgeous hands: elegant and strong and lived in, with pronounced bones and ropey veins, long knotty fingers and well-kept nails. Acquisitive, powerful hands, for taking and claiming. I wanted them on me. In me. I wanted to make them tremble.
But right now, I didn’t want him to hurt because of me.
“I’ve got an idea.” I reached behind me to where I’d left my water glass. There were still some pieces of ice in the bottom. I chased them with my fingers until I managed to snag one. Sucked it until it was completely smooth. And then brought it very gently to his knuckles.
He gave a soft hiss.
“Too cold?”
“It’s ice, Arden. Ice is cold.”
“Maybe if I had something to wrap it in. I think I saw a washcloth in the bathroom.”
I was about to stand when his other hand caught me by the wrist. “Don’t go.”
Ridiculous really because it was only a room away but such was the intensity of the moment that I forgot.
I forgot everything except the pressure of his hand and the urgency of his voice. The stark yearning in his eyes.
Icy water was dripping into my palm, sliding down my arm, my fingers turning numb.
But I didn’t care about that either.
Just his mouth, hot on mine, as he leaned over me and kissed my chilled lips. It was an awkward position, unbalancing, but I arched into his touch, letting desire shape me. I loved being unbalanced by him, controlled by him. It was its own power—its own freedom—and it made me feel so good. So good, so safe, and so marvelously claimed.
Next thing I knew he was bending me back, pushing me down onto that plush hotel carpet. He caught my other hand and pulled them both over my head. He seemed to like me that way, pinned, stretched, helpless, his.
Well. That made two of us.
Although there was part of me that ached to touch him back. To know what it would be like to tangle my fingers in his hair. Stroke the skin at the nape of his neck. Feel the muscles of his shoulders tighten like wings beneath my palms. I wanted him to have everything. All the pleasure it was in me to give.
His suit was rough against my skin and I expected his kiss to be rough as well.
But he didn’t kiss me. Only looked at me with lust-glittery eyes. Then groaned. “Oh God, how do you do this to me?”