Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 89763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 449(@200wpm)___ 359(@250wpm)___ 299(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 449(@200wpm)___ 359(@250wpm)___ 299(@300wpm)
Ariadne gives me a heartbreaking smile that’s completely at odds with her fingertips coasting up and down my length. “That time in the maze. My first time.”
I’m having a difficult time thinking, let alone trying to anticipate where she’s going with this. “Yeah? What about it?”
She presses her thumb to the sensitive spot just under the head of my cock. “Was it… Was it your first time too?”
It takes far too long for her words to penetrate. The meaning washes over me, and I’m not a man who wastes time with regret, but it sinks its claws into me all the same. My stomach twists. I have to actually take a step back to break her hold on me. I don’t want to muddy this moment with my past, but her words have skeletons I barely think about rattling around in their closets. “That’s a ridiculous fucking question, Ariadne.”
“Is it?” She watches me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t think so.”
Fuck. She’s really going to make me say it. I take a step back and drag a hand over my face. I can’t bring myself to look at her. “Listen, we’ve known each other a long time, and I don’t talk about what happened before I came into your father’s household, but I did a lot of shit to stay alive. To ensure I didn’t starve.”
She’s still watching me too closely. It makes me feel like my heart is beating on the outside of my skin, exposed and uncomfortable. Vulnerable. If she looks at me with pity, I might have to leave the fucking room. But she just tilts her head to the side and seems to consider something. “Before. What about after?”
I shake my head sharply. “It’s always been you. I’m not interested in anyone else. I haven’t been since we met.” And Minos knew better than to send me on those kinds of missions, if they even existed in the first place.
“You were thirteen when we met.”
I swing back around to face her. There’s something tight and hot in my chest. “No, I was fourteen when I moved in.”
“Yes, I know that.” She waves it away. “But that day in the market. You were thirteen then, right? It was winter, so it was well before your birthday.”
She remembers.
I rock back on my heels, that feeling of vulnerability threatening to sweep me away. I don’t have it in me to lie. Not to her. Not like this. “Yeah. I was thirteen then.” I speak so softly, it barely counts as a whisper. She hears me anyway. Of course she does.
“One last question.” She seems to lean forward, gravitating toward me without moving an inch. “Would you have chosen any of those people if the alternative wasn’t starving to death or some other awful outcome?”
“No,” I say softly. There it is. The ugly truth. Maybe it would feel less ugly if I had chosen them. I don’t think so. I was just a fucking kid. Trauma can make you grow up fast, but in the end, it’s not a substitute for the life experience that comes with a few decades on this goddamn rock orbiting the sun. I’m grateful to the kid I was. He did what it took to survive, to bring me to her. The cost is barely worth counting.
Her lips curve a little, even though her eyes stay so incredibly serious. “Then I think the maze was your first time, wasn’t it?”
I stare at this woman, at the shining star that has been my guiding light for most of my fucking life. I knew from the start that I would never deserve her, but I didn’t give a fuck. I wanted her all the same. And yeah, there was a moment in the maze when I was sappy enough to mourn the fact that this might be her first time, but it wasn’t mine. That experience had been taken from me a very long time ago, through desperation and violence. I swallow hard. “That’s not how it works.”
“It is with us.”
The same words I said to her back in the maze. I stare at Ariadne, and there’s a part of me that almost hopes she doesn’t remember. That might make this experience more bearable, this vulnerability less shocking. But no. The knowledge is there in her eyes. She knows exactly what she’s saying, exactly what that sentence means to me.
To us.
I clear my throat again. “Yeah.” The tightness in my chest gets stronger. Hotter. “Yeah, I guess that is how it is with us.”
She holds out her hand, and I move to her on pure instinct. Ariadne lifts my hand to her face and rubs her cheek on my knuckles. “If I read this in a book, I would throw it across the room in pure disbelief. But I think there’s a part of me that knew you, even then.”