AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Because I wanted to kiss you!” she shouts, her voice echoing off the walls. “I’ve pretty much always wanted to kiss you. For so long! I’ve wanted to kiss you since I knew what kissing was. And then it was some big, terrible mistake that you wanted to forget.”
“No, I didn’t. No. I couldn’t—you have to understand, Artemis, it’s not?—”
She rolls her honey-gold eyes, her hands tightening on my neck. “It’s not right? Because I’m too young and unserious for you? Because you have to protect me from the dastardly deeds of a hot think tank owner? Because you’re not into me?”
“Because I can’t have you,” I shout back. Half of what we do is bicker. When you’re with someone day in and day out, close to them because you have to be, almost everything is on the table. Teasing. Arguing. Killing time. “I can’t take you from?—”
“Who?” she taunts. “The Senator? You want me to be First Lady?”
“No. You can be that prick’s First Lady over my dead body.”
Artemis is an inch from my face. Maybe less. “So your grand plan was to announce a secret engagement? You told everyone that I’m your fiancée! This is a whole thing now, Apollo!”
“We can tell them it wasn’t real. That it was because I had to protect you.”
“You listen to me,” Artemis hisses. “You can dump me in front of our entire family, if that’s what you want. We can stage a massive, dramatic breakup. But you are not going to tell them that you faked an engagement because you think I’m too much of a child to protect myself.”
“I do not think you’re a child.”
“Don’t you?”
“No,” I get out, and then it’s like the day Daisy and Hercules got engaged. The two of us collide. Artemis claws her way up my torso and hooks her legs around my hips, her moonlight gown hitched up, and the hold I’ve had on my self-control all day sinks like a damaged ship.
I kiss Artemis with teeth. She holds onto me with her nails. The wall only exists to push her up against and lean my entire body against as much of hers as I can. She’s soft, under her dress, her body giving under mine even as she tenses and rolls her hips, letting me feel the bone and muscle and life of her, pressed to the hard parts of me. One of her sharp heels digs into the muscle of my ass with a spark of pain that sends my head spiraling into outer space and back down into her mouth. Artemis angles her foot again. She’s hooked herself onto me with fierce strength, and it feels impossible that someone with such a delicate bone structure should be able to pull at me as hard as I’m pulling at her. We shouldn’t be so evenly matched, but we are.
“What were you thinking?” she gasps, digging her fingers under my collar and scratching. I like the glancing pain, God fucking help me. I like that she’s not afraid to tear into me. Why would she be? I’ve stood up to everything that happened to me before. I buried it, and now the skin on the surface is sensitive as all hell. I want her to scratch it until I can’t feel it anymore. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I just needed you,” I say into her mouth, half-delirious, feverish with relief and guilt, my heart tick tock tick tock tick tocking down to its last beat. She tastes fresh, like a spring breeze and sweet champagne and something faintly salty. “I needed.”
I don’t know what she says after that. The sound of her mouth under mine is louder than my pulse in my ears. It’s louder than the music above us. I get one hand on her thigh and push it up under the bunched hem of her wedding-white dress.
There’s a click from somewhere behind us, and the light in the hall changes color. It seeps into Artemis’s white dress, staining it.
Blood moon, I think.
And then there’s a louder thud and heavy footsteps heading in the opposite direction.
Artemis lets me put her on her feet. I rearrange her dress while she straightens my jacket.
And then I put my hand on the small of her back and bring her out of the alcove with me.
The empty hallway seems to stretch out endlessly. I don’t know where that person and their footsteps went. I don’t care to go searching.
Artemis looks up at me, one hand at her hair, patting it back into place. “Did something happen at the meeting? Was it something he said?”
“He said he wants a favor.” I push back a tendril she missed. Lifting my arm hurts a little less than it did earlier. “But he said it in the tone people use when they’re doing you a favor.”
“Oh, no,” says Artemis. “He did condescension. That monster.”
It doesn’t sound very ominous to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t see what I saw. But if I tell her that, I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t have me committed. The episodes have never come with hallucinations before—even if that shadow did seem as real as me.
“Anyone who looks that aggressively bland has to be hiding something. And I’ll have a better chance of figuring out what it is if he isn’t using you as some kind of pawn. Or prize. He’s also doing patriarchy, Artemis. It’s very…” I try to think of a stronger word than bad. “Very bad.”
“Well.” Artemis pats my side. “If it’s that bad, we can just get married.”
“Right,” I agree. “Easy.”
7
