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Or maybe it’s because he was angry and irritated and feeling hunted by that phone call, and he was already trying to hide it from me, and I knew he’d keep trying to hide it until it ate him alive. I knew he’d tell me some younger-sister-appropriate nonsense about what the call was about, and I’m done.
His ring is on my finger. Maybe Apollo will decide to dump me in front of our entire family and take it back one day in some ridiculous attempt to free me from being engaged to him or whatever he thinks he’s doing, and when he does, then he can go back to protecting me.
Until then?—
Well. He’s definitely not going to protect me from this.
He pushes me hard against the tree and drags his mouth down the side of my neck, ending in a bite through the collar of my shirt that’s a hundred times hotter than the air around us. I make a sound that I’ve never made before, because it hurts, but I like this side of him and I want more of it. The side of him that’s not afraid that he’ll snap me in two if he pins me to a tree trunk and ravages me.
Not that he’s?—
Not that he’s ravaging me. Not that I didn’t want this. I do want this. I want the hint of pain that says I’m alive, that we’re both alive, and I am not, in fact, a delicate princess who can’t be touched and handled and taken without Apollo worrying he’s going to break me.
You can’t, I want to shout into his mouth. You have no idea what I’m capable of.
But that would only tear the curtain off what I’ve worked so hard to hide.
What I’ve worked so hard to keep to myself. Not hide. I’m not ashamed of how I am.
Or—
Maybe I am ashamed.
No, it’s not that.
Apollo finds his way back to my face, heat gusting through my shirt and then to my bare neck and finally to my mouth. He kisses me with a hard grip on my chin. He makes a sound that I don’t think he’s aware of when his muscles flex. It’s a sound that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the kiss. Or it’s part of the kiss, but it’s an involuntary reaction to a separate layer of the kiss, which is the cut I left on his biceps.
I would never have shot him anywhere that could really hurt him. Yes, I know, I know, cutting his hurting, but all I meant to do was?—
All I meant to do was prove?—
I don’t know what I meant to prove. Maybe I wasn’t proving anything. Maybe I just wanted this.
Oh, but I was. I was proving something, but I turned it inside out. I didn’t show him the bigger, darker want that pulses through my veins almost like it’s following the moon, waxing and waning but always, always coming back.
The thing about being shoved up against a tree trunk is that the shovee can use the tree trunk for leverage. I use it for all the leverage I need to throw myself back at Apollo like I threw the arrows at him a few minutes ago. In my quest for balance, one of my hands lands on his arm.
On blood.
The blood from the cut is as hot as the hiss that comes out of his mouth. His biceps tense under my touch, but Apollo doesn’t pull away. He leans harder into it. My heart is like thunder in my ears, my own blood racing toward his.
My own blood wanting his.
I’m not even into blood, as a general rule, and I have no explanation for the urge that comes over me to break the kiss, creating an inch of space between us, and lick the blood off my fingers. It tastes fine and fresh and metallic in a way that nothing else does.
Apollo watches like I’ve transformed into a supernatural being in front of him, his chest heaving and his eyes black in the moonlight. I pull them out of my mouth with a pop.
We’re both frozen for a long, crystalline instant.
“Holy fuck,” Apollo breathes.
“Did you think I was scared of blood?” I whisper, like I’m letting him in on a secret. “I’m not.”
“There’s something you’re scared of,” Apollo says, a strange note in his voice, as if—after having shot him with an arrow, after making him bleed—as if I might suddenly reveal a list of fears that I’ve never before mentioned in all the hours we’ve spent together. I don’t have a list. There is one small, knotted fear, deep down, that if he knew how little I minded—if he knew how unafraid I was—that he might not want me like this. That Apollo, with his near-miss of a childhood with its happy ending in my parents house, might only want what’s sunny-blonde and beautiful, and not the rest.
But that doesn’t count.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
