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“No.” My voice was tiny.

“No, you do hate me, and you’re having sex with me because of the scent match,” he said, chagrined. “This affects you—”

“You said you wanted time and space,” I said. “So, I guess you’re having sex with me because of the scent match.”

“Yeah, because I’m fucking grieving,” he said, heat in his tone.

“Tell me. Were you brutal with her? More brutal than you are with me?”

He touched my bite marks again. “She liked it less, I think. Maybe it was the same amount of brutality.” His voice was hard.

I was quiet.

His fingers strayed, crawling over my skin, up to trace the shell of my ear. He propped himself up to look at my skin. He was touching my opposite ear from where he’d been pillowing his head. His brow was furrowed. “You need to get away from me and stay away from me, I think, Leo. She probably did, too. Maybe this dark part of me, maybe it’s bigger than I want to acknowledge.”

“Except that’s what I’ve been doing,” I said. “And whatever it is with us, there’s a part of me that’s soothed by this, by you. I feel right on your knot.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It feels right to me, too.”

“You said you loved her?” It killed me to say this out loud. “Was it always brutal with her?”

He shook his head. “No. In fact, doing this with you again, it makes me realize, uh…”

My stomach turned over and something green and glowing spilled into me. I did not want to hear what he was going to say.

But then he lay his head back down on the pillow and shut his eyes. “Never mind.”

“No.” I struggled to prop myself up, on both of my elbows, and I glared down at him. “No, you don’t get to trail off like that.”

“I don’t know how to say it.” His eyes were still closed. He looked defeated. “She and I were together for fifteen years. We lived together. We slept in the same bed. I watched her nurse my babies. I loved her. This, with you, it feels…”

“What?”

“Obscene,” he finished in a low, regretful voice. “Wrong. I shouldn’t be doing this, not so soon. I have to hide it from everyone, and my son, it hurts him.”

That had not been what he was going to say before. “What’s different about being with me than being with her? Why did you want her more than me?”

His eyes opened. “Because of history, because of shared experience, because of how close she and I were.”

Was it only that?

And when had all this closeness happened between them, because when he ended things with me, he made it out that he didn’t have a choice, but that if he did, he would choose me. I was beginning to realize that I had to look at this man’s actions, not his words.

And in every way that mattered, he had always chosen Opal over me.

Right now, knotted into my body, he was talking about how much he loved her, how obscene it was to be with me?

“You want her more than me.”

“For fuck’s sake, Leona, she’s dead.” He was angry. “It doesn’t matter what I want. Hell, it has never mattered what I wanted.” He pushed up over me, glaring down at me.

“What you have never wanted is me,” I said.

“That’s bullshit. You know how much I want you.”

“I really don’t,” I snapped.

And then I felt that his knot was going down, maybe because he was pissed off or maybe because talking about his dead wife did not help maintain it or maybe it was just time, I did not know. But I pulled free. I scooted up, away from him, knees to my chest.