Foster stiffened.
“It’s not only on TV over there,” I whispered.
“Did they ever...?”
I knew what question he wanted to ask. I refused to answer. A lot happened over there. They morphed my values, made them less than they really were.
“Touch,” I whispered.
“Touch?”
“I miss that too.” I squeezed him to prove my point. “I miss human contact. The warmth of it, the way a person’s scent seeps into my senses. The softness behind it. It’s been a hundred years of cold, hard touches.”
“Josie...” His voice cracked.
I sniffled, trying to fight against the tears. “The first twenty or so years, I was human. Humans are a commodity, a rarity, and they treated me as such. Faerie saw something in me. I don’t know what, but one day, she finally stepped in too. She changed me. Claimed me. It kept the fae away in that regard. But then their interests in me changed. I was something more to them and they wanted a piece of me if only to get closer to Faerie. I had her favor and they wanted it too.”
I looked up at Foster and wanted to growl. I pinched his side until he grimaced.
“Don’t look at me like that, Foster. It is what it is, and it’s been a long time for me.”
“I can’t begin to understand what you have been through. I hate that you flat out refuse to say what happened out loud. I know you’re trying to sugarcoat things. I don’t want that. I want the truth, only the truth, from you.”
I pulled away and turned so I was on my knees, sitting above him. “The truth”—I reached out and cupped his cheek, enjoying the way his silky soft skin felt against my palms—“is that I have been without human touch for a hundred years. Every time you touch me, I quiver. My soul begs for more, for a taste of something I had been without for too long. I want to steal it from you. I want to take what I believe to be rightfully mine as a fae.” My sad smile turned bitter. “We fae are greedy. We only want to take and take, and if we never have to give in return, then it’s a win. I want to take everything from you. Until there’s nothing left of who you used to be, until your soul is mine.”
Foster’s hand covered mine. He curled his fingers and squeezed my hand, but he didn’t force me to pull away. His eyes were so impossibly dark that for a moment I thought maybe he could be fae too. His expression was twisted into one of a man begging for more. I knew that look. I saw it over and over again in Faerie. He was willing to give it to me. It was easy to read it in his expression, to hear it in the way his heart beat.
“Take it,” he said. “Take whatever you want from me, Josie. These last ten years have been a hell I don’t want to live again. If I could rip my soul out and give it to you, then I’d do it. It’d mean that I’d never be apart from you again.”
My heart twisted from his blatant misery. One that I caused. “Foster...” I blinked past the tears.
“Take what you want,” he repeated.
I shook my head.
“I know you want to.”
“But I don’t know if I can stop. I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t deserve it.”
“The pain I feel isn’t because of who you are or what you could potentially do to me in the future. The pain I feel is because I’ve been powerless. I pushed myself for years to find you. I fought and killed for you. I tore this world apart, searching for you. If I’d known you had been in Faerie this entire time, then I would have found my way there and torn it apart to find you. I never in a million years thought that I never found you because you weren’t here to be found. This pain is because I’ve failed you and I feel like I’ll fail you again. I can’t do that.”
“Foster.”
He leaned impossibly close, his breath warm against my lips. “Take what you want. Take everything. I don’t care.”
I didn’t care either. It was greedy of me, I knew it, but I needed him. I needed to feel him. So I leaned forward, sealing his gift with a kiss. My magic skittered out of me and through him. He shuddered against the contact of our lips.
His lips were supple, giving me exactly what I needed. The heat between us intensified as his hands skimmed down my sides along my ribs. I pushed into him, needing more, wanting more. He gave me exactly what I wanted, unbidden. A gift to a fae.
Dangerous.
Perfect.
The fae in me screamed to take it all. And so I did.
The magic around us danced, intensifying. His skin heated the longer we touched. His shirt was off with only a thought, baring an expansive chest, muscles flexing under my touch. Scars lined against his body. If I had been born a fae, my magic would have smoothed them out in need of perfection, but the human I used to be existed deep within me, and she wanted them to stay. It made him into a warrior. A warrior fit to be ours.
Foster opened his mouth, and I deepened our kiss, tasting him. He tasted of the buttery popcorn, and underneath that, him. The fiery man I knew him to be. It was potent and addicting, begging for more from me.
I moved so I was in his lap, feeling the hard bulge of his length as he pressed it into me. I groaned as I explored his chest, feeling out the scars, the outline of his muscles. The way his body was hard. Strength. Foster represented strength. Something I always had to fight to exude, and yet it was something he did naturally by merely existing.
If he chose to, he could easily take over the situation, take whatever he wanted from me at that moment. I would have let him too. But he didn’t. He kept himself contained, letting me take lead as I explored him.
That was everything to me. So many of my choices had been taken, and in a way, he was giving it back to me. I loved him all the more for it.
I pulled my shirt off and unclasped my bra. Foster knew exactly what I wanted and didn’t hesitate as he cupped my breasts, his thumbs grazing my nipples until they hardened under his care. I moaned, tingles filling me as my awareness changed, the mood shifted, intensifying, becoming more.
I rolled my hips, smiling.
He grunted, his fingers flexing around my breasts. “Vixen.”
I reached up and gripped his dark hair hard. There wasn’t much to grab, but I was able to get a hold. He grimaced but didn’t say anything. “A hundred years, Foster. Without human contact for a hundred years. If that makes me a vixen, then I am okay with that.”
His expression softened into something that stole my breath. “I’m not kidding, Josie.” He ran the back of his fingers down the side of my face, his touch so gentle it was a whisper against my skin. “Take what you want from me. If it’s everything, then I’m willing to give it to you.”
Unable to look at him, I looked down at his hard chest. I had felt the scars and now I got to see what I had thoroughly explored with my fingers. There were two puckered spots on the left side of his shoulder, and a slash that went from his side and down to his belly button. He remained silent as I traced them once again, wondering what kind of life he held. What kind of life was a soldier’s life? What did he sign up to do?
“You don’t understand what you’re saying, especially to me.”
Foster cupped my chin and lifted my face. He gave me a chaste kiss, so different from the fierceness we had just shared. “It’s because it is you that I’m saying it. I’m serious. For the first time, I feel whole again and that’s because you’re here.”
“Foster.” Closing my eyes, I rested my forehead against his. It was so hard to pull away and climb off his lap. His disappointment was as clear and heavy as my own. I did want more, I wanted to claim him as mine, but I couldn’t do to him what had happened to me. I wouldn’t rip him away from his life. It wasn’t fair to anyone.
My smile wavered as I said, “For now, let’s watch that movie you promised me.”
We dressed, fixing our clothes. My body ached for his, and it took all of my willpower to keep myself in check. Neither of us could afford giving in to our urges.
Foster forced his frown away as we got back into getting ready for a movie night. He tried to joke
, but his response didn’t have the energy behind it. “You’ve missed out on movie perfection these last couple of years.”
Not ready to have space between us, I curled into his side. That seemed to relax him as he got the movie going. The popcorn sat in his lap, and he didn’t touch any of it, letting me devour every last delicious morsel.
It was all perfect, everything I had wanted for so long. I wasn’t sure where this was going or what was going to happen, or if anything could even happen at all, but for the moment, I was completely content.
Chapter Eleven
~Waylon’s POV~
I glared at the counter, my emotions ranging from pure excitement to downright bitterness. Josie was back. She was healthy, all things considered. She wasn’t suffering in some prison cell, she wasn’t starving on the streets, or wasting away in a hospital bed as a Jane Doe. She wasn’t in a coma or decomposing in an unmarked grave.
She was alive, she was healthy, she was safe.
She was here.
The fact that she wasn’t Josie anymore didn’t settle well with me. The information sat heavily in my stomach, clawing at my insides, taunting me with the fact that she was right there, but she wasn’t at the same time. I couldn’t even process the fact that these things—these fae—existed in the first place. It all sounded too fantastical.
The elderly man behind the counter at the restaurant cleared his throat, grabbing my attention. He eyed me with caution. I sighed and sat in one of the chairs lined against the glass window, doing my best to steady my leg so as to not show the anxiety I felt.
I had to stay stoic. I needed to remain clear-headed.
And I needed to get back as soon as possible. Foster normally kept himself restrained, going at things with an analytical mind—except when it came to Josie. There was no telling what he was doing without anyone there to chaperone him. He finally had her, and I worried what kind of promises he’d make, what he’d be willing to do to make sure he didn’t lose her again.
My phone buzzed, and I answered without looking.
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going?” Jason asked.
“You’d know if you didn’t throw a tantrum and run away like that.”
He was silent for a moment. “I know.”
“Do you? Because we discussed this. You needed to remain coolheaded.”
“She dumped us. She up and left us for ten years to go to some fucking place that shouldn’t exist. And then she waltzes back into our lives like this, disrupting everything. Fuck no. Just no.”
I thought over my words carefully, trying to find an explanation that made sense. It was hard. I didn’t have all the facts, and I hated going into things as blindly as this. “I think,” I said carefully, “we don’t have all our facts. We’re led to believe one thing, but I think there is so much more information that we are missing. There’s something we’re missing.”
“You heard her. She’s been living it up in Faerie. She didn’t even plan to reach out to us when she came.”
“I also saw her and how broken she is. I agree, Josie’s presence is not ideal. It’s been a long time. We’re finally getting to a point of normalcy, of living without her. Her being back, it’s...”
I didn’t know what it was exactly, but my stomach clenched at the idea of her being around, both in nerves and in fear.
“Her presence easily toppled anything we’d been able to do to get past her,” Jason said.
“We need to talk to her sister.”
Jason snorted. “Madeline hasn’t talked to any of us in nine years. Her parents were very clear that we needed to stay far away from her. That she can’t and won’t help us.”
“She knows what happened. I don’t think Josie will tell us, but I think we can get through to Madeline. We can promise to bring her to Josie. Maybe that will work.”
“You saw Madeline that night,” Jason said. “You saw how destroyed she was when she was found.”
I closed my eyes, remembering Madeline in the hospital. They’d had to restrain her. Her eyes were glassy, she kept screaming for her sister, apologizing, begging to go with her. Whatever happened had ultimately destroyed her. “And that’s exactly why I think we need to talk to her, why we can’t assume that Josie has been living it up in Faerie like she’d like us to think.”
Jason’s silence was all the agreement I was going to get from him.
“Something bad happened to Madeline and to Josie. I want to know what it was. I want all the facts. With Josie around, I think we can finally get them.”
“She’s not going to stay. You heard her. She can’t.”
Bile rose in my throat. “I know.”
“And from the sound of it, it’s impossible for humans to go to her. It sounds like it isn’t a simple doorway to walk through to see her. A hundred years. Our ten to her hundred. If we even try to go see her, and if we can even make it back, how long would have passed?”
“I get it.”
“Do you?” Jason asked. “You have Sofia.”
I blinked as realization dawned on me. Sofia. My very serious girlfriend. “Fuck.”
“Yes, fuck. Did Josie’s presence already make you forget about the woman you’re planning to ask to marry you? You’re building a life, more so than any of us. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t give it up. Because at the end of the day, Josie will solve whatever she’s here for, and then she’s gone. We’re left behind to pick up the pieces that she easily shattered. Foster is already going to be a fucking mess, I know it. You know it. We need to keep our minds clear about this. We need to stick in reality.”
“It’s Josie.”
“And our future.”
Fuck. He was right. I rubbed at my face, trying to figure out how we got to this clusterfuck.
“Your order is ready,” the old man said, grabbing my attention. He frowned at me, a huge bag sitting in front of him.
“I have to go, man. I’m getting them dinner.”
Jason grunted and then hung up, not bothering to say anything else. There wasn’t much else to say. I stared at the home screen of my phone. It was a picture of Sofia and me. It was of our first vacation together last year. We had our arms wrapped around each other. I was looking at the camera, smiling, while she looked at me with more adoration than I knew what to do with. Guilt gnawed at me because since seeing Josie, I hadn’t given Sofia a second thought.
What kind of fucking boyfriend did that make me?
I zoomed in on her features and reality slammed into me hard enough to clench my lungs and freeze my heart. What had I done? How had I not realized it?
Sofia was practically an exact replica of Josie. Long black hair tumbling around her shoulders, deep brown eyes that could look into my soul. Shit. Even her personality. Her stubbornness, her softness. The way she could grasp a situation.
I was dating a replica of Josie. And the bitterness came when I realized she still didn’t compare to the real deal at all.
I was a true bastard, someone I fought to not be my entire life.
As if life wanted to mock me, my phone buzzed as Sofia’s name popped up on the screen. My finger moved before I knew what I was doing, sending her to voicemail. She’d assume I was busy at work, probably in a meeting. No guilt at letting her think that grew in me. I’d let her if it meant she didn’t know what I was doing.
Getting up, scowling hard, I grabbed the plastic bag. The old man paled and stepped back. That pissed me off more. I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. I’d never physically hurt a person.
Apparently, that didn’t stand when it came to a person’s emotions though.
What was I going to do? Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t know how to proceed, not with Sofia, and not with Josie.
What did I want to happen?
Chapter Twelve
The ceiling was boring to stare at. It was white, plain, and offered nothing in terms of entertainment. That meant my thoughts were left to haunt me. The penthouse was quiet enough to hear Berry snorin
g, his massive body pressed against my side. His heat was full blast, so I was too hot, sweating even with the blankets kicked off. Leave it to him to make a fae sweat.
I curled around the pillow I was hugging, trying to dispel my thoughts. It was still a dream, thinking about Foster and Waylon with me. They never left. At least, not to go home and sleep. Foster had to do something work-related, but he planned to be back before morning. Waylon had claimed the couch and was stretched out on it. The only person missing from this picture was Jason.
Knowing I wasn’t going to fall asleep anytime soon, I crept out of bed and went down the winding stairs to see Waylon in the darkness. One arm was tucked behind his head, the other resting on his chest over a thin t-shirt. The markings of his tattoo peeked out, teasing me. I still didn’t know what it was. Waylon had never had a tattoo when I knew him. All I could see was lines that started at the bottom of his neck. The blanket he had been using was pooled around his waist, his feet sticking out the other end. I smiled at the view.
This was the first time seeing Waylon so relaxed. The judgmental look I was becoming familiar with wasn’t there, and I got to see the man I remembered. I crouched by him, taking in his features, and overlapping them with the man I remembered him to be. He had always been quiet and stoic, never broadcasting his thoughts. Ten years later, he was a vault to me. I used to understand by a glance what his real feelings were, but not anymore.
A particular memory came to mind, and I had to bite back a sob.
We were having poker night, just the guys and me. It was before we admitted our feelings for each other. There had been a lot of dancing around the topic and tension between the guys. I tried to pretend I was oblivious to it all.
Jason and Foster were in the kitchen, getting drinks and food. Waylon shuffled the cards, his long fingers expertly moving them.
“What are you thinking about?” I had asked him.
His dark eyes met mine before flickering down at the cards.
Faerie Kissed Page 8
