Chapter 241 241

Chapter 241 241
Kevin's POV:

He was better at this than I was, because he was present for it in a way I had never once managed. He walked me backward through his own living room without breaking anything, with one hand on my hip and one under my jaw, and by the time the back of my legs found the arm of the couch his glasses were on the floor and his hand was flat on my stomach under the shirt and going up.

And it was working. That mattered, because of what came after.

I had both hands in his hair and the arm of the couch was under my left shoulder blade in the exact wrong place and I let it be there. His mouth came off mine and went along my jaw and down under it, and stopped.

I knew what he was doing about a second in. There is a particular pressure to it and anybody who has ever been eighteen knows what it is. He had a fist in my shirt and his mouth working under my jaw on the left side and he was taking his time about it, and I could have put a hand on his head and moved him three inches and he would have gone.

I did not move him. I lay there and let a man put a mark on my neck in a building whose address I had never given to another living person. I knew exactly what it was going to look like in the morning, and I did it anyway.

Then my brain did the thing my brain did, which was close my eyes.

That was the mechanism, and it took me until that couch to put it in a full sentence. With my eyes closed the specifics went and what was left was warm and anonymous and did the job. I had been careful for four years never to put a face in that dark on purpose. Putting a face there on purpose would have been a decision and I did not make those.

I did not put anything there, but it filled itself in without asking me.

And it was not the face. That was the thing I could not get around. If it had been the face I could have opened my eyes and been fine, I had opened my eyes before. It was that in the dark behind my eyes he was TALKING. He was narrating. He was telling me the one about the duck with his hands going and the volume all the way up. My chest turned over on itself and there was nothing I could do about it from where I was lying.

I put my hand on Owen's wrist and said, "I need to stop."

He stopped. He did not ask one question and he did not make a face, and I owed him for that.

He sat back on his heels and found his glasses and put them on. He did not ask whether he had done something, which most people do and which would have taken me ten minutes to dismantle.

Then he got a glass of water and handed it to me and sat down on the other end of the couch with his feet under him. Pilot came over and put his chin on my knee. I had my shirt half up and my belt undone and a dog looking at me with enormous concern.

I drank the water.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You're allowed to stop."

"That's not the part I'm apologizing for."

Owen looked at me over the top of the glasses, and then he took the glass out of my hand and drank some of it, because the glass was his.

"I know it's somebody," he said. "I've known since about September."

"How?"

"You go quiet in a different way when your phone goes off."

That was a true sentence and I had no answer to it, so I sat there with my belt open and Pilot breathing on my leg and let it stand.

He got up and started collecting things off the floor, a dog ball, a sock, and he said the rest with his back to me, which I appreciated.

"This isn't going to work."

"What isn't?"

"What you're using me for." He straightened up with the sock in his hand. "It's not going to work. That's all. I'm not being deep about it."

"Okay."

"Don't come back, Kevin." He said it the way he said everything, pretty flat. "I'm not upset and this isn't a speech. It's just never going to start working, and you're old enough to have noticed."

I did up my belt and said thank you and meant it. He said take care of yourself, and I went down two flights of stairs and got into the Xterra.

The seatbelt catch was not where my hand went, because it was never going to be. I put the light on to find it and caught the mirror on the way past.

It was under the jaw on the left, small, already going the color those go. I had felt him make it. I had lain there and felt every second of it and had not moved his head three inches, and here it was on the outside of me, where anybody in a room could get at it.

And that was the joke.

My body had never once given me away. No scent to shift, nothing in the air for anybody to read, an entire organism engineered to keep a secret, and it had kept it perfectly. An alpha would have walked into that apartment carrying somebody else on him and it would have been over inside a week. Not me. I could have come home from anywhere, and that night I drove his car to another man's apartment and back and brought nothing home but his keys.

The only evidence a body like mine could produce was the kind somebody else had to leave with his mouth.

I looked at it for about two seconds. Then I turned the light off and pulled out onto Fourth, because there was nothing to be done about it.

It was going to be there in the morning either way, and in four years Alejandro Martinez had never once looked at my neck in a way that would have found it.