Page 7 of Edged
“Archie, fuck.”
Owen’s entire body seized violently, hot spurts of cum splattering against my stomach as he spilled all over his hand. He let out a sob, which he silenced by sinking his teeth into the meat of my shoulder.
I gritted my teeth, bucking up and, with one last snap of my hips, shooting my load right into him. I wrapped my arms around Owen, and he held onto me with the same sort of clinging desperation that had never been ours until then. With his teeth still lodged in my shoulder, I smoothed my hands down his spine until the tremors of his orgasm, and his crying, had stilled.
Still inside of him, my cock pulsed, the beat of my heart battering out against the inside of Owen’s body, and what a wild concept. What a sensation. What a…
What had we done?
“Shit.” Owen was the first to feel the gravity tear us back down to earth, but I kept my arms around him, wanting to stay half-drunk on whatever had happened between us for as long as I could. I knew once I was out of his body and he wasn’t on my lap, we’d have to turn the lights on, we’d have to face what we’d done, but worse than that, I’d have to face his sister.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Sorry to him and to her and to me.
To us.
To everyone.
“You have to go,” he said, fighting out of my arms, but that time I didn’t stop him.
Owen climbed off my lap and got dressed without looking at me, then threw my clothes onto my lap. My cock was still stained with my own cum and his spit, and it had all been a mistake.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
But he was dressed and halfway up the stairs by the time I got turned around on the couch. He stopped, hand on the rail, and I wanted him to turn around and look at me, I wanted him to see how much Imeantwhat had just happened between us, but he didn’t. I could see the guilt as a tangible thing around us, wrapped around his shoulders and curled tight around my heart.
He didn’t turn back, though, because the confession in his letter had said everything there was left to share between us. Or so I’d thought, because the last words Owen said to me that night were new ones, but I believed them as much as I knew the sky to be blue and my heart to be broken on the floor between us.
“I hate you, Archer.”
And he left me alone in the basement, no doubt to fix the mess I’d found us in.
But I was twenty and I was stupid. I was still a child then, so I got dressed, walked out their front door and never, ever looked back.
CHAPTER1
ARCHIE
My bedroomat home was dark, pitch black until I wanted the sun to break through the blackout curtains, until I was ready to face the day.
I’d never been a morning person, something my parents hoped I would someday grow out of, but as I careened toward the start of my thirties, there was no change in sight. It wasn’t their problem anymore, as they’d both passed away while I was across the country in grad school, but wholly mine.
Rather, my actual, current problem was that I wasn’t inmybedroom. It was Sunday morning, it was early, and I was in a guest room in the house of one of my closest friends. Rob and I were thick as thieves, but he had horrible taste in architecture. His home was a modern monstrosity made almost entirely out of willpower and plate glass.
“What kind of prick puts his guest room on an east-facing wall?” My very good friend, and current bedmate, Flynn, groaned, rolling away from me and tugging the blankets so hard he left half of my body uncovered.
We’d gone out the night before and followed Rob home like puppies because, at the time, it had felt like a better option than watching our other friends Dalton and Barclay take turns trying their fuck friend, Val, on like a glove.
“Robert McAvoy, that’s who,” I answered, scrubbing a hand down my face. “The kind of prick who lets people stay the night even though he doesn’t really want them to.”
“He wanted us to.”
“To fuck that submissive little dominant of his into the floor is what he wanted,” I said, thinking briefly of Rob’s new boyfriend, Grayson. A man closer to my age whom I imagined myself becoming friends with, if the circumstances allowed. Grayson was quick-witted and smart, rich enough in his own right, though nowhere near my own net worth. Or Rob’s, for that matter. And he made Rob work hard for it, which I appreciated.
“I don’t blame him.” Flynn rolled onto his back, dark eyes blinking open. “Grayson is a good looking kid.”
“He’s not a kid. He’s my age.”
