Page 62 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

We were almost exactly the same age. His birthday was two weeks before mine, and when we were little kids, his mother would make us cakes, one for him and one for me, and I would always ask for whatever kind of cake Corentin was having, because I kind of hero-worshiped him.

Corentin as a little boy was very tough and very cool. Once, I remember that we knocked over a vase and broke it. He got cut on accident when we were picking up the pieces. He just put his finger in his mouth and sucked on the wound, nonchalant, like it didn’t even really hurt, and when I asked if he wanted a bandage for it, he shrugged and said, “I mean, if it’s no trouble.”

No trouble? He was bleeding.

He had dark wavy hair, and when he was a kid, the waves were long enough to hang into his eyes, and he was always shoving them out of the way. When he did, this always made him look tough and cool, too.

Corentin could do all these things that I didn’t know how to do because he’d spent a bunch of time on his own, even though my parents didn’t think I was old enough to be left alone. Corentin knew how to cook macaroni and cheese from the box. On the stove and everything. I thought that was really impressive.

The other thing to know about Corentin was that he found me impressive, for no reason that really made any sense to me. He would always give me his entire attention, however, his dark, expressive eyes unblinking as I would tell him whatever it was I was thinking.

For other people, he didn’t have a lot of patience. This was part of what made him cool, how dismissive he was.

But he was never dismissive of me.

Even when I said stupid things, he was gentle as he corrected me. No, Aurelie, people who are poor can’t just get servants to do things for them. They don’t have money to pay them. They have to cook for themselves. But it’s cool. How would you know that? You’ve never seen anything different. Just don’t say something like that in front of someone who’s not me, okay? They might be a jerk about it.

When we got to be teenagers, he started doing all kinds of things to make money, like working for the local pool store to go out and clean people’s pools. He also ended up selling drugs. (“Nothing hard, don’t worry, Aurelie,” he would say. “Just mushrooms, weed, and maybe a little coke. Nothing scary. Nothing people get shot over.”) This made him seem even tougher and even cooler.

He cut his wavy dark hair real short, so that it lay against his head, and he was lean and muscular and sharp in this way. When I looked at him, I would get this jolt at how he seemed sort of dangerous, and this made me even more attracted to him.

When we were sixteen, he showed up with this tattoo, of a serpent, peering out from the collar of his t-shirt. The serpent crawled up over his neck and was sticking out a forked tongue just under his ear. Sometimes, when he was cleaning the pool, he would strip off his shirt and I would see how the serpent was coiled all the way down over his pecks and his rib cage and ultimately disappeared into his pants.

I didn’t see the bottom of that snake until I went into heat, didn’t see that it curled around his thigh. It was a long tattoo.

Right before the incident when I went into heat, we kissed for the first time. It happened because I went out to this abandoned house where people hung out sometimes. Not people that I knew, not people whose parents had titles and property and money, not people like that. Other people.

Kids partied there. There was graffiti on all the walls, most of it containing swear words, and there were ratty mattresses covered in ratty blankets and there were piles of beer bottles and cigarette butts and bottles that had been broken and littered all over the floors of the place.

I went with Gina. We thought of it as if it were some big adventure, something akin to crossing the ocean to a completely different country where people spoke a different language.

The guys there smirked at us. They gave us beer and offered us cigarettes. They were coarse but they weren’t rude. We intrigued them.

Corentin stalked in and saw me, sitting there, coughing my way through some other guy’s cigarette, and he gave me this look, like I was insane. He beckoned me, with two fingers, two dirty fingers, his fingernails stained like he’d been doing some filthy kind of manual labor, and maybe he’d been fixing cars on the side for extra cash, because he did that sometimes, too.

I remember how it felt for him to motion me like that with his two fingers, how I felt like I was somehow utterly connected to him, like I would do anything for him.

We went outside. He folded his arms over his chest. He looked dangerous and sleek and beautiful. “We can’t do this, and we both know it.”

“I’m not doing anything, just hanging out,” I said.

“This doesn’t work, Aurelie.” His voice was caustic. “Doesn’t matter how we feel. Doesn’t matter what we want.”

What we wanted? He felt it, too? I hadn’t been sure of that, sure of him.

That was when he kissed me. He snatched my chin between his forefinger and thumb of his dirty fingers and held me in place and kissed me hard, his tongue in my mouth like electric sparks.

Then I went into heat, but I didn’t know it was heat. I thought it was just being “ready.” On all the TV shows, they talked about this idea of readiness for sexual activity as if it was an actual thing, as if you’d—at some point—get some feeling of certainty that you were definitely ready to have sex and this would be identifiable and real.

I went into heat, and I thought, Oh, this is being ready.

I went to him.

To his house where he lived with his mother, but he said we couldn’t stay there. I was in heat and getting worse and worse off. I was peeling off my clothes at this point.

He made us get in his car, and he drove us off somewhere private.

I had my top off. I was wriggling out of my bra. I was straddling him.

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