Page 92 of Gilded Fake

They hold for a second, and then his hand clamps around the back of my neck. He yanks me forward, the cigarette tumbling from his lips a second before they crash into mine. His fingers tighten, pinning me to him, and his tongue sweeps over mine hungrily. A tremor goes through him, and then he growls into my mouth, his tongue thrusting harder, his fingers plunging into my hair and fisting at the nape of my neck. He tastes like whiskey and cigarettes and pure, raw masculinity.

I shove him back, hard, and wipe my mouth on my hand. “What the fuck, Duke?”

He looks down at his lap, where his donkey dick is straining against his jeans, and sweeps the lit cigarette off his thigh. Even in the dark, I can see the hole it burned in the denim and the dark of the burned skin beneath.

“Christ,” I say, scowling and turning to spit into the dirt on my other side. “How drunk are you?”

“I felt it,” he grumbles. “It just wasn’t worth stopping for.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Why?” he asks. “You can’t tell me you don’t feel it. We’re fucking dynamite together.”

“Exactly,” I say, picking up the pack and getting a new cigarette. “Explosive and destructive.”

“Maybe that’s because we’re fighting it.”

“What, you want to be my boyfriend?” I challenge. “Walk around holding hands with me? Buy me rainbow sherbert at Two Scoops of Love?”

Now it’s his turn to scowl. “No,” he grumbles. “But we’d be good together.”

I snort. “We are the worst parts of each other. We’d burn out and self-destruct like dynamite in a matter of days.”

“We could fuck whenever we wanted.”

“Whenever you wanted,” I clarify. “When no one’s around.”

“So?” he asks. “You’re not fucking anyone else.”

“I’m fucking Gloria.”

He takes his flask and swings his legs forward and back, like he’s just sitting on my tailgate and not on the edge of a deadly drop. My stomach bottoms out, but I give him his space. He takes a shot and hisses at the burn before speaking. “You love her?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I do.”

We sit listening to the insect chorus ebb and swell around us, watching the fireflies blink and the moon creep up big and yellow from behind the trees.

Finally, he breaks the silence. “You think, if you weren’t with Lo—”

“No.”

He reaches back and gets a cigarette for himself. “What if we’d never fucked with your sister?”

“No.”

“Why not?” he demands.

“Because I hate you.”

“But we fucked.”

“Because I wanted to hurt you,” I say. “And I wanted something that could hurt you again, so I’d have power over you, and you couldn’t put me back in the gutter if I disobeyed you.”

“Bullshit.”

“And you only did it because you wanted to be hurt,” I go on. “Because you think you can pay for what you did to Mabel with some fucked up form of self-flagellation. In your warped mind, you’ll be even when you’ve suffered as much as she has. But you can never atone for what you’ve done, Duke. Only god can forgive a sin like that.”

He visible shudders, then sucks hard on the cigarette before answering. “You don’t know that. Maybe she could forgive me.”

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