Page 134 of Mud

Fuck if that didn’t sound like a damn fantasy, unfortunately for me.

“Please, just dry them,” I whispered, defeated, wrapping my arms around my torso, regretting having washed my clothes. I should have just left them like that—so what that they were dirty? I was in the Iris Roe!

“I will. But you have to put them on in front of me.” He took a step closer and reached for my wet hair, pushing it back behind my shoulder. Then he reached his other hand for my face, too, and I made to move away and say,don’t touch meor something like that, but he didn’t let me. “Stay,”he ordered in that husky voice. “Don’t move.” And I didn’t.

Because I was a damn fool, standing in front of thesame guy who’d watched his brothers torturing me just three or four days ago. Or was it five?

Regardless. It was that same guy.

Yet I stood still because I was never good at disobeying his orders, and he ran his hands through my hair, came even closer until he was deep into my personal space. I closed my eyes, unable to stand myself or him, and then he whispered those words again, and I felt the magic, felt the heat that came alive in his hands, and felt my hair drying quickly.

The scent of him filled my nostrils—his chest was almost pressed to the tip of my nose.

“See how easy that was?”

His voice was a whisper, more than a caress now. It was a need all on its own.

I stopped myself from letting out a very embarrassing whimper, and I couldn’t believe I was wet. Not from the bath, no, but between my legs.

Weak, Rora. So fucking weak…

“I’ll be on the other side of the bed. C’mon, you can do it, sweetness. You can do anything,” he said—exactly what he used to say to me back then. When the new school got overwhelming. When I was suffering and in pain, and I hid it from the world, but he always saw right through my facade even if I never told himwhy.

He always said I could beat it, whatever it was—and I did beat it.

It just…broke me.

And him as well.

“Why?” I whispered, forcing myself to open my eyes. “Why are you doing this now? Why?” He said it himself. He’d seen me naked before, plenty of times.

“Because I need to,” he said, touching the tip of my nosejust slightly as he continued to smooth my now dry hair behind my head with his other hand. “Just to see if you were real.”

The words slipped from him—he didn’t mean to say them. I saw the heartbreak in his darkening eyes for a moment there, the sparks gone.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I did the best I could do, I’m sorry,I wanted to say, yearned to say, but stopped myself because why bother?

Not only was he not going to believe me—why would he?—but he was not the same Taland I once knew no matter that traces of the pain were still on him. No matter that he slipped sometimes, this was still the same man who watched his brothers torture me.

And I really was as tired physically as I was mentally. Emotionally.

So, in the end, I caved.

“Go on, then. Go to the other side.”

Taland was surprised.

But I wasn’t going to call Vuvu on him, and I wasn’t going to try to force him out there where he could die. I’d sleep on the floor if I had to—it was okay. But I needed my clothes and my weapons on me first, and if this is what it took, I’d rather get it over with it quicker.

“Good girl,” Taland whispered, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. But he let go of me and slowly walked backward to the window, rested his elbows on the windowsill, and whispered his spell.

Blackfire magic slipped from his outstretched fingers and toward the bed, my clothes bundled up at the corner. The heat of it reached me, bringing my blood near a boiling point.

The next second, I pulled the towel off my body and let it fall to the floor.

I did it fast—he said to put my clothes on slowly, not to slowly take off the towel. And I needed it off me all at once, hoping it would hurt less. Hoping I’d be less ashamed, less embarrassed.

I wasn’t.

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