Page 24 of Karma

For the first time since I came to meet her in LA her eyes are soft.

I brush a strand of hair off her cheek. She hasn’t braided it and it’s hanging loose and soft down her back, framing her face like a golden mane. Or a wedding veil. “I didn’t either.”

“I know,” she says and looks down at the dusty sidewalk at her feet. “But things are different now.”

I was gonna ask her to come with me to a room—one with clean sheets that she likes so much—and let me show her just how much I still love every perfectly imperfect inch of her. But what she said took that wonderful idea out like a bullet to the brain.

“I don’t understand,” I say and it’s not even a lie. “It’s been a week. How different can things be?”

She smiles faintly, and I don’t think she’s even aware of it. I hate that smile so much. It’s the same one she and Scorpio have been sharing all afternoon, probably thinking I didn’t notice. I saw every twitch of their lips.

“I still want you the same as I ever did,” she says. “But I want him too.”

There she goes tossing another of her bombs. She’s a head shorter than me, and way slighter, but she’s always been able to hold me in the palms of her hands and shape me exactly like she wants me. She says jump, I ask how high? That kind of thing. Only I can’t tell what she’s asking me to do now. And I can already feel myself slipping from her palms. It’s so bad, I’d punch a wall if we were standing next to one.

“What do you want from me?”

She shrugs. “Make it work. Somehow.”

She’s not just being coy or cute on purpose. She’s not faking not knowing where we stand. She’s not just pretending… she really doesn’t have the answers.

“How?” I ask anyway.

She puts on her jacket and pulls her keys from one of the pockets. “I’m going to meet Isabella now and finally get those tattoos I’ve been dreaming about. I’ll deal with this afterwards.”

Then she stands on her toes, throws her arms around my neck and finally gives me that kiss I’ve been craving since she walked into that dive bar earlier. The one that stops the world from spinning so very fast and has the power to muffle any kind of whooshing in my ears. Even the kind caused by a tornado.

But even her calming energy and lasting sweetness is different now. There’s a new note to it. A distant hum of a new melody. One I don’t know. One I don’t know if I like.

“I’ll come to you later,” she whispers breathlessly once she breaks apart from me. “But I might be late.”

“And what am I supposed to do until then?” the hard-on she just gave me is growing painfully large against the zipper of my jeans, fed by all the anger of those bombs she flung at me before. The ones that didn’t touch her at all, just like I suspected they wouldn’t.

She brushes her long, skilled fingers over my cock, making everything worse. Then she kisses my neck. Dropping more bombs.

“He goes both ways, just in case that makes any difference,” she whispers in my ear before nuzzling on my earlobe. “I confirmed it.”

Then she steps away from me, deftly avoiding my hands as I try to grab her and make her stay.

“Don’t wait up for me, if you don’t want to,” she says as she smiles coyly over her shoulder.

Another bomb.

What does she expect me to do? Fuck him and then fall in love with him too like she seems to be doing.

Not gonna happen. Reaper was the only one for me. I knew that way back when we first met and I’m gonna need years—decades, probably—before I even start thinking about that changing.

And I’m certainly not gonna change that for Karma’s new toy. Especially since all I want to do to him is shake him by the throat while shouting that she’s mine.

But, nah. He’s not worth even getting upset over. She’s just infatuated with how shiny and new he is. And she’ll get over him just as fast as she fell for him. Probably even faster after I mess up his pretty face.

12

Scorpio

Karma thinks Grim will accept the two of us, but she either doesn’t know him as well as she thinks she does, or she’s letting wishful thinking get the better of her. The guy’s been staring at me with murder in his eyes ever since he joined us, not saying much. Karma tried to get the conversation going valiantly, but all I got was a very strong urge to be somewhere else.

As he walks back into the bar without her, I wish I’d removed myself from the table we were sharing. Because she’s not with him. She probably went to finally get those tattoos she’d come here to get. She wants us to get to know each other better—and by that she probably means have sex. She hasn’t said it straight out, but she’s been hinting at it more and more since we got to LA. But I’m sure he’d rather kill me than fuck me and I don’t want either of those things.

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