Page 23 of After Dark
Josette could only incline her head, giving him her thanks, and found she was unduly relieved. She felt completely wrung out, but if he’d insisted, she knew she would have found a way back into that space. It was a relief that he’d let it go.
She wanted to think that was Arlo’s doing, but somehow,she had the strangest notion that it had to do with the girl at his feet. No one would believe it, but she had the distinct impression that he wanted to tend to Iris’s aftercare more than he wanted to mete out any punishment to Josette.
If she was a little more in her right mind, she might have been foolish enough to say something.
But then she was glad she didn’t, because Frederick wasn’t done.
“He wants to trust you,” he said softly. Not quite with menace, more with a kind of steel-tipped disapproval. “I never will. Just so we’re clear, you and me.”
Josette swallowed, and felt her throat protest. Still, she held his gaze.
“Crystal,” she replied, though it was little more than a croak.
Then she pulled her knees up even closer so she was sitting in something of a fetal position, and she didn’t look at him again.
And when Arlo came back and gave her an electrolyte drink, she drank it all down. Then he settled her on his lap again and she closed her eyes, leaned into his heat, and told herself it was all going to be okay.
She was home again, and this time, she meant to stay.
No matter what Frederick thought of her.
Chapter Six
Almost ten days later, Josette hardly recognized her life.
Or maybe what she meant was that she’d slipped back into the life she’d left, so seamlessly it was as if she’d never taken a break from it at all.
Some days, she found that an exercise of pure joy. As if the universe was conspiring to say, look. You did it. You made a mistake and you fixed it, which is more than most of your extended family can say, and that’s what matters.
Other days, she wasn’t so sure.
Nothing could be this easy, right? She knew that better than most. She’d grown up poor in a resort town, so she’d known her whole life that there was a big difference between the way things appeared and the way things really were.
The difference this time was that she was deeply invested in the appearance and wanted it to be real. She wanted this to be as easy as it seemed—though if she thought about it, Arlo was the only part of her life that she would ever considereasy.And by that she meant meetinghim and understanding that he was the one for her.That parthad been simple.
Everything else, not so much.
The truth was, she had loved this place. She had loved this life. She’d thought that what they had was perfect, or ought to have been – and when she hadn’t been able to live up to that, it had broken something inside of her.
Or maybe she’d always been broken, hard to say. That had certainly been the conventional wisdom back in her hometown, wherebrokenwas one of the kinder things they called her.
But something about the way Arlo let her back into his life so easily made her feel broken all over again.
She couldn’t get Frederick’s words out of her head. Despite her complicated feelings for a man so cold and inaccessible, who always managed to cause her a crisis or two while he was making her scenes with him spectacularly hot, she couldn’t blame him. She didn’t trust herself either. The only person who trusted her — or pretended to trust her, because she didn’t believe he really did — was Arlo.
Or maybe it wasn’t trust, she thought on another beautiful morning up high above the water. Maybe he was simply showing her exactly what she’d been missing, which was a far more effective technique than arguing about it.
It was working, too. She had already missed this. But living the life she’d missed again, consequence-free, was diabolical.
It was as if nothing had ever changed or ever could. Arlo worked long hours, so he took what happened when he was home very seriously. There were rules and rituals, and it turned out she remembered them all perfectly.
When he was away, she would wake up in the morning and video call him immediately so he could see the sleep onher face. Then, depending on his mood and the time of his first meeting, he would often demand she touch herself, or impale herself with various items for his amusement as he worked himself with his own hand.
If he was home, they slept tangled up together the way they always had—like puzzle pieces that had finally snapped together where they belonged. She was attuned to his movements that way. When he woke up, she did too, and crawled down the length of his body so he could greet the day with her mouth on his cock.
He usually got a workout in after that. Back before, Josette had gone with him to the gym in their building and put in some time on the Stairmaster or treadmill. Sometimes she stretched, or just watched him perform the various exercises he liked to run through like a circuit. These days, she’d gotten more into the weight machines than she’d ever been in the past.
Arlo, she found, approved, and she liked working out with him. He not only showed her small corrections that helped her keep her form, but she found that his steely gaze on her inspired her to lift heavier every time.
