Page 8 of Odin
He makes an effortless loop and slings it over the gleaming hook.
He steps away, his body heat leaving with him, the basement cold for the first time since I followed him down here. He’s going for the chair, so I can stand on it like I said, but I stop him.
“Just heft me up. It’s all good.”
He gets the chair anyway. When he turns around, carrying it over, his expression is almost guarded and a little bit wary. Ofme?
I step up onto the chair the second he puts it down. Standing on it in my heels puts me an inch or two taller than him.
Before either of us can overthink it, I lean into him, balancing my shoulder against his, and wrap a leg around his waist. I’m not as coordinated as I usually am, especially not in the towering heels on a wooden surface. The chair skids out, slipping sideways, but he catches me. His strong arms band around my shoulder and waist. I wrap my legs around either side of his hips, clenching my heels together tightly.
One shoe still falls right off my foot. I kick the other off, planting my bare feet into his jeans for grip. I’m a little bit frantic, not used to not having any hands.
“Whoa. I’ve got you.”
I laugh a little hysterically. “Sorry. I guess I’m more of a disaster than I realized.”
“It’s alright.” His hand splays over my shoulder, fingers burning against the bare skin of my back that the vest doesn’t cover. “You’re going to be okay.”
He sounds so sure, so steady, so damnsteadfast, that I want to believe him. I want to lean into him and soak up his heat. I want to tuck my face into his neck and bask in his scent, his strength, and his safety. Maybe that’s the real thrill of letting someone dominate you. It’s the giving up of control willingly, surrendering it to another person because you trust them so inherently, that you want no barriers between you. It’s not one person using another. It’s two people truly coming together.
That’s a crazy fucking thought given that this man is a stranger, and his son—the man I was going to marry, who I had known for years—never truly made me feel that way. There was always this barrier between us, a chasm that I couldn’t cross. I don’t even know if I wanted to cross it. I was going to share my life with Preston. I shared my body, but when it came to anything deeper? I never felt like we had that. I thought I loved him, but there was a good chance I had no idea what love even was.
Preston betraying me and me cutting him out of my life? It’s not just shock that dimmed the pain. I feel it. It’s raw. It’s horrible. But I know that in a few weeks, or maybe a few months, I’ll be fine. There’s not something irrevocably lost, or pieces of me that are always going to be forever broken now that I’m not with him. Not like when my dad died.
Even if he hadn’t fucked my mom and had just told me one day that it was over, that he didn’t love me, would I have been heartbroken or just passingly angry and disappointed?
I know, without a shadow of doubt, that he never knew the secret parts of me. He never wanted to. He never tried to reach them, and I never tried to give them. He saw what he wanted to see, but that was never the realme.
Not that that’s what’s happening here. I’m just digging deeper inside myself, trying to understand and make sense of my new reality. I guess it’s the fact that my body is running hotter and colder than it ever has before. I’ve never felt my insides tighten like this, never ached so wildly, never felt like it’simpossibleto catch my breath.
It’s more than just the whiskey, the rope, and the illicit thrill of this. That’s all just an illusion. Well, maybe thewhiskey took the edge off, but surely to freaking goodness, it’s not that powerful.
The rest is just me.
My body. And whatever being this close to Odin, is doing to it.
I force my lips apart so I can breathe. I can calm my racing heart and the heat spiraling through my veins, and the relentless ache that’s now settled somewhere near my ribs. I canchooseall of that because I’m the one in control of my thoughts, hormones, and my body.
But that’s before I squirm just a little, to hoist myself up higher and get on with the whole fake photos. I edge myself a little bit too far to the front, a little bit too hard. Without my hands, I have almost zero control of the motion. I take myself by surprise. I catch Odin by surprise too. I end up swinging almost around to the front of him, crashing directly into the hard bulge in his jeans.
Instead of swinging myself away, I freeze. Full stop. My stomach flips over, but not in the way that grosses me out. Not like it did, pinching and lurching like I’d been gut punched, when I found Preston and my mom.
Part of me wants to press myself closer to this man and let him hold me. Getting cheated on wasn’t ameproblem. There’s nothing wrong with me, but all the same, it’s a blow to my confidence. That’s not entirely it. Part of me just wants to be close to someone who is warm, smells good, and is pretty darn kind from what I know. If I’m being honest, my relationship lacked intimacy, and that was a me problem. I don’t know why I always had to hold something back. Maybe because of all thetimes he asked me to change, or give something up, or fit into the mold he needed.
This rough-around-the-edges beast of a man with the softest smile wouldn’t ask me to do that. He’s the kind of man who would accept me for who I was and get sweet about it, like he was when he talked about his club and the people who make it a family. This man could accept someone if they wererealand like them better for it.
There’s a good chance that I’m being absurd.
That whatever I’m feeling right now is just a trauma and whiskey-induced hormonal mess in my head. It has nothing to do with me being a secret dreamer who wants the kind of love that comes into your life and fucks it all to shit in ways that both hurt and heal.
Odin finally recovers and jerks away. “Fuck.”
He quickly maneuvers me back to his side. Still keeps an arm wrapped around my waist and the other over my shoulders. The rough calluses on his palms rasp against my soft skin. I have to stifle a gasp as sensation floods my whole body. Without the chair and my shoes, I’d be literally hanging from my wrists if he dropped me, but he keeps me perfectly balanced.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No,” I breathe, my face heating up because he’s mortified too. “It’s just the body’s reaction to stimulation.” I clear my throat messily. “I’m studying to be a vet. I- didn’t finish. I was convinced to take a year off. Preston didn’t want me to work, so I stopped going. It was only going to be for a year, but now it’s too late to register.”
