Trust her.
That’s what Liesel wants—trust.
I sink back into my chair next to Phoenix. She doesn’t even glance up from her phone. She can pretend she doesn’t know what I went back to Liesel for all she wants, but pretending we are one big happy family isn’t going to make our children’s lives any better. We have to face the truth.
Liesel said she trusts me. I assume that must be true since she didn’t immediately demand her child be removed from my custody. To some extent, she must also trust Phoenix.
But do I trust her?
I want to. I want to trust her desperately. I want to trust that everything I thought I knew about Liesel isn’t true—that she didn’t do the horrible thing I discovered. I want to believe that the reason she’s hiding things from me is truly to protect our kids. I want to trust her.
But I don’t.
She’s broken my trust so many times, as have I.
I don’t know why she’s changed her mind and now trusts me. Or maybe that’s a lie, like everything else she speaks.
I do know that we have to figure out a way to trust each other if we are going to survive this; I just don’t know how.
Phoenix finally looks at me and smiles weakly as she puts the hood of her hoodie up over her head and then leans on my shoulder, her hand resting against my inner thigh. It doesn’t bother me how blasé she is with touching me. Phoenix has earned the right to touch me however she wants.
The problem is I don’t crave her touch. I crave the spicy blonde in the back who wants to castrate me as much as she wants to fuck me. The woman hates as much as she loves me. The woman who is mine and yet will never actually be mine.
When Liesel told me to stop, I thought I was imagining it. There was no way I could be feeling like I felt touching her, and her have the capacity to tell me to stop. The burning desire bolting through me was buzzing through her body too. I saw it in her hooded eyes, her parted lips, and the way she bit down on my lip.
I tortured her with my body not because I actually thought it would lead her to tell me the truth, but because I needed something to ground myself in her again. I thought she needed the same—an escape from reality together.
But then she asked me to stop.
Does she have more control over her urges than I do? Or is her lust just not as strong as mine is?
I move my head, and a drop of blood splotches Phoenix’s cheek. Her thumb swipes across her pale cheek, and then she looks at the red-colored liquid on the tip of her thumb.
I don’t know how she’s going to react to seeing evidence of my interactions with Liesel. I watch curiously as she waits a beat before placing her thumb into her mouth, sucking the blood off.
Nothing.
A sight like that in the past might get me hard and horny as hell. I’d be pulling her into the nearest bathroom to fuck her senseless. That was who I used to be—a horny bastard content on fucking everyone.
My eyes sear back to where I left my heart—sitting next to Liesel, my huntress.
Phoenix sits up and examines me closer until she finds the source of the blood—my bottom lip. A lip that Liesel bit down on to keep from screaming my name as I fucked her with my fingers—fingers that still smell like her.
Phoenix’s eyes glaze over into a frosty shade. I can see the damn icicles hanging from her eyelashes.
I prepare myself for her slap, bite, hit, rage. I deserve it. Even though we have an open marriage, I know that I hurt her. I hate hurting her. She’s one of my closest friends, and I’ll always owe the world to her. I married her never thinking I’d want another woman as a constant in my life. I was wrong, but so was Phoenix for thinking that she could make me fall in love with her.
The slap never comes. Instead, she leans close to my lips, uncomfortably close, until we are sharing oxygen.
“Dunn,” I warn.
“You vowed your body to me forever. I let you fuck other whores, but you will always be mine. We aren’t getting a divorce. You don’t want that. You’re just confused by old feelings. You want me.”
I shake my head, careful not to let our lips brush against each other.
“She hurts you.” Her thumb brushes over my swollen, bleeding lip. “I heal you.”
And then she presses her lips against mine. She might call it a kiss, but for it to be a kiss, I’d have to kiss her back. That doesn’t stop her. She licks her tongue over my wound, trying to heal me with her saliva.