She would have let him too.
He lied to her more than once tonight. He told her he never thought of her, but that wasn’t true. He’d thought about her often over the years. What was true, sadly, was that it didn’t produce much in the way of feelings, and he was easily able to brush the memories away.
But now that she was back, he’d done nothing but think of her. He couldn’t stop the memories from rolling through his mind like those movies he’d seen in the First Dimension. He was well on his way to getting drunk tonight, so perhaps he’d stop thinking about fucking her, which was at the forefront after seeing her in his shirt.
Leaning forward, Bastien grabbed the bottle and put it to his lips, ignoring his empty glass. He took two long swallows and hissed, because it did taste like turpentine.
“What is ailing you, brother?” Kieran asked as he again reached for the bottle. Bastien handed it over. “It’s unlike you to wallow.”
“I’m not wallowing,” Bastien muttered, but that was yet another lie that dripped from his mouth tonight.
Kieran grinned across the table. “I’m going to take a guess and say that Thalia coming back has turned your life upside down.”
“That’s an understatement,” Bastien reluctantly admitted and tried to ignore the pleased look on his brother’s face. Because the truth was, his life had been turned upside down the minute the spell that sent her away was cast.
Designed to harness every bit of his love for her and imbue it into her very soul, the protection magic had resulted in profoundly negative effects for Bastien.
Yes, as she faded away, he wasn’t despondent, but he was cognizant of an emptiness within. Where Thalia had filled him up, he was left with a vast chasm that made him feel… incomplete.
It took a long fucking time for Bastien to become accustomed to that feeling of nothingness. Other women couldn’t fill it, so he shoved other stuff inside that eventually rebuilt him into the man he was today.
Hatred for Ferelith was his primary fuel, and he leveraged every ounce of that passion and energy into defeating his enemies. He killed indiscriminately, as long as his opponent was working for Ferelith. His hands were drenched in blood, his soul etched with every death, and it was the only thing that made him feel whole again.
“That damn woman thinks we can pick up where we left off,” Bastien grumbled.
Kieran merely cocked an eyebrow as he took the bottle from Bastien and brought it to his mouth.
Bastien slammed his fist onto the table. “She wanted to talk about her feelings, wanted me to talk about my feelings, and then… next thing I knew, she wanted to know if I would fuck her.”
Kieran choked on the liquor and sprayed rye whiskey all over the table. “She actually came right out and asked you to…?”
“Well, she didn’t overtly say that. Somehow I was talking about how beautiful she was, and I might’ve said she was fuckable. I don’t remember the order of things. She asked if I felt she was fuckable—”
A deep furrow appeared in Kieran’s forehead, and he held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute… you actually had this conversation?”
“And I told her, there was a dormitory full of soldiers if she needed to scratch that itch.”
Kieran sprang from his chair, reached across, and slapped his brother on the side of the head, hard enough to rock Bastien. “You are a fucking idiot. You don’t say those things to a princess. You don’t say those things to Thalia. I should kick your ass.”
Bastien loved his brother. The spell hadn’t prohibited him from loving, just from loving Thalia. But he had to hold his temper because as brothers are wont to do, they’d often beat on each other in times of anger, and usually when alcohol was involved. Kieran striking him would more often than not end up with them rolling around, trading blows until they were worn out and bloodied. They’d then return to the bottle.
But Bastien didn’t have it in him tonight. Now that he was unloading about Thalia, he decided to get it all out since Kieran had been the one right by his side the last seven years, and he knew his brother was a different man.
“I told her I had another woman,” Bastien admitted.
Kieran set the whiskey bottle down. “But you don’t. You broke it off with Merrilyn.”
“Thalia needs to move on from me, and the easiest way for her to do that is to think I’m a hopeless cause. I know Thalia, and she won’t pursue me if she thinks there’s someone else. She’s not the type to get in between a couple.”
Kieran laughed and pointed at his brother. “That right there sounds like pride mixed with a bit of fondness for Thalia. You may not feel much for her, but you still respect all the qualities that led you to fall in love with her in the first place. The spell took your love, not your admiration.”