Nightfall (Devil's Night 4)

“What happened between you two?” he asked. “It’s not a coincidence that you’re here, you know?”

I studied him. Yes, I k

new that. It had something to do with Will. “So you think whoever dumped me here is giving Will a present?”

“Perhaps.” He eased his grip on my neck. “They are definitely no friend to you, though.”

Spinning me around, he forced me to the edge of the wall, both of us leaning in and watching Will.

“Do you think he’ll protect you?” he whispered.

I tried to jerk out of his hold, but he held tight. Will fisted his cock, leaning into the wall, eyes closed, and breathing hard.

“Does he have to?” I asked, my eyes trailing down his body again. “Why are we watching this?”

“You’re watching this,” he explained. “I’m watching you.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer, and I turned my head, looking up at him. His amber eyes watched Will and his brow knit, troubled.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered. “Maybe to remember what it feels like when you weren’t alone. When you weren’t the only one looking out for yourself.” He looked down at me. “Maybe to remember what we left behind. And to remember what we didn’t.”

What was he talking about?

“Will and I are about the same age,” he said, “but I think we were probably very different in high school. He was the talker, right?” He smiled at me. “I was the quiet one.”

Now it was the other way around, it seemed.

“I wasn’t always like this,” he told me. “I was miserable. Six feet of weakness, fear, and cowardice.” He gazed at Will again as he talked. “‘You’ll be a doctor,’ they said. ‘You’ll study that. Work there. Go here on vacations. Spend your free time doing this. Marry her. Have three children. Live up there in that house after the honeymoon tour of London, Paris, and Rome.’”

I tried to picture him as he described himself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him docile.

“Until one night, buried in my books, I saw her,” Aydin continued.

I listened, but I turned my gaze back on Will as Aydin spoke in my ear.

“It wasn’t her body or her face,” he told me. “It was how everything with her was effortless. Every movement. Every look.”

Will sucked in air between his teeth, his strokes harder and faster and the muscles in his arm tight.

“She loved to love,” Aydin said. “She loved to touch and to feel and to wrap her every breath around someone and hold them with it, because she was an artist.”

Everything warmed, and I envied how he described her. Whoever she was.

What would Will say about me?

“It wasn’t her job,” Aydin said, “but it was her calling.”

He paused, and then he dropped his voice as if thinking out loud. “It wasn’t her job,” he said again. “Then.”

It was like Will. He loved to love. He loved to be happy.

He’d wanted to make me happy once.

“I’d never wanted anything more in my whole life,” Aydin went on, “and I was studying to be a surgeon who would’ve gladly cut off his own hands to have her.”

Will squeezed his eyes shut, and I dropped my gaze to his cock again, my breathing nearly in sync with his strokes. What was he thinking about?