My Life From Hell (22 page)

But I’d never had fine with Kai.

I’d had “blow my mind”. I’d had “melt my bones”. I’d had “blackout ecstasy.”

I’m sure the kiss looked very romantic from the outside but here in the middle of the action, it was all rather nondescript, kissing partner considered.

No wonder Persephone wanted to kill him. Except … there was nothing in any of her memories about this being a disappointment, or anything other than what she wanted. She hadn’t had any complaints about their love life.

Where was the chemistry? The combustibility? Should I be glad it wasn’t there? So confused.

There was a click as Kai turned off the lamp. The room was plunged into darkness, save for the silvery sliver of moonlight trickling in through the window.

My confusion grew. “It’s bedtime,” I said.

There was a rustle and what sounded like an item of clothing hitting the floor. “Exactly,” he replied, as he took me in his arms. I pressed my hands to his chest realizing it was bare.

Kai tried to tug up my robe.

Holy! Crap! I grabbed it in a death grip.

“A little late to be playing hard to get, love,” he said, amused.

“Very tired. Go back to your room now.”

He laughed. “Are you taking over our bedroom?”

“Our?” They shared?
Of course they did.

Another rustle and a heavier thump.

Nervously, I stretched out the tips of my fingers. And cringed as I felt more bare skin. The thump had been his pants.

Please be wearing underwear.

Tentative, I crept my fingers up his thigh—
how I loved his thighs
. I was relieved to hit boxer length fabric.

Unfortunately, Kai saw that as an invitation. “I need you.”

Oh.
Ohhh.

Yes, please!

Hell, no!

My brain intervened before my mouth could say something I’d regret. Although it had to put quite the smackdown on some serious cravings. It was a struggle, but in the end, my mind emerged victorious.

Kind of a hollow victory.

I bolted back to the edge of the bed. There was no way in Hades, Olympus, or any reality that my first time having sex—especially with Kai—was going to happen while I was in Persephone’s body.

No getting intimate and interactive for us.

A very long silence ensued, during which I gnawed my bottom lip raw, and tried to figure out how to handle this without coming off as a tease or a prude. What was Persephone normal? “We should wait to have sex until after the ritual. So as not to dilute its power.” There. I thought that was pretty good.

Kai sat up into a pool of moonlight. He raked his hands through his hair. “When we do the ritual, is it going to work? Or is whatever you’re so mad about going to sour the whole thing?”

I flinched, hearing him parrot the words I’d said to him back at his house. I gave him a strained smile. “Don’t be silly. Everything is fine.”

“Uh-huh.”

With a final assessing glance, he turned away and lay down.

I stayed on the edge of the bed, tense until, finally I heard Kai’s even breathing and knew he was asleep. Careful not to wake him, I scooted closer and peered down.

Kai was tangled in the sheets, barely covered. In the moonlight, he resembled a fallen angel. He was ripped everywhere, from his long muscled thighs, up his abs and along the perfect V of his torso. Like a chiseled statue.

I braced myself against a sudden rush of giddy longing. My eyes roamed to his face. He must have shaved recently because his skin was free from stubble. His olive complexion so free of blemish that he could have made a mint as the poster boy for clear skin. His dark, thick lashes lay heavily on his cheek. He seemed so innocent.

So beautiful. I longed to touch him. But as me.

And since that was impossible, I curled into a ball on my side of the bed, leaving a good ten inches between us.

It might as well have been a mile.

Thirteen

I woke up Monday morning half sprawled on top of Kai and realized two things. One, he gave off heat like a furnace and two, he was pressing slow kisses into my shoulder.

“Morning.” His voice was growly and scratchy.

I tucked my head against his bare torso, feeling the rise of his chest and the steady thump of his heart. Just like we’d been back at his house. Except that had been Sophie and Kai. This was Persephone and Kyrillos. Kind of.

I wanted the other way back.

I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him.

In response, Kai lowered his head, all the better to gain access to my neck, His dark hair was totally mussed up.

“Kai—,” I caught myself. “Kyrillos, look at me.”

He rolled me onto my back and looked into my eyes. “I see you just fine, kardia mou.”

You’re not seeing me at all.
But I wasn’t sure if that thought came because he didn’t see Sophie, or because he didn’t see Persephone.

He leaned in slowly. I knew he wanted to kiss me, and that he was checking to see if Persephone was still upset. Which was sweet. I guess.

I needed to know if the tone of our previous kiss had been a weird one-off, so I allowed this one. My eyes fell closed and Kai moved in.

His kissing has gotten better in the past seventeen years. Or is it just that he had the right person to kiss? Well, he did have a lot of practice after she died. And, ew! How much did he practice? Because he went from little league to the World Series. But yay for me, Sophie, being on the right end of it!

It’s not good when you can hold entire conversations with yourself in the face of your boyfriend’s kisses. And that’s all we were doing. Kissing.

Kai and I would have been tearing at each other’s clothes by now. And we hadn’t even had sex. These two had. There was just none of the madness between
them
that there was between us. Maybe that was a good thing? Maybe that’s how normal couples did things? Were we just so zero-to-a-billion about everything that all my perceptions were skewed?

Kai paused to smile down at me, just as the sunlight surrounded him, his hair perfectly tousled. I slid my eyes sideways, noticing our just-so rumpled sheets, the way a strand of my hair fell across his arm.

It was a freaking movie moment. That’s what their entire relationship was like for me. Cinema pretty. Not real world messy.

I wanted the messy back. So I bucked to push him off me and sat up. I had to find Prometheus and see about getting that truth spirit to pay a visit. “Busy day,” I said. I’m not stupid. I could tell Kai was getting suspicious of me holding him at bay, so I pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “The equinox is in three days. I’m just edgy.”

He seemed to accept that. Or at least not press the subject.

I threw him a bright smile. “Hungry?”

He swung his legs off the bed, got up, and threw on jeans and a worn green T-shirt. It molded to him, but left many good things to the imagination. “I’ll get you your coffee,” he said.

Before I could add, “Great, that’ll hold me until I get some real food,” a spurt of rage flooded my system. A memory hit me.

Kyrillos entered the room, a large mug in his hands. Sleepily, I propped myself up against the headboard, hoping against hope that today would be different.

I fisted the edge of my blankets, but kept a smile on my face.

He reached me and held out the mug. And just like every morning, I felt disappointment unfurl deep within me. Coffee again. Not hot chocolate.

I accepted the cup, the bitter aroma making my stomach turn.

I hated coffee. But he delivered it to me every day with a smile.

He was no better than the others. Only wanting whatever image of me suited him best. Not really seeing at all.

Persephone’s simmering anger rose in me, a snarl twisting my lips. It grew, dancing inside me until my back arched and the emotion of the memory thrust me back into my vision. My body tensed as I saw that this time, there was a twist.

Sophie stood across the garden, immobile on the rock. The lava bubbled and flowed freely around her. But where I was, all was light and fire, falling away to nothing.

I burned, stretching out my awareness to fuel the flames and the lava and the destruction. I would die but everything would go down with me.

“Persephone?”

I don’t know how long Kai had been calling me before I came to, but as his face came into focus, I saw him flinch.

Persephone’s memory, her deep seated resentment for Kai had snapped me into a version of the vision that was truly terrifying. My brain couldn’t process the lingering after-emotions of it. Never mind being here, in front of the person who fueled that fury.

I needed Kai gone. To think through what it meant. To be able to shake this off without his very presence leaving me at the mercy of
her
feelings.

I forced myself to relax the granite glower carved into my face. Uncurled the talons that my fingers had become. I blinked up at Kai with a pleasant smile and hoped he wouldn’t see how fast I was breathing.

I caught sight of the steaming mug that Kai was still holding and felt a irrational surge of hope—maybe it was hot chocolate. I hated feeling like I was losing myself to Persephone, as evidenced by my hesitation before reaching for the coffee I loved so much.

“Here.” As he prompted me to take the cup, there was a flash in his eyes for the briefest of seconds. A glint.

I stared but his now-affable expression didn’t change. And that’s when I realized he knew. The bastard knew Persephone hated coffee, and he gave it to her every day anyway.

Why?

I took the cup from him with a pleasant smile.
Just like I always did.

His expression hardened. He threw me a rakish grin and bent briefly to kiss my brow. “Come to me soon,” he said. And then he left.

The sheets fell away as I awkwardly struggled up, with the cup cradled close. For the moment, the astoundingly passive-aggressive dynamic between these two took a back seat to whatever had just happened with the vision.

I’d
been
the freaking pomegranate tree, for crying out loud. And it hadn’t felt like dying. Well, yeah, it had, but it wasn’t a gentle go-out-with-a-whimper ending. I’d been fueling the destruction.

Was this my confirmation that I ended the world? Was I the instrument of destruction? And if so, in the end, was it me or Persephone who would ultimately be in charge? Was the vision hard proof that the past repeated itself? That this enchantment didn’t end, and Sophie Bloom ultimately failed to exist?

Was I going to lose all awareness, leaving Persephone and her destructive impulses to take over? Would the volatile combination of Persephone, Zeus, and Hades end humanity?

I took a sip of the coffee, my head spinning. Persephone may have hated coffee, but funnily enough, it was exactly the way I liked it. It was drip, not espresso, which would have been better, but it had the right amount of milk and sugar. Maybe Kai did recognize me on some unconscious level?

Don’t get stupidly hopeful.

I closed my eyes, savoring the taste, turning my anxiety about the the vision into a chance to sift through memories and understand why Persephone had never spoken up about the coffee. It was obviously part of something much bigger.

Demeter and Zeus had fueled Persephone’s sense of very conditional love. Instilling her desire to please, to be told what a delight she was. There was my answer. As was remembering her anxiety to always live up to that label. In my experience, most gods didn’t follow the “nothing you can do will ever make me love you less” school of parenting. All of this had brought her into a passive-aggressive standoff with Kai, where she couldn’t speak up and he wouldn’t ask.

Just because I always give in doesn’t mean I always want to.
Her long-ago thought echoed up to me now. I remembered Persephone in a way I hadn’t before. And all it seemed to do was accentuate the differences between us.