37. WEN

The last time I was with Godric in our dungeon, I failed to seduce him. The next day, he disappeared. What followed was the worst time of my life. That’s saying a lot when it has always been the perfect shitstorm.

Case in point is the last one we left behind half an hour ago at the Metatron Library.

He brought me here only after I pestered the fucking Hell and Heaven out of him. The semi-Celestial lug thought I’d let what happened in our Mindscape go without an urgent follow-up.

I now sit on the altar, swinging my legs, watching him prowling around me like the panther he supposedly has for a pet, and sigh long and longingly.

That man will drive me to write sonnets. And erotica. Though I’m still partial to my assassination recipe book. Which I’ll start implementing if he doesn’t stop trying to put off facing me.

Seems he only finds it easy to be eloquent when we’re disembodied voices. When we’re very much bodied, and I’m right before him in the hot, wet, aching flesh, he chickens out.

“Hey, Chicken Wings.” I catch his sweatshirt, stopping him as he starts placing the Seraphic Crystals around the altar. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He raises one eyebrow. My teeth ache to sink in the perfection of its arrogance and challenge. I promise myself I’d start with it as I bite and nibble my way down every lethal inch of him.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you think we’re going to have a Mindscape session. If so, you’re out of your mindscape.”

“I need to investigate how you physically disappeared into the void. I didn’t even think that was possible. That was another major development.”

I wave him off. “And it can wait. The major development that can’t is what you said while I was there.”

It’s his turn to sigh. “I guess it’s futile to repeat my previous advisory threat.”

“To forget about it if I knew what was best for me? The epitome of futility.”

He levels his gaze on mine, eyes beginning to skitter with those bolts of darkness. “What would you have me say now?”

“Whoa. I like this new cooperative you. Not sure I trust him, though.”

He empties his expansive chest on a fatalistic exhalation. “There’s no pleasing you, is there?”

I flutter my lashes at him. “There’s a surefire way of pleasing me that only you can achieve, and you’re withholding it.”

His body stiffens, and the heat in his gaze flares, literally.

Just as I think it will combust, the blaze dies down and he exhales again. “Forgive me.”

I blink up at him. “You can utter these two words? Without bursting into flames?” At his rumble, my lips spread, and I lean back on my elbows. “I will only if you stop withholding it.” His gaze turns somber, and I frown. “You were asking my forgiveness for being a massive tease, right?”

He shakes his head. “For what I unknowingly put you through.”

Seriously? He realizes he needs to apologize for that now? When I’m spreading myself before him on a literal altar?

But this is huge. I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but putting out this fire between us once and for all takes precedence over putting us out of our sexual misery.

I sit up, grab hold of his sweatshirt, lean my chin against his abs, and look up into his stormy eyes. “I would have never forgiven you if you realized, even a little, what you’d put me through, and didn’t care. But since you’re an idiot on a Celestial scale, and had no clue, I do. I forgive you.”

His eyes squeeze, as if those three words hurt him.

I surge up to cup his face, needing to absorb his pain. He deprived me of trying to do so when he came back all battered and haunted.

He leans into my touch with a groan, eyes still closed, as if soaking up my worry and compassion. The god who never expected nor wanted any from anyone before.

My heart stutters with the privilege of his need, with the delight of the freedoms he’s allowing me.

Still, I want more.

With one last stroke to his roughened perfection, I withdraw my hands. “But my forgiveness is conditional.”

His eyes open, growing grim. “Of course. What do I have to do, my torment?”

“Oh, you’ve promoted me! That’s a promotion, right?”

“Indeed. Your conditions, woman.”

“That you come at breakfast tomorrow, hand me the leash tied around your neck, and strip down to a thong while dancing to Britney’s I’m a Slave 4 U.”

His eyes narrow to slits of emerald fire. “Seems that striptease scenario has been on your mind since the night I caught you. And the time has come for you to exact your revenge.” His lips compress as he gives a terse nod, looking both pant- and panty-wetting. “Very well.”

My heart almost kicks me off the altar. “Very well what? You mean you’re considering doing it?”

“I would have maimed anyone else who dared make such a demand. But if this is your price, I’m not in a position to refuse.”

The images burst in my mind, of him undulating and stripping, all that mind-boggling masculinity and forcefulness making the lyrics beyond farcical. The jaws littering the floor. The minds blown beyond repair. The lives derailed by the spectacle.

I burst into torrents of snorting, braying laughter.

He watches me with a long-suffering expression until I start to choke, and the stabbing in my sides forces me to stop.

Still spluttering, and wiping away the flood of tears, I grin up at him like a maniac. “Now you’ve confirmed the extent of my bargaining powers over you, you can unclench your delicious derriere. I’ll reserve the knowledge for future deals. For now, my conditions don’t involve public performances or exposure. They’re actually intensely private.”

He regards me with rising suspicion and wariness.

“Oh, don’t look at me as if I’m going to ask you to be nice or something just as impossible.” A baleful glance makes me snort again. “Exactly, so relax. I only ask that you promise to share the truth with me, of why you left, the moment you can. And that you believe that you can tell me anything, and trust that I will never hold anything against you, and would always be on your side.”

His grunt reverberates the whole cavern as he grimaces. “I’d rather opt for the striptease. I’d add arriving in a giant cake.”

Instead of being funny, this strikes an arrow of despondency into my heart. “It’s that hard for you to open up, huh?”

“Harder than you could possibly imagine.”

Shaking off the fear that he would never let me in, I steer back to my original efforts, my hungry gaze running over him, from the crotch up. “With you, who needs imagination?”

The moment I reach his eyes, his gaze snares me. “If my promise is the price for your forgiveness, then you have it. I will share the truth, any truth, the moment I possibly can. Promise me you’ll do the same.”

Guilt lurches inside me. I haven’t shared the truth about meeting Lucifer. And I don’t know if I can or should.

But with him in exile, he’s going nowhere for now. I’ll figure out what to do about him later. This is about Godric now. About us.

I still feel like crap as I attempt to lighten the mood. “How about we seal this pact with a kiss?”

“How about I give you something better?”

I slap my chest in mock horror. “You think anything can be better than a kiss from Godric the Great? What happened to you while you were away?”

His lips quirk. “It’s not better in general, but for you in particular.”

“Yet more proof you’re malfunctioning. Nothing can be better for me.” I hook my legs around his, crossing my ankles around his hips. “Unless you mean what a kiss would lead to.”

He lets me draw him closer, stopping short of pressing the bulge he’s no longer concealing against my aching center.

I start to massage his hips with my boots, wishing it were my heels digging into those steel buns, and he shakes his head in disbelief. “After a lifetime amidst monsters, and your exploits as Walter White, the criminal mastermind who had the human and Supernatural L.A. underworld, and even me, confounded for over a year, I thought you would have perfected self-preservation to an art. Yet, you don’t possess an iota of it. What do you really expect from persisting to poke a starving lion, White, when you’re a succulent gazelle? What else but get eaten?”

My back arches in surrender even as I tighten my legs around him. “Oh, yes, please.”

With a long, pained groan, he steps back, breaking my hold on him.

“It’s you who perfected the art of evasion, Godawful.” I sit up, my core pounding and arousal soaking my panties. Needing to push him to do something about it, I give him my best goading smile. “I’m beginning to think you’re all talk.”

“And you want a little less conversation, a little more action, eh?”

Everything stops as I stare up at him.

Did he just say …?

As if to drive it home, he adds, “All this aggravation ain’t satisfactionin’ you?”

He sang this. Sang it. And he sounds even better than Elvis, when I thought it an impossibility …

Everything tangles, stretches, then snaps.

I spill off the altar with the force of the recoil, shouting at the top of my lungs, “It wasn’t a dream?”

His huff is sarcasm itself. “You didn’t think it would be that simple, did you? With both of us involved, everything has to be convoluted and inexplicable.”

My mind is burning rubber, finding no place to turn, no way to brake. “What was it then?”

His frown is back as he sighs again, deep and disturbed. “What part of inexplicable didn’t you understand? But it couldn’t have been a dream because we both lived it.”

“You did, you mean. I died.”

“Why do you think I’ve been trying to warn you off?”

“You’re afraid you would do that to me?”

“I don’t know what I will do to you, when you finally break me, White.”

I did consider that before. The logistics of him in the throes of passion, the whole Man of Heavenly Steel, Woman of Mortal Tissue situation. I guess this is the perfect time to ask about my prospects in this scenario.

“Did you ever kill any mortal lovers by mistake?” I ask, stupidly more reluctant to hear about former lovers, than accidentally murdered ones.

“I never had any ‘mortals.’ Or any ‘lovers.’” The vicious relief and smugness at his declaration is beyond ridiculous. But I can’t help it. I want this all-consuming thing between us to be his first connection, too. “And no, I’ve never killed anyone, under any circumstances, accidentally. But in that joint hallucination or whatever it was, it was by no mistake that I killed you.”

My heart convulses at the still-vivid memory. “You wanted to kill me at the beginning. Maybe whatever it was, was replaying your intentions at that time.”

“I never wanted to kill you. I thought I should.”

“Then you changed your mind.”

“You changed my mind. You changed me. I already told you, I no longer know how to be. With you, or without you.”

I stare at him as he walks away to the apartment-sized mat where he trains me in Melek, more implications than I can handle inundating me.

“You’ve ruined me, White.” He drops down, stretches back on his elbows, sighing in resignation. “And now the world will have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The Godawful you created, the Archangelspawn of Death who’s losing his mind, whether I have you or I don’t.”

Gulping down the spiked fist that expands in my throat, I attempt a smile as I approach him. “If you’re losing your mind either way, have me and be done with it.”

He cocks his head at me, his eyes turbulent with ridicule and frustration. “You think if I have you, and I don’t ruin you, I’d ever be done with it? With you?”

Unable to withstand his intensity, I fall back on teasing. “Maybe after all that agonizing slow burn, it’ll turn out to be a dud. Maybe it’ll just fizzle out and we can get back to making me your weapon without the maddening ‘what ifs.’”

His jeer hits me in every erogenous zone, like a sharp flick to my nipples and a hard nip to my clit. “If I thought it a possibility this would ‘fizzle out,’ I would have bent you over this altar long ago, ridden you within an inch of your life and been done with it.”

My knees give out and I fall into an undignified heap beside him, insinuating a leg between his. “It’s not too late to do that.”

He turns to me, letting me rub myself against him, his feel and scent and warmth and the way he looks at me sending me clear out of my mind with arousal.

“Would you have me, then be done with me, my bane?”

“I can”t imagine how anyone could,” I moan against his chest, seconds away from dry humping him with all I have.

His lips twist in disgust. “Then you would be surprised.”

Incredulity drags me up to exclaim, “You can’t be serious. You’re you. Everyone wants you.”

“That’s celebrity infatuation. In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m the personification of ‘never meet your heroes.’”

“I met you. And the more I know of you, the more I want you.”

“Because to you, I’ve always been the villain. The monster.” He lets me see a fraction of both as his gaze skims its savagery over me from toes to lips. My core clenches and flows, as if he has fondled and suckled me all over. Cruel satisfaction blazes crimson in his eyes. “But you’re a monster, too, my bane. That’s why only I can ignite you, and only I can fill your bottomless needs.”

I bury my face into his neck, crushing my breasts against his chest. “Didn’t we already agree on less conversation and more action? And you say I talk too much.”

“I have to say this, especially since you don’t want to hear it. Like Astaroth said, what we are is also why we are a disaster in progress. And that’s when I haven’t laid a hand on you yet. Once I do, it would probably end in cataclysm.”

“Oh, who cares!” I throw myself over him, taking him down to the mat, and crashing my lips on his.

The floodgates of our connection burst open. It expands and twists and bellows, until it’s almost unbearable.

There shouldn’t be need like this, hunger and greed like this. I want to fuse with him, devour him, let him consume me. I want to tear open his barriers and my abyss, and let them raze the universe.

But he isn’t kissing me back. And he won’t. He’s afraid of himself. For me. Afraid of us, for everything else.

Body burning with arousal, and heart rupturing with desolation, I let his lips go. I start to push myself off him, and a bolt of lightning wrapped in enervating pleasure strikes between my shoulder blades.

I slump over him under the impact, panting, melting.

He’s touching me.