Because around her, he was.
“I am Daphne,” she had uttered behind a bleak smile, surveying the unlit corridor beside the stairwell of the club dorms.
Threx, who was Thayor at the time, flexed. The notes in her voice shifted his entire physiology, and I watched. Daphne didn’t only make him work, control his breath, fill his lungs, and keep him walking straight, but she kept him sane. Lucid. In his skin.
Look, I’ve seen some twisted, fucked-up bonds in my life. You don’t escape the Underworld without them. But never had I come close to the amalgamation that was Threx and Daphne. It was as if their souls only mechanism for survival was to feed off each other for all eternity.
It was love, but not the kind you want to look in the eye. Famine. Feast. A thing that went bump in the night.
“We will be okay here,” Thayor promised, pulling her by the waist into his orbit.
He didn’t use the wordsafeand I admired him for it because she wasn’t. Especially not with me.
“Anything is better than a park bench.” She cracked a smile, winding into his center. The icy edges of his eyes shifted to her face, reading her expression entirely.
“We will see,” he grumbled, tucking a loose ringlet behind her ear. “But either way, I’ve got you.”
And he did.
Not with his words, or actions, or promises, but with his whole fucking body. Or his heart, if you believe in that kind of shit.
And she?
Fuck me. She had all of him. The bastard couldn’t regulate without her.
It became clear fast that whatever Threx you received that day, whether the cool, calculated assassin or the third-war nuclear bomb, stemmed directly from Daphne’s internal state. If she were pissed at him, he would burn the world. If she were sad, then fuck everyone’s opinion! Watching her moods proved just as important as understanding his. Daphne was his metronome, and he was her parasympathetic system, so imagine my surprise when I learned that he’d never touched her. Not truly! Not in the one space that mattered.
“Hey?” she said months later, leaning in my doorframe, the collar on Threx’s shirt slightly torn from the way she was constantly tugging at it. “Mind if I hang out?”
I peered up from the book in my hand, wondering for a split second what she’d look like in my clothes before swatting the image away. Not only would Threx pulverize me if I touched her, but something told me I would never survive her. She was too close and yet too far.
“Threx fucking again?” I smirked, shifting over so she could crawl beside me.
This had been our little game for months, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to how she occupied my space, how her soap stayed on my pillow long after she left, settledsomething inside me. I knew it was dangerous, but there was a certain sweetness in the way she could never be mine.
Daphne smiled and nodded.
“Ever wonder why he doesn’t just fuck you?”
“All the time,” she admitted before collapsing onto my mattress. “Maybe I don’t do it for him.”
I gave myself permission to trace the line of her jaw, falling into the slope of her neck where several freckles liked to play. Daphne was beautiful in the way nature offers a sudden burst of color amid a storm. She didn’t have to work at it. The lines of her body alone did things to my dick I’d never thought possible.
“Blasphemy,” I declared, freezing when she buried her face in my arm.
I wasn’t the type of person who liked to be touched. It felt like an assault on my senses, branding into my skin like dry ice. But that sensation never happened with her. In fact, I remember waiting for the urge to remove her from my orbit, and the feeling of death when the temptation to draw her near overpowered me instead. All she had to do was look at me, and suddenly I was no longer floating away.
“You smell good,” she commented behind a yawn, rolling into my heat. The dorms were freezing, a tactic my father used to “build character.” Asshole. The only thing it built was sickness. I think I spent five years of my goddamn life with a cold.
“Like sweat and getting punched?” I asked in a laugh, still noticing the sting in my fist from the afternoon’s festivities.
“No,” she inhaled. “Try forest wind and vintage books,” she corrected.
Forest wind. God help me! If she were not so damn cute, I might smother her to death.
Daphne knew romance was lost on me. That humans were anything more than pieces of shit who sometimes got it right felt like the wrong kind of fiction to escape into. It was illogical tobelieve in lies, but she… she made me want to reach for it. Or at the very least, stare in the mirror long enough until whatever version of me she’d created to help her cope with the fact she was living with criminals came true.
It wasn’t.