Filthy Gods (American Gods 0.5)(15)

“Casablanca,” I said, pressing my cheek into the pillow.

“You know it?”

I hummed. “Yeah.”

His touch, his fingers made me sleepy, made me happy and safe.

The famous tune filled the room and I couldn’t help think of the ending. How Ingrid Bergman left Humphrey Bogart. A hollowness filled my stomach.

I felt safe with Nathaniel, I felt comfortable and I couldn’t remember the last person to make me feel that way so intensely.

This was a summer affair and even as his fingers pressed into the soles of my feet, I knew he would leave me.

But I couldn’t stop the feeling.

Stop the emotions I hadn’t ever imagined wrapping around my throat and suffocating me.

But maybe, I thought as sleep dragged me further into paradise, I would pretend he was mine forever.




Each morning I rose before him, sneaking out of his bedroom and vanishing before the dawn could catch me. I had to pretend when I saw him seated on the veranda, fully dressed with black sunglasses that hid his vivid eyes from me that he hadn’t been deep inside of me the night before, large and swelling and hot. That his powerful fingers hadn’t rolled and pinched my nipples until they were raw and achy and then sucked them into his wet eager mouth. Or he had forced me to debate him about the politics of the Cuban missile crisis while his tongue teased my throbbing core, nipping on the sensitive flesh until I bit my arm to stop from calling him a god.

No.

We were mere strangers, mere competitive running mates who despised the other.

Even when he tilted his sunglasses down his elegant, sharp nose and allowed me to see those vivid eyes of intelligence and power and radiance.

Watching him and the three guys lounge under the veranda, white sheer curtains billowing around them, made the four of them seem otherworldly. Like statues I had studied in Ancient History. Perfectly symmetric features. Tall, powerful frames of strength and beauty. Untouchable. Perfect specimens that wielded too much power. Young gods untouchable, invincible, powerful.

They were the Kennedys of our world. So close, but so far away that they became legends by the press and the media.

Nathaniel opened his mouth slightly and his tongue licked his lower lip, slowly, teasingly as he watched me walk by, carrying a basket of clean white linen. Seeing his mouth, his tongue made my body shake, my nipples hard and achy, remembering that very mouth sucking, nipping, licking them until I came undone in his grasp.

It was never just sex with Nathaniel.

Even before he touched me, he brought up a subject—from health care to the Russian Revolution—and I couldn’t stop myself from arguing.

By the time the afternoon had hit, the sun high in the sky beating down on us, the cicadas were loud and vibrant. I carried a bucket of cleaning supplies, eyeing the ocean far in the distance and the high grass between us, lulling in the summer breeze.

I wiped my forehead on my arm and huffed, stopping in front of the janitor’s closet to return the cleaning supplies.

I struggled to get the key in the large door, grunting when I failed the second time.

“C’mon,” I said through my clenched teeth.

When the key finally went in, I sighed in relief and pushed the door open with my hip.

Just as I placed the bucket on the middle shelf, I heard the door close behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder and it took me a moment to see it was Nathaniel.

“What are—?” My voice died when I noted his heaving chest and white-fisted hands beside his tense body.

“Are you seeing anyone else?” he said, his voice calm and cool, but his dark expression, his eyes dark and narrowed, anything but. “I thought we’d agreed to be exclusive.”

I gawked at him, shocked to see him so rattled.

“What? No—” I shook my head, but he moved closer, his steps large and powerful, eating up the space between us.

“Senator Scott just told a group of men you want his cock. That you’ve been flirting with him,” he said, his ocean eyes a storm raging at me.

I scowled. “No. He disgusts me. He tried to flirt with me, but I turned him down.” I eyed him, watching his fists loosen only slightly beside him. “Do you really think I’d flirt with anyone else?”

“You’re very ambitious,” he said gruffly, his lashes lowering, his eyes watching me from underneath them. “I wouldn’t hold that against you.”

A sharp pain erupted in my chest. Like he had stabbed me. I tried to recover before he saw, but his expression changed fast and he reached out.

I stepped back, my hip hitting the shelves behind me. “I’m not that desperate to further my career, Nathaniel.” I glared at him. “And you thinking I would—”

“If push came to shove, we both know we’d destroy or use anyone to get the future we want,” he said, leaning closer, his hand resting on the shelf beside my head. His eyes flickered downward, scanning my parted mouth and over my constricting throat. Like he wanted to kiss me there. “But no one else can have your body or your mind.”

I glowered, but his body so close to mine, his head lowering.

He didn’t say a word.

He didn’t move and simply stared.

But his stare alone said more.

He had been jealous.

Seeing the calm man on edge, not so perfect and proper and collected.