How hadn’t I felt someone next to me in this small space?

I felt someone take my hand and place it to their face and was immediately relieved when my fingers ran against the smooth, cool nose ring beneath my touch.

“Adam?” I asked. “Oh my god, I’m so glad you’re in here with me. Why did they let you stay with me? I thought I had to go through this process alone.”

He didn’t answer me, though. Instead, he put his mouth on the side of my neck and kissed me gently. What I thought was an attempt to help me feel calmer quickly escalated into a sensual drag of his tongue up my neck and over my jaw, until he reached my mouth and put his moist lips over mine. If being locked in a dark box was part of the vetting process, at least Adam was in here with me to make it better. I was so intoxicated by him that the fear of where I was dissipated the further he put his tongue inside my mouth. The feeling this time was even more intense than before, perhaps it was because the only sense I could rely on without sight and sound, was the sense of touch…and the sense of taste, which I relished with him and found myself unable to resist. When he pulled the shirt over my head, I was too enthralled by the dark sensuality of the moment to hesitate.

I undid his pants and felt his bare chest against mine as he climbed up against me with just enough space in the room to lay half against the opposing wall. My thighs shook as his hand gently parted my legs, and the hard tip of his cock just barely touched the place where he would enter me. He held his body right there, pressing me just enough to let me know he was there, but just out of reach of my begging desire as I tried to urge my body up against him.

“Do you want me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I panted breathlessly.

There was a small thought in the back of my mind that tried to break through the climbing sensation. But the thought persisted until I couldn’t ignore it any longer as I lingered on the brink of expectation.

It’s not Adam.

I knew it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his voice. It wasn’t the way that his body felt against mine as it had the last time. I knew who it was, and a part of me, as much as I was consumed with rabid hatred…still wanted him.

“Here I am,” he said. “All you need to do to have me is within reach of one, small movement, Lisette.”

I froze. My body, my thoughts, everything was frozen. I felt the pulsing throb at the rim of his body, pressing with the most subtle, steady pressure against me, and my thighs were shaking uncontrollably.

“You know who I am,” he whispered as he put his tongue in my mouth and talked without taking it out. “And yet you still don’t back your body away from me. Tell me why that is.”

I felt as if I shook any more that my muscles were going to seize as I tried to fight back against the urge to bring my body down around him and push him into me.

How can this be happening?

This was the agony Adam had told me about, and he was right. I would have taken a thousand thorns to the heart rather than to go through the torment of my mind and body being wrapped around each other, and the line between passion and hatred being bled together. But then I noticed something else.

He was trembling too.

He, who thought he had the upper hand, who thought that he was the one dangling me on the end of insatiable longing…he was shaking too. I felt the quake of his hips against mine and noticed the twitching of his chest muscles against my skin. He thought he was in control, but he wasn’t.

And that was all I needed to regain my focus.

I twirled my tongue around his furiously and felt him gasp as I pulled his chest into mine with a forceful slam as my back pressed up against the wall even harder. I felt his body heave as he struggled to hold himself between my thighs at just the right spot without entering me. And then I did something that would show him I was not to be trifled with.

That I could outdo his level of restraint.

I rocked my hips forward and pushed down against him just enough to put the head of his swollen lust inside me, but not enough to give him the satisfaction of claiming my virginity. I felt his body convulse as he reflexively started to push his hot, hard body deeper into mine. But before he could get any further, I pressed my hand against his chest and held my pelvis locked where it was as I whispered in his ear and felt his heart pound against me.

“How’s this, Michael?”

10

There were several more days of mortifying initiation, none of which were as unconscionable as the first, though.

Immediately following the incident with Michael, I was put back into the apartment and subjected to most things that now seemed only mildly annoying and inconvenient in comparison, but I suppose it would seem like torture to others; hours of interrogations to questions pertaining to my motives, hollow threats and small bouts of physical challenges that I had to overcome to prove my allegiance. And at the end of the vetting process I got a strict warning by Marta.

Then I was formally “welcomed” into Lineage.

But although I managed to sail through the rest of the process like it was a breeze, the time in the stone room with Michael was equivalent to a hundred thorns of suffering to me.

How did Michael know that would nearly break me? I hated him, and he hated me. What would ever give him the idea that being seduced by him might have brought me to my knees?

When I had gotten back to the apartment, Adam looked worried sick and brought me immediately back to his room and wrapped me in a dozen blankets as if being warm and snuggly would help make it all go away. He asked me what had happened, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him.

To be honest, I wasn’t even sure what had happened.

Michael acted as though none of it had ever existed, though. When I left Adam’s room to go to the bathroom and get some water from the kitchen, Michael just stared at me from across the room and said nothing. The nose ring that he had used to try and fool me with was now gone, which had been a clever trick. But even though he didn’t say anything, he didn’t need to. Anytime that the three of us were around each other in the apartment, there was a heavy and palpable tension that filled the air. Michael pretended not to know anything about what had happened during my initiation, and Adam either believed him or at least acted like he did.

Which was probably better for all of us.

When my transfer was finalized and Marta had signed off on it, everyone now had to accept me as both a colleague at Lineage and as Adam’s girlfriend. My things were sent over from Goldshire, and Adam made space for me in their apartment. Michael was quieter than usual, which we both found surprising, and he kept mostly to himself like a predator lying in the shadows in wait. I had been able to convince Adam to escort me to the big tree at the edge of the grounds where Julian and I had once hidden within its branches so that I could talk to Julian for just a few minutes and explain what I had done.

But, he wasn’t happy with me.

Adam probably wouldn’t have agreed, but since he could tell I had been through something awful during the initiation (but just couldn’t tell what it was), I was finally able to wear him down until he agreed to go with me and keep watch while Julian and I talked. He arranged for Julian to meet us there, and I vowed to myself to figure out how Adam was so easily able to sneak around both campuses without ever getting caught.

When we arrived, Julian was more unhappy than I had ever seen him before. Not only was he upset that I had lied to him and disappeared without telling him what I was doing, but he was also visibly jealous after hearing that I was now “officially” Adam’s girlfriend. If he knew what had happened in the stone room with Michael, I am certain he would have never forgiven me.

It was best that no one ever found out about that.

As soon as we saw each other, I ran up to hug Julian, and he wrapped his arms around me and buried his face in my hair.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I said, trying to hold in my tears.

“I’ve missed you too,” he said. He pulled his head away to look in my face. “Lisette, why did you do it? You told me you wouldn’t.”

“I know,” I said as I started to cry.

I couldn’t ever seem to hide my emotions with him. “I’m so, so sorry, Julian. I had to.”

“I know,” he said as he pulled my head down onto his shoulder and stroked the back of my hair. “I know why you did it. I just wish you would have admitted things and not lied.”

I cried quietly against his shoulder for a few minutes as he patiently held me. I thought about when we were kids, and I had fallen off the top of my treehouse. Julian was there, and he caught me before I crashed onto the ground and likely would have broken a leg or an arm. He was always catching me, even now.

“Are they treating you okay?” he asked when I finally looked up.

“Yeah,” I said.

It wasn’t a total lie. Now that the vetting was finished, they were treating me just fine. I didn’t see any need to burden him with the knowledge of how awful the past several days had been. It was over, and that was the end of it. Even Michael seemed to have moved on.

“And what about Adam?” he asked.