Thighs Forced Open After Betrayal

I slammed Jules back against the wall the instant the door clicked shut, my hands already driving between his legs with punishing force, fingers digging into the meat of his thighs to pry them open right there in the wake of his betrayal. He locked them instantly, an old reflex, a wall going up brick by brick, muscles corded and trembling with the effort. I wedged my knee between and shoved, slow and deliberate, the fabric of his pants rasping dry and stubborn against my skin as I forced the first grudging inch of separation.

He didn’t yield. Of course he didn’t. I felt the tendons in his inner thigh bunch and snap taut again the second I eased my pressure to reset my grip, and something in me almost laughed at that — at how predictable he still was, clenching like a fist around the one thing he had left to withhold. I planted my palms flatter, spreading my fingers wide across the muscle, trying for better purchase, and drove my hip forward to pin his weight against the plaster. My shoulder screamed with it almost immediately, a dull burning ache settling into the joint, because he was not a small man and he was not going quietly.

“Stefan,” I said, just the name, nothing else yet, and felt the flinch travel down through his thigh into my hands before he even opened his mouth. Good. That was a tell. I filed it away, cold and precise, the way I used to file away everything about him back when filing away things about him felt like devotion instead of ammunition.

He shoved back, a sudden desperate buck of his hips that nearly threw me off balance, my knee sliding an ugly few inches down the wall before I caught myself against the jut of his hip, and his thighs — traitorously open for half a second — slammed shut again with a hard, dry snap of denim against my forearm. I hissed through my teeth at the friction burn already rising pink along the inside of my skin where his pants had rasped me raw.

“You sold —” I started, and he cut across me, voice ragged.

“Don’t. Don’t you dare stand there and —”

“You sold me out.” I planted my left hand flat just above his knee, low and steady, and let my right hand drift up along the seam of the other thigh, trying a new angle, prying outward instead of up, and felt the muscle fight me differently there, a fresher resistance. “To Stefan. For the Danes deal.”

“You don’t know what you’re —”

“I know exactly what I’m talking about.” I dragged my right thumb higher, up into the crease where thigh met hip, and felt him shudder, hips twitching forward involuntarily even as his knees clamped tighter around my straining arm. My bicep burned. I adjusted my footing, planted one boot wider for leverage, dropped my weight another inch, and this time I felt something give — not surrender, just fatigue, the first true crack in the dam.

“Say her name,” I whispered against his throat, feeling his pulse jackrabbit under my mouth. “Go on. Since we’re doing this.”

“Tina.” He spat it like it burned him too. “Fine. Tina. The same week. You want me to say it prettier?”

“I want you to open your legs.”

“Make me.”

I did. Or I tried — driving my knee up again, harder this time, my palm sliding slick with his sweat and my own along the seam of his thigh, and for one dizzying second I thought I had him, the muscle trembling on the edge of collapse, and then he clenched down again with a strangled sound of pure spite, thighs locking around my arm like a vise, cutting off blood flow at the wrist until my fingers went numb and tingling.

“Rome,” I said through gritted teeth, shaking the feeling back into my hand, repositioning, “and Percy. All those nights plotting. You remember plotting, Jules?”

“I remember everything.” His breath was coming faster now, ragged little pulls through his nose, chest heaving against mine where I had him pinned. “I remember you thinking it meant something.”

“It did mean something. That’s why it worked on you.” I shoved again, both palms now, fingers splayed wide across both thighs at once, using my whole weight rather than just my arms, letting gravity do what muscle alone couldn’t. His knees buckled a fraction — a fraction — and I felt the give travel up through my hands like a current, and I almost moaned at it, at the sheer petty triumph of feeling him lose an inch of himself to me after everything.

He recovered instantly. Slammed back shut, his knee cracking hard against the knee I still had wedged between his legs, hard enough to make me grunt, and for a second we were just two bodies locked in something uglier than desire, breathing hard, neither of us speaking, the silence stretching taut and mean between us while sweat rolled down the side of his throat and my own shirt clung damp to my spine.

I hated how much I wanted this. I hated that hating it didn’t stop the wetness gathering low in my belly every time his thighs fought me, every time his breath hitched against my ear like he was losing something he’d sworn to keep.

“You handed them the numbers,” I said quietly now, no heat in it, almost gentle, which was worse, I knew it was worse, because his whole body flinched at the change in my voice. “Like none of it meant anything. Like I meant —”

“Don’t.” His voice broke clean in half. “Don’t you dare do the quiet voice.”

“Say what you felt.”

“I felt —” He stopped. His thighs trembled, still locked, still fighting, but there was a tremor in it now that wasn’t just muscle fatigue. I pressed my advantage, sliding my right hand up higher, thumb tracing dangerously close to where he wanted me and didn’t want to want me, and felt him shudder head to foot.

“Say it.”

“I hated it.” The words tore loose finally, ugly and low. “I hated how easy it was. I hated that you didn’t even see it coming.”

There it was. First crack in the ladder, and I let myself feel it — really feel it, savor it, a private hot little spike of satisfaction low in my chest that had nothing to do with his cock and everything to do with his voice cracking on hated. I didn’t let it show on my face. I kept my hands moving, methodical, prying, one thigh trembling open another half inch under the relentless drag of my palm, then clamping shut again in a last spasm of pride.

“More,” I said.

“There isn’t —”

“There’s always more with you. Say it.”

His head fell back against the wall, throat working, and for a moment I thought he’d refuse outright, thighs locked so hard around my numbed arm that I had to plant my boot against the baseboard just to keep from sliding, my own thigh muscles screaming from the crouch I’d held too long. I switched hands, shaking out the dead one, flexing feeling back into fingers gone white at the tips, and started again from the top — knees, thighs, that same brutal patient drag outward.

“I wanted you broken,” he finally said, voice raw, eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder like he couldn’t look at me and say it at once. “Like this. Like you’ve always wanted me.”

Second crack. I let my mouth curve, slow, cruel, right against his ear. “That’s two. Keep going.”

“Why does it matter to you? You already —”

“Because I want to hear you say it while I’m the one holding you open.” My hand slid higher again, closer, and this time when I pressed my thigh forward into the gap I’d won, his whole body jolted, thighs quivering on the edge of collapse and pride fighting the same losing war they’d been fighting for the last several minutes. “Tell me what you felt when you heard about Tina getting back to me. Tell me you were scared.”

“I wasn’t —”

“Tell me.”

“I was scared.” It came out strangled, humiliated, his hips twitching forward into nothing, seeking friction that wasn’t there yet. “I was scared you’d stop wanting to ruin me. That’s — God, that’s insane, isn’t it? I sold you out and then I was scared you’d stop caring enough to —”

Third crack, and this one hit somewhere under my own ribs I didn’t want examined too closely. I shoved it down. Focused instead on the physical, on the war still technically being fought beneath my hands — his thighs still clenched, stubborn even now, muscle memory outlasting confession.

“Tell me you thought about this,” I said, voice gone low and merciless, “every night since the wager started. Tell me you touched yourself thinking about exactly this.”

Silence. A long one. His jaw worked, throat bobbed, and I dug my fingers back in, right at the crease, right at the spot that always made his whole leg jump, and held there, patient, merciless, until —

“Yes.” Barely audible. “Every night. I hated myself for it.”

Fourth crack. I felt it land in him somewhere deep, watched something in his face give way that had nothing to do with muscle — a loosening around the eyes, a slackening at the mouth, the specific unguarded look of a man who has just handed over the last thing he meant to keep. I recognized it because I’d spent months wearing it myself after he’d gutted me.

“One more,” I whispered. “Tell me you’re glad I’m the one doing this. Not Stefan. Not anyone else. Say you’re glad it’s me.”

And that was the one that broke him. Not the accusation, not the confession about Tina, not even the admission of nightly, shameful want — but this, the smallest thing, the truth he’d clearly been guarding hardest of all. His breath left him in a single broken exhale, and his thighs — after everything, after every clamp and recover and clamp again, after the friction-burned skin of my forearm and the dead numbness that had twice crept into my fingers and the ache still radiating through both my shoulders — simply stopped fighting.

It wasn’t dramatic. That was the thing I hadn’t expected, some part of me braced for a final violent struggle, and instead there was only a slow exhale shuddering out of him, a long releasing tremor that ran the length of both legs at once, and then his thighs parted, loose and shaking, entirely open, entirely mine, his whole weight suddenly sagging into the wall as though the muscle simply forgot how to remember its own resistance. The sound he made wasn’t a word. It was something smaller than that, something involuntary, half sob and half exhale, and I stood there for one full second doing absolutely nothing at all, just watching it happen, letting the stillness stretch, drinking in the specific, private, filthy triumph of having out-lasted him at something for once.

I stepped back, all the way back, until two clear feet of air separated us.

He blinked, disoriented by the sudden absence of my weight, of my hands, thighs still trembling apart against the wall with nothing holding them there now but his own exhaustion. I watched confusion flicker across his face — the dawning understanding that this was not going where his body assumed it was going.

“Unzip yourself,” I said. Flat. Almost bored, though nothing in me was bored, my own pulse hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. “Slow.”

He hesitated, hand hovering near his own waistband like it belonged to someone else, and then his fingers found the button, the zipper, dragging it down with a small, ragged sound that seemed obscenely loud in the quiet room.

“Now stroke yourself, Jules.”

His fingers shook wrapping around bare skin, and the sound that left him — half grunt, half something closer to shame — did something ugly and satisfying low in my own chest. I crossed my arms and watched, cataloguing every twitch of his hand, every hitch of breath, the way his eyes wouldn’t settle anywhere, sliding from my face to the floor to the ceiling and back, unable to hold contact with what he was doing in front of me.

“Slower,” I said, when his fist tightened too fast, too eager for relief. He obeyed, jaw clenched, a muscle ticking there I remembered kissing once, a lifetime and one betrayal ago.

“Tell me what you whispered to Stefan,” I said. “Out loud. While you do that.”

“I told him —” His voice cracked, hand stuttering in its rhythm. “I told him you trusted me too much. That you’d never see it coming from me.”

“Keep going. Tighter grip.”

He complied, hips beginning to roll forward into his own fist, breath coming faster, more fractured, eyes finally landing on mine and staying there this time, wide and glassy and stripped of every ounce of the composure he’d walked in with.

“Tell me why you really did it.”

“Because I wanted—” A broken exhale. “Because it felt like power. For once. Felt like I had something over you instead of the other way around.”

“And now?” I let the question sit, cold, clinical, while his hand worked faster despite himself, thighs still trembling from the earlier war, chest heaving. “Who has the power now, Jules?”

“You.” It tore out of him on a sob, hips jerking hard into his own hand. “You do. You always—”

“Say it while you finish.”

“You have all of it,” he gasped, body curling forward, “you have—” and then he was gone, release hitting him in a violent, solitary shudder, spine bowing off the wall, a sound ripped out of him that had no dignity left in it at all, come streaking hot over his own knuckles while I stood two feet away and didn’t move to touch him, didn’t move at all, just watched the whole collapse happen exactly the way I’d engineered it.

He slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn loosely up, chest still heaving, staring at nothing.

I should have felt satisfied. I did, somewhere — a hot, private, ugly little glow of vindication sitting low in my stomach, the specific pleasure of having made him say every single thing I’d needed him to say. But underneath it, unwelcome, was something colder, something that felt uncomfortably close to grief, because the man sitting wrecked on the floor in front of me used to be the person I told everything to, and now he was just the wreckage of a bet I’d won.

“The wager’s yours,” he said finally, voice scraped hollow, not looking up. “I’m done.”

I didn’t answer him. There wasn’t anything left to say that wouldn’t have cost me something I wasn’t willing to pay. I turned, crossed the room, and let myself out, closing the door softly behind me instead of slamming it, which somehow felt crueler than if I had — leaving him there alone on the floor in the exact ruin I’d built, piece by piece, with my own two hands.