His Custody

by Tamsen Parker

  He could only think of one thing. It might be fucked-up and wrong, but it also might work. He’d been telling the truth when he said he would do anything to keep her and he would. That tiny angelic Judge Pollard on his shoulder narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms, her iridescent wings shimmering on either side of her black robe. The figment his imagination had conjured wasn’t thrilled, but she was going to watch this play out before handing down judgment. He couldn’t wait.

  It was possible it would’ve been wiser to sit down and think this through, maybe call her therapist or, god, anyone else, but patience wasn’t his strong suit. Action was what was called for here. He pushed past Ada and into the hallway, stalking to his room and grabbing a small locked box from the top shelf in his closet. A minute later, he was banging on Keyne’s door.

  “Hold on!”

  He clenched a fist so he wouldn’t break down her door and counted the seconds before the door swung open. Ninety-three.

  “Hey Jasper, what’s—”

  Her eyes were glossy. She looked high and he wondered if he’d been right about the drugs. But her words weren’t slurred, she didn’t seem agitated or out of it. Puzzled, since he’d barged into her room and was holding her above the elbow and pushing her down into the chair that was pulled out from her desk. She was wearing those damn sleep shorts again, the ones with the tiny blue and white flowers that had no business being that short and he wanted to tell her to change, but not yet.

  She sat with her ankles crossed and tucked between the legs of the chair and he dropped the box on the table next to her with a clatter. He stood back and she crossed her arms over her chest, her small breasts making soft rising suns above the too-low neckline of her camisole.

  Her wardrobe hadn’t bothered him at first because it was what she’d always run around in. Hell, what she had on covered more than the bikinis she’d sported on the boat and on the beaches where they’d dock. It shouldn’t have registered at all because it never had before, but now it was temptation. Stimulus for a part of his brain he’d rather not acknowledge.

  He was going to have to set half her clothes on fire. Or send her to a convent. No. What he was going to have to do was fucking control himself. He wasn’t one of those puritanical men who blamed women for not being able to exercise any restraint themselves. And enough time at the club had solidified and put a name to something he’d already known and believed: there was no way he’d slut-shame Keyne O’Connell. Her clothes weren’t the problem, it was his fucking filthy mind that was, and he wasn’t going to make her feel like it was her fault he couldn’t get his shit together.

  Jasper did his best to arrange his body so it wasn’t threatening, but the best he could come up with was hands on his hips. Not his finest work. “Are you cutting yourself?”

  Her eyes went wide and alert, and an angry red blush crept across her collarbone, leaked up her neck into her cheeks until she was a vivid pink everywhere above the shoulders. “Jasper—”

  “Answer me.”

  Keyne clamped her mouth shut and glared at him. Crap. Gavin was always the one to give in. Keyne would take secrets to her grave. He wasn’t going to get a word out of her and fuck if that didn’t set his brain on fire.

  “Uncross your ankles.” A few seconds ticked by, but she didn’t move. “Do it now or I will do it for you.”

  Her glare softened and her eyes glinted. “I don’t think that counts as beyond reproach, do you?”

  And now she was going to throw Judge Pollard’s words in his face? The robed and bewinged figure on his shoulder agreed, and gave him a Well, do you? raised eyebrow look. Thanks a fucking lot, Keyne, for giving her ideas. How could such a small person be so infuriating? “Just fucking do it.”

  Her mouth swung to one side and her strawberry brows inched up her forehead, considering. She let out a breath and then slowly, deliberately, looking him in the eye, she unhooked her feet and slid her legs apart.

  Above her knee on the inside of her thigh, as Ada had said, there were cuts. Not big. An inch and a half across maybe, a quarter inch apart. She’d started mid-thigh and worked her way down judging by how healed the cuts were. She’d been lucky, or careful; nothing looked inflamed or infected, but god knew what she was using to do it.

  Jasper sunk to his knees in front of her, sitting back on his heels and putting his hands on her knees. He didn’t spread her legs any wider, didn’t want to, but held her so she couldn’t close up again. There were light golden freckles dusting the tops of her kneecaps and the contrast with the horizontal red lines on her skin made him come undone.

  She’d looked away when he knelt and when he looked up at her, she was turned to the side, nose in the air, breathing hard as a tear ran down her cheek.

  “Why?”

  Keyne didn’t answer him, didn’t look at him, closed her eyes tight enough that another tear squeezed between her lids and followed the track of the first.

  “Is it that bad, Keyne? That you need to make yourself bleed to feel anything? Are you doing penance? Because you think it was your fault? Or is this a slow suicide? Are you hoping one of them will get infected and you’ll go septic and die? Is that what you want?” His voice had climbed from calm to pleading to an angry plateau. He wasn’t shouting but he wasn’t far off, and she was vibrating with strain under his hands. “Did you think how I would feel if I lost you?”

  Her eyes snapped open and she turned to him “I—”

  “I know. You think I don’t have feelings. You think I’m a heartless machine.” His thumbs dug into her inner thighs. He knew enough to know he was bruising her, but he didn’t care. If she wanted to hurt, let her hurt. “I don’t feel guilty about what happened to our parents and Gavin. It cracked my chest wide open and I’m still bleeding because it hurts but I don’t blame myself. There was nothing I could have done. But you . . . If I lose you, I don’t think I could live with myself. Because that’s something I do have power over. I am responsible for you.”

  In a swirl of damp red hair, she turned on him, fury lighting her eyes. “You don’t—”

  “I don’t have power over you? Don’t kid yourself. Look at what you’re letting me do.”

  They both looked at his big hands on her slim knees, holding her thighs open. Sex. The charge ran through him, and he hoped it didn’t leak into her body. He could control himself. Would control himself. She didn’t need to know. She wouldn’t know. The thoughts, the urges, the dreams he had about her. He’d take that secret to his goddamn grave.

  Now he needed to fix this. Or near enough as he knew how. Which was far away enough from what any sane person would do that he was probably going to hell. Or jail. Okay, yeah, jail first and then hell. But if it might help? Then he was going to give it a shot, metal bars or eternal fires be damned.

  “Look. I’m not going to tell you to stop. I wish you would, but I understand compulsions. Like if you don’t give in this very second, any hope you have of feeling that way again is going to shrivel up and die.” He’d ceased to crave alcohol or coke as much as he had when Keyne first came to live with him, and it had always been easy for him to drop weed when he felt like it. But the euphoria that cocaine brought was frigging exquisite, and in that moment his yen for it was a tangible thing. Same with the slow descent and numbing a good amount of booze could give. And hell, he’d be a cheap date with three months of sobriety under his belt. Yes, he understood the hunger of compulsions, and how useless it could be to fight against them, especially if you didn’t want to, and Keyne already had enough things to fight. “So I’m going to offer you a compromise.”

  “You’re going to compromise? On me cutting myself?” Her tone was a mix of disbelieving and disdainful, her wrinkled nose offering the same.

  He sighed, nodded helplessly. He should’ve stuck with psych as an undergrad. Maybe then he wouldn’t be fucking this up quite so badly. He only understood the psycho
logy of a certain kind of woman and he wasn’t sure whether to hope the games he knew how to play would work on Keyne or not.

  “I’m not going to stop you. I don’t know how.” Not without physically restraining her or getting her locked up in a psych ward, neither of which he was going to touch with a ten-foot pole. “So here’s the deal. You want to cut yourself? You’re going to do it in front of me.”

  He took his hands from her thighs, leaving red marks where his fingers had dug into her and picked up the box, setting the dials in the lock until the catch released. After he’d urged her knees together, he laid it on her lap before opening the lid.

  Her eyes bugged at the contents before she looked up at him. “What the hell—”

  “Asking questions is not part of the bargain.” It was his blood play kit. The one thing he hadn’t given to Ryan to keep because Ryan had a major squick about blood play. Alcohol swabs for before, autoclaved knives for the act, sterile cloths for cleanup, antibacterial ointment and medical tape for bandaging. Right. Not everyone happened to have a blood play kit lying around, and she was going to be awfully goddamn suspicious about why he’d have a box like this: half instruments of torture, half first aid kit. Well, let her wonder. Too late to think better of it now.

  Her gaze skated back and forth over the contents, darting to meet his every few passes. He didn’t offer anything except a stony façade. When she met his eyes for more than a few seconds, it was with an angry sneer. “What kind of sick fuck are you, wanting to watch me cut myself?”

  There was a long list of things he’d rather be doing than watch Keyne O’Connell take a knife to her freckled skin, her blood trickle down her inner thigh. But he didn’t think that would get him anywhere. “What kind of sick fuck are you, wanting to cut yourself?”

  Calling your ward a sick fuck was likely against the rules in The Good Guardian’s Handbook, but since when had he played by the rules? He was clearly not cut out for this, but all he had to do was keep her alive through her senior year. If he could do that, no matter the means, he was going to call it a win.

  Keyne smiled then, a tiny rise in her cheeks, a puff of air escaping though her nose in the ghost of a laugh. “You don’t get off on this? You’re not some kind of vampire?”

  She was teasing him and his relief was palpable. “No. We could get you some garlic to hang around your doorframe if you’re concerned though.”

  That was the truth. When he’d done blood play, it wasn’t the blood that had turned him on. It was his partners’ willingness to put that much trust in him, to deem him worthy of holding their lives in his steady hands, the way none of them had flinched when the blade sunk into their flesh. They’d believed with everything they had that he knew how to do this safely, he wasn’t going to cut too deep, wouldn’t leave them scarred, wouldn’t let them bleed out. That’s what had got him hot—that heady sensation of power, control, mastery.

  Jasper might have been a ruthless dealer in business, willing to destroy people who got in his way, but he would never hurt someone who’d submitted to him, offered themselves to him so completely. He wasn’t exactly proud of being a corporate wolf, not to be trusted in the boardroom, but he’d done what he had to do to build what he had. But outside of that, he was an honorable man. Worthy of trust. He wanted, with everything he had, for Keyne to trust him, to have as much faith in him as those women had. He’d never wanted anything worse than he wanted that.

  “Are you done for the day or are you going to show me how you do this?”

  “You want me to . . . now?”

  “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  He’d be late for his call, but so be it. Keyne was his priority and if some suits on the other end of a conference call had to wait for him, they’d do it. She reached into the box and extracted a curved blade sealed like an instrument in a dentist’s office, holding it up to him. “This one?”

  “Whichever one you like.” He shrugged to cover the shudder that ran through him. If Gavin were here . . . Well, that was moot because Gavin wasn’t here. If he were, none of this would’ve happened. A sudden spike of anger lanced through his stomach and his chest. Keyne wasn’t the only one they’d abandoned, the only one left damaged.

  For a second, he was so angry at them all for leaving them. Look at what happened when he was left to his own devices. It was all their fucking fault he was having to do this, but he had to shove it down for now because this wasn’t about him. It was about Keyne. He hated every second of this but he wasn’t going to show it. Every time he’d schooled his expression to an implacable poker face was in preparation for this moment.

  She grasped the sharp knife tighter in her fingers, making her choice.

  That step complete, he took the box from her and extracted everything else they would need. While she waited for him to finish, Keyne sat back in her chair and let her knees fall open, not shy now that he knew her secret. He pointed to the next logical step in her ladder of lacerations. “Are you going to cut here or start on the other side?”

  She was right, he was a sick fuck. How could he be doing this? He breathed through his nose, hoping she wouldn’t notice his nostrils were flared and she couldn’t hear how loud the air was whistling through to his lungs. Bile sloshed around in his stomach and he thought he might be sick. Luckily there was a trash can right next to Keyne’s desk so in the event he did puke, it would be contained and Ada wouldn’t have to clean the carpet.

  Keyne wrapped her lips between her teeth before she looked at him. “Other side.”

  “Okay.” He laid a gauze pad between her leg and the chair to catch the blood. It wasn’t thick, but he wouldn’t let her cut deep enough to bleed through. He showed her where her femoral artery ran and told her to be careful to avoid it.

  “You know you just gave me a road map of how to off myself, right?”

  “You’re not going to kill yourself.” He’d meant it as an observation but it came out as an order. You will not kill yourself.

  Her strawberry blond lashes, so light they were almost translucent, rested against her cheek before her eyes fluttered open, connected with his and she shook her head. The motion was slow and small and it gave him more confidence than if it had been a flailing, vociferous denial.

  Once the site was prepared, she unwrapped the knife and held the blade over her skin. Their eyes met and he could have sworn she was asking for permission. He gave it to her with a blink before his gaze zeroed in on her hand.

  She was shaking and he wanted to grab the knife from her, cut her himself because he wouldn’t slip. But that was a step further than he was willing to go on this fucked-up slope and so he watched her fingers like a hawk as they gripped the blade tighter and touched gleaming metal to skin. It was a thin, razor sharp blade and she’d clearly been using something not as fine, not as crafted for the purpose, because she gasped when it was so easy to make the cut. But she didn’t go too deep, didn’t skate too long over her flesh, and she pulled away as the blood started to gather at the seam she’d opened. It pooled in a drop that slid toward the gauze and her eyes closed as she put the knife on her desk.

  Jasper stared at the thin stream, dribbling over some of her freckles like a gory game of connect the dots. He stared at it until he couldn’t anymore, grabbing more gauze out of the kit and heading to the bathroom for some soap and water.

  When he got back, she’d pressed a pad of gauze against the cut she’d made, though her eyes were closed and her head was dropped back. He took her hand, lifted it away from the wound and proceeded to clean and bandage it and the one on the other side that looked new. He didn’t look in her face until he was done.

  “Are you finished?”

  She blinked. “You’d let me do it again?”

  “You can do it until I tell you to stop.”

  Her brows knitted together, trying to figure out his game. Good luck, Keyne; I don’
t know what I’m playing at either.

  “I’m done.”

  “Good.” He packed up the box, setting aside the things to be thrown in the trash and the knife to be cleaned. The box felt heavier under his arm than it had on the way in and he was wrung out, like after an intense scene. Mostly they energized him but on rare occasions, they wrecked him, and this was the latter. He took a step toward the door but before he could get any further, her small voice called him back.

  “Jasper?”

  “Yeah?” He didn’t face her, couldn’t right now or he might flat out break down right in front of her, but turned his head so she would know he was listening.

  “I mean, I’m done. I won’t do it anymore.”

  His breath caught in his chest and then he did turn around. “Okay.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and her voice shook like she was about to lose it. “I—I just wanted to feel something that wasn’t that. It didn’t matter if it hurt or felt good but nothing felt good enough. I wanted to know I could feel something, that maybe, someday I’d be capable of feeling something other than empty, other than sad, other than hopeless.”

  Her breath shuddered out and she put her head in her hands, her wet hair spilling forward around her face. “If I . . . if I feel like doing that again, will you tell me not to? I think I could stop, if you told me not to do it anymore. I don’t want to keep cutting myself, but I . . .”

  He dropped to his knees in front of her, laying his hands on the outsides of her knees, offering her his solid warmth. I’m here. “I can do that.”

  “I know you can.” She sniffed, looking up at him through the curtain of her hair, sounding more like the stubborn Keyne he knew. “Tell me you will.”