by Zoey Derrick
I stand up and take a step toward her. She puts her hand up to stop me. I can see the war in her eyes. But I don’t have to guess. “I don’t know whether to forgive you or kick you out.”
“I’d like forgiveness. I’ve never done this before, Raine. I’ve never felt like this before.” I sigh. “I’m a dick because it’s the only way I know how to guard myself or even to process all of this.”
“Well, I need you to drop your assholian beliefs, because I can tell you three things.” She pauses and I nod in encouragement for her to continue. “One, I’m not one of them. That Sunday night I was indulging in a fantasy of being with the ultimate rock god. Yes, I was willing to give it one night, but Beck being there was meant to be a buffer for me and my normal reaction to sleeping with someone. But Beck wasn’t the man I wanted to sleep with.” She runs her hands through her hair. “Two, I don’t know why you push people away or keep them at arm’s length. I would honestly like to know because it will help me to better understand you and it will ultimately help me to stop you from self-destruction when you’re around me. And lastly, I’m not asking for a long term commitment from you, in fact I don’t even know what it is that I want from you. But I know, after all this angst and frustration, that if I sleep with you again, it will tear me to shreds.”
I take a step toward her. I can’t believe I am about to say what I’m going to say, but frankly it’s the fucking truth. “I know you’re not one of them. I can never clump you into that group of women. You’re so much better than that and I don’t deserve your compassion, I don’t deserve your forgiveness and more than anything, I do not deserve anything you have to offer me.” I take two more steps and bend down before her.
She eyes me warily and I slam back the glass of Crown in my hand. I need the liquid courage to get me through this.
I take a moment to feel the Crown burning in my stomach and making its way out into my limbs. Stalling is the name of this game. I stand back up and move back to the other couch and take a seat. I know I can’t stall any longer. “My parents were killed when I was seventeen.”
She gasps and covers her mouth. I can’t look at her because I don’t need to see sadness. “You need to know that I’ve never told anyone this before. At least not someone that I want to be intimate with. The guys know, for obvious reasons. When you spend as much time together, it’s hard not to.” I take a deep breath. “I’m sure what’s running through your mind is something to the effect of me being seventeen, being older. Well, you’re right. Being older made it easier for me to emancipate myself and avoid going into the system for seven months. But it also means that I spent sixteen years in a loveless household. They fought constantly. They ignored me whenever it suited them. I was making myself dinner at nine because I was starving. I was making school lunches at seven, and by twelve I was grocery shopping, smoking, drinking and never getting in trouble because nobody cared.” I scrub my hand over my face. “My father had a fast fist and an even deadlier belt. My mother had indifference.”
I get up and grab some more ice off the alcove. I didn’t even hear her get up, but she comes up behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist and I slouch.
“Your touch obliterates everything I grew up knowing about love, compassion, forgiveness. When you touch me, nothing else matters,” I admit and she holds me tighter. I put my hand on top of hers. She puts her head against my back and I set the glass down and turn in her arms. “Looking at you, I realize that I want so much more than a receptacle. That I need it and I wonder how I’ve lived this long without it,” I tell her and she smiles sadly at me.
“I’m not a cure-all, Dex. As much as I want to be that for you, I don’t know how to do that. I’m not strong enough to deal with your mood swings. It will break me.”
“I never want to break you.” I kiss her forehead.
“I’m afraid that you will and not just physically.” She wiggles her hips and he stirs again.
“You sweet dirty girl.” I kiss her forehead again. “But I’m not done.”
“Then I need a drink.” She pulls back and I step out from in front of the fridge and she goes straight for the ice bucket before she walks back to the couch. She puts a few more cubes in her glass and tops it off with more Crown.
“A girl after my own heart.” I smile at her as she downs the glass. I smirk at a memory. “Your love of Crown the other night.”
“That was such a waste of good booze.” She smirks as she gets back up off of the couch and goes into the fridge for a bottle of water.
“No, it wasn’t,” I say seriously. “It brought us together, though in a rather fucked up way.” She smiles as she passes me again on the way back to the couch. I watch her curl up, but she doesn’t take much care with how her shirt slips off of her shoulder. A little further and she’d be hanging completely out. I notice now that there is no tank top and no bra strap. Her comfort level makes me smile. I try not to stare. I have another idea and staring will give me away.
“When they died, I was pissed. Not because they were gone, but because my parents were loaded.” She gasps. “I know, it sounds like a poor man’s story, but in reality, it was the opposite. I was pissed because they were dead, and I was thrown out of my house and onto the streets, or friends’ couches as was the case for the first three months while everything was locked up in the estate. Their will specifically stated that the property was to be sold and yada yada, you don’t need the gory details of that. But with my time on the streets and on couches, I discovered cocaine, crack and heroine. I always told myself that I was lucid. I could function, I could hold down a job, but as soon as the sun went down, it was another story.” She’s listening intently. I walk over in her direction, toward the window. I stand there for a minute. “That’s also where I discovered my love, if you want to call it that, of sex and I found rich women, mostly that my parents used to know and who would feel sorry for me. I’d seduce them into giving me money to feed my habit.”
“While you were still a minor?”
I snort a laugh. “Ironically, with no money, no solid place to live, I managed to emancipate myself, making me a legal adult. Though if anyone pushed the issue, it was technically illegal, but no one did. Once my parents’ estate freed up, I found a shit apartment, paid for two years of rent in advance, banked and safe deposited access to the majority of my money. That’s when I went on a ten day bender. No longer needing to work, I blew through more than thirty thousand dollars in drugs.”
She gasps and I look at her. “I can’t even… I’ve never even seen that much money at once, let alone…”
I cock my head at her, then I walk around behind the couch and bend down, resting my elbows against the back of it. “I didn’t even know I’d spent that much money until about six years later. Though by that time, my spending had jumped into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then I was forced to relive my parents’ death all over again when a lawyer found me. I was thrilled when I walked out of the first lawyer’s office with the amount of money that I did. I was young, didn’t know and certainly didn’t care. I had enough to live on and not work. I could play drums when I wanted to. Panhandle on the street with a pickle bucket, it didn’t matter, I could do it all. I was invincible. Then everything started to unravel. I was a complete mess. I stopped being careful with my money, with my spending and with my body. I got arrested. Spent three days in jail and when I got home, sober for the first time in years, I found a letter from an attorney. The letter basically stated that I’d reached the term of a trust that had been established by my parents.”
“More money?”
I nod. “I knew that I had to claim it, but because I was sober, I knew that I would have to claim it and get clean. I made an appointment with the attorney, and then called Betty Ford in California, made an intake appointment for that same day. I walked into the attorney’s office and I gave him all the information he needed to get the money to me and I walked out of there and into Betty Ford.” I can’t stop
my hand from pursuing its destination. She brought it on by letting her shirt slip down her arm. I slide my hand down her shoulder and I gently cup her breast. I roll her nipple between my finger and she moans.
“Dex,” she breathes.
“Sorry, princess, I couldn’t resist.” I slowly pull my hand away and she shivers but stops my retreat. In fact, she pulls my hand back down in an invitation to continue what I was doing. I won’t deny her that. I can’t help it. I love the feel of her pierced nipples beneath my fingers. I love feeling the warm flesh rolling and hardening at my touch.
“What happened after rehab?” she says huskily.
“I enrolled in college. Met Kyle, Calvin and Eric. Eventually we found Talon and 69 Bottles was born.”
She lets out a hot rushed breath at my continued touch. I slide my other hand down the other side. Cupping both her breasts in my palms and fingering her nipples. She writhes and shudders. Her legs start to twitch with need.
She doesn’t say anything, but I slow my playing. I want to keep talking even though I am slowly building up a case of blue balls but it reminds me of what I deserve. I don’t deserve her. She’s too perfect. Too pure. A true princess.
In my silence, she feels the need to fill the space, I guess it’s because I’ve been so open with her. “I was raped,” she says and I freeze.
The words tumbled from my mouth before I could stop them. His disclosure of his story combined with the shot gave me the little boost of confidence that I needed to blurt it out. What I didn’t expect was his reaction. “Dex, can you let go?” I say softly. When he froze on me, he had a pretty good grip on my nipples and he hasn’t let up. It’s not uncomfortable, but it starting to hurt. Slowly he releases my nipples and he pulls his hands back.
No, no, no. “That… that’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” I say as I stand up and go lean against the counter by the fridge.
“What happened?” he asks in a voice so low I can barely hear him.
“I don’t know that you want to hear this. Not tonight, not while you’re so…exposed,” I say.
“Sweet girl,” his eyes meet mine, “now is the time to tell me.”
His eyes are soft yet serious.
“Typical really.”
He growls, “Nothing about rape is typical, Raine, try again.”
“I was at a party with a group of friends. I was barely eighteen, naive. I was drinking, like everyone else at the party. Dancing and having a good time with my friends. Somewhere along the line I’d caught the eye of a guy. I was drunk, probably for the first time in my life and I flirted with him. Dancing provocatively with my girlfriends, you know the type.” I shrug but he’s unamused and I don’t blame him. “Somehow, I don’t remember how, we ended up across the street, walking through the park. He came on to me, attacked me. I managed to knee him in the balls and I ran away.” I watch him flinch at the memory of our own little knee to balls encounter last week, but the story is coming out automatically. I’m not really seeing Dex, the room or anything else but that night.
“What happened after you ran away?” he asks softly. He can tell I’ve checked out on him.
“He caught up to me. Grabbed me by the elbow so hard he activated a pressure point.” I grab my elbow to show him and recognition and awareness alights in his eyes. “I fell to my knees under the pain of his grip and he hit me with something, I don’t know what, but it was right across the side of my head.” My hand instinctively goes into my hair to rub the three scars I have. “I don’t remember much of what happened after that.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me.
“I spent nearly four weeks in the hospital recovering from head trauma, a broken leg, I had to have surgery to fix two tears, down there…” I stop talking. I don’t talk about the last bit, ever.
“What else?” he says quizzically.
I shake my head. He stands up and walks toward me. My whole body starts to tremble and tears well in my eyes. I momentarily think that he’s going to walk away, walk past me and out the door, but he doesn’t. He comes to stand in front of me. “Tell me,” he implores.
“I can’t.”
“Please?” he whispers.
I lean into him with my head, pressing it against his chest. He gently brings his hand into my hair and strokes it, comforting me. “I didn’t have a choice. Not that I could have made it anyway because there were too many factors involved. In order for them to repair the internal damage, I had to have an abortion…” I can’t control the sobs that pour out of me.
“Shh. It’s all right,” he says trying to lift my chin up. After a couple of taps I give in, raising my tear soaked eyes to his. “You did nothing wrong,” he tells me softly. “And anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.” He leans down and kisses my cheek, kissing away my tears then he moves to the other cheek, repeating the process. “It doesn’t change.” I feel his hands slide down my body and up under my shirt. I shiver as his hands touch skin and all my nerves are on fire, desire building once again. “It doesn’t change a thing about how I feel about you.” His lips land on mine the moment his fingers brush across my nipple, forcing me to open my mouth and he steals my moan with his tongue. The kiss doesn’t last. “If anything, it makes what I feel right now a thousand times stronger. We both have scars. Scars we’re required to live with.”
He kisses me again, this time the passion is almost more than I can bear. I pull on the bottom of my shirt, and he breaks the kiss only long enough for me to rid myself of my shirt and toss it to the floor. He pulls off his t-shirt too. “If you tell me to stop, I will stop. If you tell me to leave, I’ll go.” He lays a gentle kiss against my forehead. “If you tell me to stay, I will stay. I am not doing this out of guilt for what you’ve told me, or for what I’ve told you. I’m doing this because I have to be inside you. I can’t take it anymore.”
“Don’t stop,” I breathe and his hands come up to cup my cheeks and his lips are back on mine once more. I place my hands against his chest, my fingers trailing down over his nipples, down his washboard abs to the button on his jeans. His tongue slides in against mine and I slide mine along his. Soaking him in, savoring the taste that is distinctively Dex.
My head starts to spin as I slide his zipper down. Hooking my thumbs under his boxers, I push them down, freeing his cock and I take it quickly into my hands. His breathing hitches and he moans into my mouth. My head is spinning and I pull back, attempting to catch my breath, but he grabs my shoulders and guides me towards the bed.
Once my knees back up against it, he gently pushes me down on the edge. “Don’t move,” he says softly and I obey, waiting patiently while he gets out of his jeans and goes into his pocket. “I…I don’t want to use this,” he says in a rush as he pulls a condom from his pocket. “But I owe it to you to get tested first.” He looks me in the eye; I try hard to hide my panic. “I get tested regularly. I was tested right before the tour, but…” I shake my head.
“I’d appreciate it if you got tested. Then you can ditch the condoms.”
“I’ve never not worn one.” I can’t hide my surprise. “I was more afraid of other things than…fuck, should we really be having this conversation?”
I smile at his flustered expression. “Probably not, but I have an IUD. It’s highly effective.” He smiles then. “I was never going to let that happen again, not until I’m truly ready.” He nods his understanding and tosses the condom on the bed. “Come here,” I tell him, desperate to have him touching me again.
He comes over to me on his knees, and I cup his cheeks and kiss him. He doesn’t linger there before he starts kissing along my jaw, down my neck, across my shoulder, kissing the points of my wings as he goes. He swaps licks, nibbles and kisses down my chest, avoiding the one place I desperately need him. I groan in frustration and he smiles like a Cheshire cat. “What do you want, princess?”
I grab my aching breasts in my hands and watch as his face lights up at the overflowing swell of them an
d he gently sucks a nipple into his mouth. Licking, flicking and sucking on it like his life depends on it. His other hand comes up to play with the other nipple and I moan.
He kisses across the swell to my other nipple and sucks it into his mouth, teasing me. “You’re torturing me,” I whisper and he smiles as he bites my nipple. I yelp and start laughing. I fall back on the bed.
“Now that’s a beautiful sight,” he says as he lifts my legs over his shoulders and before I can balance on my elbows, his tongue swipes against my sex.
“Ahh, fuck,” I groan and put my hand in his hair, holding him to me, grinding my pussy against his face and he doesn’t stop. He’s licking, circling, sucking and then I feel him slide a finger inside me. He quickly finds the spot that lights me up like nothing else and my legs start to shake.
His mouth comes away, but his finger doesn’t stop. He slides another one inside and I begin to fuck his fingers. “It is my goal to make you come like last time, as many times as humanly possible,” he breathes. His hot breath is caressing my sex; my clit is a ball of overwhelming sensation.
“Please,” I whine and his mouth is back on me in a second. He doesn’t let up licking and sucking on my clit. Occasionally his teeth graze my stiff nub and I writhe. My orgasm is building, simmering just below the surface. “Fuck. Dex…” I practically scream as my orgasm overtakes me. My body shakes with the release he so desperately wanted. The warm rush of fluid slides past his fingers and he groans into my pussy. He slows his motions, letting me ride out the rest of my orgasm.
When I finally settle, he pulls back. His lips are wet, glistening with my juices and somehow I find the strength to sit up; he extracts his fingers as I do. I lick at his lips, tasting him and me combined into one seriously hot aphrodisiac. He’s the first to start to lose control. “Take me,” I whisper against his lips and I kiss him once more. I slide up on to the bed and lie down, spreading myself out for him. My hand lands on the condom he threw up here and I put it between my teeth, ripping the foil and pulling out the barrier he needs. “Come here.” I give him my own command and he dutifully obeys me. I sit up slightly and line up the condom and roll it down his shaft as quickly as I can.
