“Are you mad because men have it too easy? Or because you’re just now realising how long it takes you to put all that shit on your face? Because for the record, I think you’re perfect without it.” He slides his hands down over my arse and slips beneath the fabric of my skirt. “Fuck, babe. You’re not wearing underwear … again.”
“I can’t wear underwear with this skirt. Panty lines, Sam.” I gasp when his deft fingers tug on my clit ring. “We’re going to be late.”
“Yep,” he mutters and slides my skirt up over my arse, and I’m so distracted by the things he’s doing with his hands and the way his teeth nip at the flesh of my cheeks that I forget all about my new injuries until the square of blood-stained tissue falls to the bathroom floor. He sees it the moment I do; I feel it in the rigidness of his fingers on my body and in the electricity between us. Sam stills and I meet his gaze in the mirror.
“I cut myself shaving,” I whisper in a panicked rush.
“Bullshit.” He straightens and spins me around to face him, yanking my skirt up the remainder of the way. He grasps my knee in his big calloused hands, inspecting the cuts. “Jesus fucking Christ, Pepper.”
Sam releases my leg and shakes his head at me. “How long?”
“Today, just today.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t plan on it. I cut myself shaving.” He stares at me in disbelief and I hurry to erase the disappointment in his eyes. “I did. Sammy, it’s true.”
“That’s not a simple slip of your hand, Little.”
“I didn’t mean for the others to happen. I didn’t know it was happening until I was bleeding all over the floor.”
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyes are tightly cinched, and his chest is heaving as though he’s barely keeping it together. “Do you realise how insane that sounds? That you didn’t even fucking know you were doing it? Am I gonna come home and find you bleeding out in a bathtub because you didn’t know you were doing it?”
“No. I just—”
“What?” he snaps. “What possible excuse do you have for sinking a blade into your flesh? For hurting yourself?”
Tears sting my eyes, a lump forms in my throat, and I feel as though I can’t breathe. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means it was an accident. I didn’t set out to cut myself. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was too late.”
Sammy scrubs a hand over his face and shakes his head. “I can’t watch this shit again.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper. Panic seizes my chest.
He can’t leave me. I need him.
“I watched you bleed out on your bed, Pepper. We nearly fucking lost you then. And now six years later we’re back to the same shit.”
“We’re not back to anything.” I press my palms against his chest, ignoring how they shake as my eyes plead with him not to leave. “I slipped. It won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t. Tomorrow we’re going to see your doctor and we’re gonna get him to up your meds.”
He doesn’t understand. I can’t take the pills again. I’m not me with them. I’m numb. A husk of a girl who used to think and feel. Those pills suck all of the life from me. They take Sam away from me, because the only time I’ve ever felt alive is with his touch, and they dull even that.
My voice cracks when I say, “No. we’re not.”
“Pepper—”
“This is my body, Sam, and I’ll do whatever the fuck I want with it. I’m doing just fine.”
“Cutting yourself in the bathroom and trying to hide it from me isn’t just fine. I’d call that pretty fucking far from fine, wouldn’t you?” He shakes his head and walks out of the bathroom.
“Where are you going?”
“I need some air.” He shoots back and walks down the stairs. I fix my skirt into place and then I stare at the bloody razor in the sink, and the fucked–up girl in the mirror that I can never escape, no matter how many pills I swallow. And that’s the crux of it, that even now, three months after I swallowed my last pill, I still feel exactly the same as I did when I was on them.
Whether I take my meds or not, I still hate the person I am on the inside. I hate how weak and pathetic I am, and I hate the firm dark hand of this illness, and how tightly it grasps me. I hate that it hurts the people around me. If I could disappear, just cease to be without hurting them, I probably would, but it’s their love that keeps me anchored here, and it’s their love that makes me hate myself. It’s their love that makes me want to die, because every cell in my body knows I’m not worthy of it. Not Holly and Jack, Coop, Ana, Elijah, Lil, Bob, or Sammy. Especially not Sammy.
I want to rant, and rage, and break shit, and scream my injustice to the universe, but I’m too fucking tired for any of it. Instead, I wipe the tears from my cheeks and hurry after Sam. When I step out onto the patio off the lounge room, I’m taken aback by what I see. Sam is standing by the pool, hunched over, his fingers laced tightly together behind his head. He lets out a roar of frustration and I feel his anger and his helplessness, his sadness reverberate through my entire body.
Tears pool in my eyes and spill over. A sob escapes my throat and Sam spins around, his wide-eyed gaze conveying the fact that he didn’t know I was right behind him. I take a step back, ready to turn tail and run, but he points to me and says in a booming voice, “No! You’re not running.”
Run? I can’t move. I’m numb, but not in that good way. I told him it would be like this. I knew that eventually this would be too much for him. I knew I’d be too much for any one man to handle. Even Sammy.
“Pepper,” Sam warns, and then I do run. Or at least I take two steps in the opposite direction, but he catches me up in his arms and pulls me into him, my back to his front.
“Let me go,” I wail.
“Don’t run from me, baby,” he coos in my ear. “You scared the shit outta me. I handled it badly. I’m sorry.”
“I told you that you’d get sick of me. I told you that you’re too much for me, too good. I’m broken, Sam. I can see how much it hurt you, and yet I just want to go back upstairs and do it again. I want to cut until all the darkness bleeds out of me.”
“Shh,” he whispers, stroking the hair back from my face. “I got you, Little. I’m right here.”
I can’t breathe. He’s holding me too tightly, and I’m choking on guilt and sorrow and the blackness that always comes from knowing I’ve disappointed him, that I’ve let him down again.
He bends and scoops me into his arms, carrying me back through the house to the bedroom where he lays me down on the bed and settles behind me. Sam pulls me against his body and wraps an arm around my waist, and I’m glad for it, because in this moment, he’s the only thing ensuring that I don’t completely break apart.
“I got you, Little,” he whispers while I cry. The tears spill out of me until I’m emotionally spent, and then I feel nothing.
Then I’m weightless, anchored only by his arms around me.
The way I’ve always been.
I STEP from the longest shower I’ve had in weeks because Sammy—otherwise known as the water police—has a job interview down at the local fire station and is no doubt already schmoozing his way into the position of Chief. I wrap a towel around my body, wiping away the steam from the mirror with the palm of my hand. My skin is flushed from the heat, my cheeks scrubbed clean and rosy, my lips plump, and completely bare. My face seems alien without makeup. I like it even less than I ordinarily would.
My whole life I’ve been told that I’m gorgeous, or that I’m hot, that I have a body made for sin. But I don’t see any of it. When I look in the mirror, I still see that sad and lonely little redheaded girl, the girl who can’t be loved, because who would love a girl with scars?
I let the towel fall away from my body and I glare at the woman opposite me.
She snarls back.
As if on autopilot I reach for the top d
rawer and pull out an old black leather pouch. The corners are frayed, the zip sticks every time I open it, and the silver patterns that I’d drawn years ago, have faded. I glide my thumb over the soft leather, close my eyes and feel a frisson of pleasure slide down my spine.
I cradle the pouch in my hands as carefully as I would a newborn, knowing that inside it lies the key to my oblivion. Setting it on the vanity, I open the zip and remove a shiny, glinting blade.
I grip the blade and lean over, carefully bringing it to my thigh, to the wounds I’d made a week ago. The ones I’ve been running over with a blade every day since. I’m careful not to create any more, and it almost kills me having to stop when all I want to do is keep cutting, keep up the bloodletting, and make the pain slowly leech away. The incisions are kind of hard to see, and thanks to my ink I know Sam wouldn’t notice them.
I close my eyes. My blood sings as it wells against my flesh. And I allow that peaceful oblivion to swallow me up.
We’re late. Again. Five minutes before we were supposed to leave, Sammy decided to attack me in the kitchen. I’ve never been very good at saying no to him. That point is made doubly true when the man comes up behind me, bends me over the breakfast bar, and slips his already oiled–up glorious cock inside me. Half an hour later, as he fucked me up against Coop’s giant stainless steel refrigerator, I still hadn’t said no to him.
The man was insatiable. I was insatiable. Together we were motherfucking fireworks.
Now, I take Sammy’s hand and pull him through the underground bar where Mace is celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday, right to a secluded section of roped off booths in the back.
Mace stands up when he sees us approaching. “Babe, you made it.”
Sammy’s hand tightens in mine, one brief glance behind me proves he’s thinking what I expected him to be thinking: that he wants to punch Mace in the face for calling me babe. Again.
A big beefy bouncer pulls back the velvet rope to allow us entry. It seems kinda ridiculous, since the thirty-odd people here to celebrate Mace’s birthday look like the sort of people you’d want to keep out of your party rather than in it. I don’t think anybody’s going to be gate crashing that rope anytime soon.
Mace scoops me up in a giant hug, one that has me clutching his present in my hands for dear life so I don’t lose it to the floor.
“Happy Birthday, Mister.”
“It is, now that you’re here. I thought you were going to stand me up again?” He’s referring to last weekend, and how we didn’t turn up at his brother’s show. I’d been vague with my explanation at work the following day. I couldn’t exactly tell him I’d relapsed and given in to the temptation to open my veins and bleed out all over the bathroom floor. Mace had helped me finish the tattoo on my thigh; he’d seen the scars there, but he’d never said anything. We’d just never talked about it. There were a lot of things Mace and I didn’t talk about.
“You know Kingston was devastated when he didn’t see your pretty face in the crowd.”
I roll my eyes. “Sure, because he didn’t have a hundred other women throwing their panties at him.”
“You woulda thrown your panties? Jesus, don’t tell him that. He’ll commit suicide knowing you weren’t there.”
“Happy birthday,” Sam says, inserting himself into the space beside us and offering his hand to Mace, who stares pointedly at it and then chuckles. Sammy glares at him, and even above the noise of the packed bar I can hear him grinding his teeth.
Sometimes Mace is a complete fuckhead.
“We got you a present,” I say, thrusting the bag in Mace’s face so he’ll quit glaring at my man as if he’s about to throw down, jelly-wrestling style. Though that could be kinda hot.
Mace turns his attention back to me. He takes the gift bag from my hand and pulls out the bottle of Jack, looking it over appreciatively. His mouth tips up in a smile. “You remembered?”
“It’s all you drink, Mace. Kinda hard to forget.”
“I meant you remembered the night we shared a bottle of this shit,” he whispers, and because of the noise, it’s not so much a whisper as it is shouting in my face. He leans into me, his dark eyes going all liquid and intense. “Doesn’t taste the same from a glass, though.”
“Whoa. Okay, Birthday boy,” I say, placing my hands on his chest in an attempt to get him to back the fuck up. I love Mace, he’s fun and he’s a raving flirt, but this territorial bullshit he’s pulling is beginning to piss me off. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Not enough to make your big gorilla there vanish before my eyes.”
“I need a fucking drink,” Sam says, “You coming, babe?”
“Yeah, just a sec.” I smile up at Sam and he turns away, heading for the bar without me. Once Sam is out of earshot, I turn to Mace. “You’re being a douche. Behave and I won’t let him punch you in the face.”
“Can I punch him in the face? I am the birthday boy after all.”
“You’re about to be the birthday boy in a coma.” I poke a finger at his chest. “I mean it. Back off and be nice.”
“Nice is for pussies.”
“Then it’s for pussies that get some. I know what you’re doing, and it isn’t going to work. Stop being an arsehole.” I retort, stalking away from him, and by stalking I mean moving one centimetre at a time because the place is packed. I push through the crowd, squeezing in and out of bodies in order to get to Sam. When I find him, he’s leaning up against the bar, throwing back what looks like a double of whiskey. I stand back and watch him for a beat. A couple of prissy bitches stand beside him, tottering on their white platform heels. They all look like they hit up “Hookers ‘R’ Us” and bought the same tired–arse dress in every colour. Bleurgh.
One of the girls, a small blonde with perky tits and an arse tight enough to bounce a coin off it, makes her move. She’s exactly Sam’s type. Small, blonde, gorgeous … She leans in and asks him a question, and I wanna stab her in the eyes with my spiked heels. Sam smiles, unleashing all that completely clueless sex appeal on them, and I’m not lying, I’m sure I see the blonde’s knees give out a little. And yeah, okay, I’ve been a sucker for that smile for longer than I’ve had tits and arse, so I can’t really blame her.
She leans in again and mutters something in his ear. He shakes his head and glances around, pointing right at me when his gaze singles me out from the crowd. He says something to the woman and the Cranky Skank Posse all lean around Sam to give me evil eyes. I smile and give them a little finger wave. Goldilocks shakes her head and turns up her nose, muttering something else as they retreat. Sam doesn’t look as though he’s really paying them any attention though, because his eyes are firmly fixed on me and burning a hole through my flesh.
I walk up to him and lean against the bar. “Hey.”
“Hey,” he says, right back. He’s doing that sexy grin thing and his eyes are all molten heat. I have the urge to climb him like a tree. Sammy chuckles, as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
I lean in, snatching up his drink and downing the remainder of it, and then I grab hold of his shirt and pull him down to me. “I need you inside me, now.”
“Let’s get out of here then.”
I shake my head. “Meet me in the men’s bathrooms.”
“Fuck, I love your naughty side,” Sammy says.
I shoot him a wink and saunter off, only I don’t make it far because I’m stopped by a screaming, over-the-top voice that I know a little too well. “HOLY FUCK, IS THAT PEPPER RYAN? The only daughter of world-famous Taint front-man Cooper Ryan?” I spin around and am instantly enveloped in a hug. Trix is a hugger. “Bitch, where the hell you been? I thought you were fuckin’ dead!”
“Nope, still here. I just went home for a bit.”
“You went back to Bum-Fuck Nowhere? No fucking way. Why would you do that? And why the hell didn’t you invite me? Did you see the guy? What’s his name? Seth … Scott?”
“Sam,” I finish for her, staring ap
ologetically over her shoulder at the man in question. Trix follows my gaze and dismisses Sam for another interrogation.
“Right, Sam. Sooo, details. Did you fuck him? Was it as good as you remembered? Did he still veer to the right?”
Sam leans in and answers for me, “She did. It was. And yeah, it’s still hanging to the right.” He holds out his hand and after a moment of stunned silence where Trix is staring at Sam with her mouth hanging open—and it’s highly likely her Vagoo is already putting at the welcome mat—she shakes his hand. “Hi, I’m Sam.”
Trix turns a stunned, wide-eyed, and a little bit too excited gaze on me. “Sam, Sam?” She looks to me for clarification. “That Sam?”
“That Sam.” I smile.
“Holy shit, girl,” she says, and then takes a moment to sweep her gaze over him from head to toe. “Where is this town again? If they all look like him, I’m fucking moving. Now.”
I shake my head. Trix is a freak—no really. She’s a piercer, a hairstylist—or more importantly, my hairstylist—and it’s pretty widely known that when she was fifteen, she ran away to join the circus as a contortionist before falling in love with a man twenty years her senior. It didn’t end well—at least, not for him, because he’s still serving time in lock-up for statutory rape. Obviously they’re no longer lovers, but she still goes to visit him on Sundays, and has since she was eighteen.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars and free colour for a year if you let me take him home and fuck his brains out.” Sam withdraws his hand from hers—which she was still shaking, by the way—and his smile vanishes. He actually looks a little frightened as his eyes dart to mine.
“Ha. Not for all the colour in the world, Trixie.” I slide my hand around Sam’s bicep and pull him close to me.
Trix tucks her teal-green mermaid hair behind her ears and grasps my forearm a little too tightly. “I will empty my bank account into yours just to see what’s inside those jeans.”
“Sorry, Trix. I waited a long time to make him mine, and I’m not sharing.”
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