Damage Me (Crystal Gulf Book 2) (15 page)

“You want to know something?” Mom asked after a second. He shook his head, but she kept going anyway. “Tyler Bachmen never smiled at anyone. He never wanted good. He never loved. When you think of wanting a drink think of the fact that you beat that son of a bitch.”

I frowned at the way she talked about my dad, staring at my food. He couldn’t have been that bad, could he? Because if he was that bad, then wouldn’t I be also? Is that why Bach thought he was bad? Because he grew up with him? No. I instantly dismissed the thought. That’s not true.

“Did I?”

Mom shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder whether I did too. Then I look at Hill and know that I did the right thing.”

Bach looked up at me and met my eyes, something that looked like comfort chasing away the bad.

“Can you tell me something good about him?” I asked, my tone soft.

“Our dad?” He looked away.

“One thing.” I gripped my fork. “Just one.”

“Hill,” Mom hushed.

“Just one damn thing. One.”

“Language,” she chided.

I rolled my eyes. She cussed like a trucker.

Bach locked me in place. “The only good thing he ever did was make you. That’s it. He didn’t do anything else worth remembering.”

Rage rushed through me. “You can’t think of a single thing he did for you? You lived with him your entire life. Didn’t you?” I added when he flinched.

He shook his head.

His lack of answers grated on me. “Why don’t either of you talk about him? Mom says one thing a year about him, maybe, and you act like you’d rather swim with sharks than say one nice thing about him.” I slammed my hand on the table. “Why?”

“Because there’s nothing nice about him!” Bach growled, shedding his unwillingness. “He was a monster. A drug addict, drug dealing monster, who beat the shit out of me every chance he got and even when he didn’t. There. Are you happy? How does it feel to know you yearn for a monster?”

How much more could my insides take? They’re already overturned. I haven’t been myself since I went to that party. But that was the final straw. Bach’s right. I yearned for my father my entire life. I craved what I was missing. To learn that the person I wanted so badly was a drug addict, drug dealing monster, that he beat my brother, sent ice through me. “I don’t believe you.” I looked at Mom for reassurance, but she was looking at her coffee as if it were going to save her from the truth. “Is that true? Did my dad beat him?”

She nodded once.

“And you knew this?”

Nod.

“And you still had a baby with him?” I am horrified.

“Things happen, Hill. I was young. I was on my own. I wasn’t making the right choices.”

“Wait.” I couldn’t think straight. Pieces of me I thought were mine were revolting. “Where was your mom?”

He raised his eyebrow, answering my question.

“You were sleeping around behind his wife’s back? My dad’s a cheater too?” My heart was shattering.

Mom couldn’t look at me. “Tyler was a charmer.”

Bach made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. Mom’s eyes flashed, and they landed on his. Something passed between them like it always did.

“What were you doing hanging around a drug dealer?” What was going on here? “Patty Hayes,” I demanded, using her full name the way she did mine when I was in trouble. “What were you doing around him?”

“What do you think?” Mom finally relented. She sat up, squared her shoulders, and accepted that I finally knew the truth. “I used to be an addict, Hill. I did meth with the town drug dealer and slept with him when his wife wasn’t home. I fell for his bullshit and his dope. But all of that stopped when I found out I was pregnant with you. I stopped. I left that world behind,” she said, but she hesitated slightly, and I knew she was about to lie. “I didn’t go back but one time,” she continued, pausing to glance at Bach, “and then I never went back again.”

I was confused. There was so much there, and yet the holes were flagrant. “I don’t understand. You stopped sleeping with him when you found out you were pregnant? Right?” Her silence belied her previous statement. “How old was I when he went to jail?”

Bach cleared his throat when she remained quiet. “He went to jail when I was seven. So that would have made you around four.”

My jaw dropped. “Mom!” I didn’t usually judge my mother. She struggled to raise me; all that I had was because of her. But staying with an abusive drug addict while he was married with a kid, was a side of her I had never met. That wasn’t just one wrong. That was too many wrongs to count. “He hit you?” I had to check this. Bach nodded, one quick, painful shake of his head. “Bad?” He knew what I meant. Did he spank him or did he ruin him? Another nod, and when his eyes filled with pain, I knew his father destroyed him.
Your father too
. I felt sick to my stomach. “And you knew? You knew he was all of those things, and you still stayed with him?”

Her eyes were strong, they were her, but when she looked away I wondered how well I truly knew my mother. I’ve listened to her rules, followed them far more than I broke them. I did what I had to do to make it easier on her. I trusted her. She’s all I had. But this felt different. These lies were not just memories. They’ve been the truth, and I’ve been fed lies. “I wanted him. You listened to me cry for him when I was a kid. I asked about him. I thought about him all the time. And you let me? You let me want a monster?”

“Sweets,” Bach said, defending her. “You don’t understand. My dad did bad things.
Bad
things. She did the right thing. Trust me. She saved you from all of that. Have you ever had black eyes as a kid?”

I shook my head.

“Have you ever gone years, decades, almost an entire life without hearing
I love you
?”

My eyes blurred.

“Have you ever bled, shook, burned?” He flinched, but held my gaze, his pain damaging me.

“No,” I whispered.

“That’s because she saved you. She gave you everything I didn’t have growing up. You should thank her.”

“I am thankful. But did you ever miss him?”

He shook his head.

“Did you ever yearn from right here.” I patted my chest. “For a monster, thinking he was someone else?”

He opened his mouth to argue, but thought better, because in his eyes there was no love for our father, which meant he wasn’t just a monster, he was the king of Zane’s. I had lived my life wanting a demon, and my mother had let me. Let me crave darkness when all she had to do was admit she wasn’t perfect and let me decide what was worth what. Instead, she withheld truths and the lies I just so happened to cling to were disastrous.

After what I went through, knowing I had a man like Zane in me all along, in my blood, was something I refused to accept.

I didn’t have eyes like my father all this time.

I had the eyes of a monster.

Chapter Six

Dylan

I smelled.

Every time I moved I got a whiff. Body odor and sweat smeared all over me. If I sat still, I could ignore it. When I moved the smell of me sent a wave of stink around me like a fog. My leg burned, throbbing and teeming with infection. My heart burned in my chest. My gray area had kept me company for almost a week. I sat in the same spot and rotted. My stomach had given up days ago at any hopes of food. If I wanted some, I’d have to reach the second or top shelf in the cupboards, and that wasn’t happening.

When I slept, I picked up where my reality left off. I was on the ground bleeding out, wondering how Harley would take losing someone else to the army.

Maybe I should have thought about that more before I left. Maybe I had other options now that I wasn’t stuck in the lie I created. But when that recruiter walked into the tattoo shop I happened to be in, it felt more like a gift rather than a warning. He’d had answers to the questions I’d been asking myself. How could I take care of my daughter without a job? I was on my own most of my life, selling, stealing, and doing what I had to do to take care of myself. That way of thinking didn’t apply to a kid. They needed everything I didn’t have.

What I had wasn’t even suitable for me.

I grabbed at my hair and pulled, trying to regain some sense of reality. Pain could do that. I knew. It was all I felt. My days bled into one another, each more gray, more painful, and more entrapping.

It was worse than the hospital. At least in there I had a nurse every few hours. I had a TV. The remote was in the glass cabinet. In order to get it, I’d have to kneel down. The buttons were on the back of the television. I couldn’t reach them balancing on one leg.

I was certain about one thing. If I had to sit here by myself another second, I was going to snap clean through. My negative emotions had turned into bitter disgust for my entire being. I couldn’t help picturing Harley with Bach in all types of positions. She was so sweet about sex with me. How could a woman like that want to be with a guy like Bach? We weren’t gentle. We were rough. We took. Although being with Harley did made you want things you didn’t know you could have.

I pictured her long smooth body. Legs that held her up like a gift. Her hair fell around her shoulders and face. The sound of her voice as she moaned my name. The feeling of slipping inside of her for the first time, of claiming her sweet pussy as mine. I wasn’t surprised when my dick began to harden, filling with blood so quickly my balls ached. I leaned my head back and kept going. The smell and feel of her beneath me as I thrusted into her, her long legs wrapped around my waist, holding me there, keeping me in place as her pussy took my pounding.

I reached into my shorts and freed myself. Harley was the tightest girl I’d ever been with. I stroked my cock from base to tip, recalling how much she was mine when we made love. And we made love. There was no sex or screwing like there had been with all the other girls I fooled around with. With them, there was no emotion. With Harley, that’s all there was. Tears streamed down my face as I came. I groaned, and it had nothing to do with pleasure. Because all of that was gone. The pleasure, the love, and the future I lied to create—I lost it all to Bach fucking Bachmen.

“Bastard!” I growled, spewing my hurt all over my living room.

My jizz was all over me. I stared down at the mess I created in disgust. I wiped it off my hand onto my shorts and then gave up. Who was there to please? Who was left in this world for me?

At that precise moment my doorbell rang.

I glared at it. “Go away!”

My desire for a houseguest was evident in my growl, but whoever it was did not give up. They knocked softly, this timid knock that annoyed the shit out of me. I stared down at my semen and then at my reflection in the TV. I was slumped in on myself. My hair was a mess. My beard had grown in. My eyes were lethal. And pussy ass tears slid down my cheeks.

“Dylan? It’s me.” The tone of their voice was delicate and shy, barely heard through the door.

But it sucked the air out of me. It was the sweetest thing I’d heard in too long. My heart sprinted. My blood pumped. For the first time in weeks, I wanted to get up and let someone in.

“Shit.” I felt like I was covered in jizz and tears. “Give me a minute,” I called, grabbing my crutches.

Getting to my feet felt harder every day. The pain took my breath away until I was gasping for air as I went to my room. I managed to get my shorts off. My dick had thankfully unhardened, hanging limply in my boxers. I ignored the emblazed flesh of my wounds and shimmed a pair of shorts out of my drawer. Leaning against the wall, I bent, getting them over my left leg. I stepped into them with my right, and then slid them up until I was covered.

At least ten minutes had passed when I finally got to the door. I unlocked it and rested against the wall as I opened it.

Hillary was standing there. Her eyes were wounded, but thankfully her bruise had started to heal and fade. She looked so small in her oversized yellow sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Her hair was in a messy ponytail and she clutched her car keys in her hand, as if they were the only things keeping her in place.

It took me a second to realize some things. One: she was looking at me the same way I was looking at her, and unfortunately even in her baggy clothes she was cute. I was the furthest from cute I’d ever been. The second thing I realized was that I didn’t give a shit about being cute. I wasn’t cute. Right now I wasn’t anything.

“What are you doing here?” My words came out harsher than I intended. I hadn’t used my voice in days. I cleared it and met her eyes. I could barely stand them. They were so Bach it stabbed at the knife he plunged in my back. But at the same time they were so good, I couldn’t
not
look into them.

She looked down, pulling my attention to her flip-flop clad feet. Her toes were painted a bright blue. The paint was chipped on her big toes. “I don’t know. I kind of ended up here.” She raised her head, giving me a glimpse of what she was feeling. “If you want me to leave I can.”

Bach probably put her up to this. I looked over the railing to find that the lawn below was empty save for a small dark blue car. As I considered her motives, rejection-filled her eyes, and she nodded slowly, backing away.

“I’ll go.” She took a deep breath as she turned for the stairs.

I watched her, the way her jeans took her curves and hid her body. “Wait.” I didn’t change my shorts for me. “I don’t want you to leave. I was surprised to see you; that’s all.” I kicked the door open further. “You want to come in?”

Cool air smelling thickly of the Gulf blew across my face. I inhaled, letting the salty smell erase the smell of me.

“If you’re not busy,” she said, looking at me as if she were doing something wrong.

Her response amused me. “What would I be busy doing?”

“I don’t know. Eating lunch. It’s lunch time.”

I almost cracked a smile.
No, actually I was jacking off and crying about my ex
. “Don’t have much of an appetite these days.” I pushed away from the wall when she stepped inside and kicked the door closed. Having a guest alerted me to a few things. The smell, the darkness, and the quietness. “Excuse the mess. My mansion’s being renovated.”