Taunt Me (Rough Love Book 2) (26 page)

“I’m sorry it’s not enough,” he said roughly. “I guess we were never enough for each other.”

He spun on his heel and walked out of my bedroom, his back muscles tense and his jaw clenched. I followed him to the living room, where he snatched up his clothes and began to dress.

Holy shit.
I’d wanted to push him to open up to me, to love me. Instead, he seemed poised to break up with me. I started backpedaling, retracting my words in a panic.

“I’m just confused by you,” I said. “Maybe I’m asking too much.”

“You’re not asking too much.” In those curt, resigned words, I knew I’d pushed too far, to the point where he’d decided to give up on our entire relationship. He shoved his arms into his shirt sleeves. “You’re asking me for things any normal person would want. I’m glad you’re normal. Unfortunately, I’m not.”

I looked down at the shards of my dress as he scooped up his jacket and started toward the door. I stepped in front of him, hugging my arms over my breasts. “What does that mean?”

He waved a hand for me to move. “It’s late. I have to go.”

“Now? Can’t you stay and talk? What about us?”

He looked down, held my gaze for long seconds. He was gone. There was no more “us” to talk about. He was leaving me a second time, and I knew this time it would be for good.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said quietly, without rancor. “I can’t be what you want. I don’t have it in me.” He gave a soft, bitter chuckle. “You’re right when you say there’s nothing inside me, starshine. Somehow you’ve always known me better than anyone else.”

I blinked at him. “I didn’t mean it when I said that.”

“I think you did. I care for you, Chere, enough to...” His voice went on, breaking my heart as his fingers slipped around mine for a moment. “Enough to let you go. I think it’s best if we parted ways.”

“Price—”

“And I’m not going to give you some poem to remember me by, because you’re right, that’s shitty. It’s someone else’s words and feelings, not mine.” His lips tightened. “I’d give you my words and feelings if I knew what they were. But you’re right. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know what’s inside me, especially when it comes to you.”

He let go of my hand, kissed my forehead, then opened the door with inexorable words of parting, his own blunt poetry.

“I just know it’s not enough to make you happy. And that’s not okay.”

When I was little, I had all these dreams of power and force and good and evil. I wanted to fight dragons. I wanted to be heroic and save princesses. I pored over the pictures in my fairy tale books, fetishizing the women, so different from my autocratic mother and my nagging nannies. I stared at drawings of lonely Rapunzel locked in her tower, or Cinderella crying by the fire, and my little-boy heart felt full and strong.

When I got a little older, my fairy tale fantasies transformed into superhero daydreams. I wanted to be both the villain and the rescuer to my adolescent crushes. I wanted to hurt women and save them, and be worthy of them. As I aged, I developed very specific fantasies, of towers and dungeons, cages and rope, and tearful, traumatized victims. I masturbated endlessly to imagined scenes of torment and abduction.

Then I grew into an adult, and realized that my needs skirted the edge of what was socially acceptable. Failed relationship followed failed relationship, and I finally gave up. I realized, well, no one will ever allow me to live out these fantasies without coming to hate me. I’ll never find a modern woman who’ll crave force and slavery, and be willing to surrender to so much pain. I’ll never find a woman who will accept this dark, unhinged side of me.

Then I found her.

And then, a few years later, I realized fairy tales rarely came true.

Not that we’d ever been a fairy tale. An insecure ex-hooker and a sadistic commitment-phobe were never the stuff of happily ever after. Still, it hurt to hear her say that I had
nothing inside me
.

Nothing?
Nothing but three years of worry and angst and desire for you, you raving bitch.

She hadn’t just bruised my soul with those words she flung at me. She’d raked her claws over the only part of my psyche that wasn’t confident and strong. She’d dug right down to the part of me that wanted to love, but was afraid of being hated again, and again, and again. Yes, I was a fucking coward when it came to love. I didn’t need her to point it out to me. I knew.

As she had stood there railing at me, our roles were reversed, and she was the one mindfucking and hurting me, and trying to make me cry, only she wasn’t doing it for sexual titillation. She was doing it because she honestly, literally believed I didn’t care about her, that I was only interested in using her for sex.
There’s nothing inside you but selfish emptiness, and money, and violence.

Maybe she was right. Maybe beneath my rich, successful outward appearance, there was only a sniveling asshole who needed things his way. Maybe that was all I had to offer her, not love, but jealousy and desperate, pathetic scrabbling.

I’ll buy you. I’ll pay for you. I’ll lock you in my dungeon. That will make you stay.

It didn’t escape my notice that I’d spent thousands of dollars outfitting a dungeon I’d never allowed her to see. She needed a happy life, not a slave collar. She needed a good man, not me. I was selfish, empty, violent, and not enough of what she wanted.

Now I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t fair to string her along, and I couldn’t survive another shakedown like the one she’d subjected me to today. If I didn’t walk away from her and eventually manage to forget about her, I’d slog through the rest of my life losing my fucking mind.

I’d just have to distract myself for a while. Block her number, delete her contact information, stay close to home. I had work projects I could concentrate on. Those were great for distraction, and eating up mental energy. I had books for when all else failed.

As for the physical, I could create profiles on BDSM dating sites, and find women to fuck and beat on, women desperate to surrender to men like me. There were plenty of them, the majority willing to subsist without love, only to have some dominant guy’s attention.

Or I could try to write poems for Chere, or paint some fucking painting, exposing my soft, cowardly insides to try to win her back.

No. Solitude was so much safer, so much less risky. I went to the guest room closet and dug out the binoculars, and turned out all the lights and prowled to my spot by the window. I trained the lenses on her apartment. All the lights were on, and her drapes were open. There was a rectangle of paper in the center window. I focused on the words.

There’s always a way
, it read, in her swirly, girly-shit writing.

I put down the binoculars and sat on the couch with my head in my hands. I should never have told her that, because there wasn’t a way. My dungeon would remain as empty as my heart. She was right, there was nothing inside me.

Without Chere, there was absolutely nothing at all.

“Chere, baby. You need to get out of bed.” Andrew nudged me, checking for life. I’d been hiding under my covers for about a week now, because I didn’t want to face the world.

“Chere,” he said again. “You haven’t eaten all day. I brought cookies.”

“Don’t want cookies.”

Andrew’s eyes widened. “You always want cookies. I’m calling a mental health hotline.”

I sat up and tried to hit him with my pillow. And missed. Maybe I did need to eat something. “I don’t need a hotline,” I said, to make the worried look go away. “I just can’t believe...”

I can’t believe he left me again.

I’d tried to call. I’d tried to write to him, but my emails bounced back. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d told him he had
nothing inside him
, which was so awful and wrong. His expression when I said it...

Now I was the one who felt empty inside.

“I have to go apologize,” I said to Andrew, huddling deeper in the bedsheets.

“You know what’s going to happen if you go to him. More sex. More confusion. From what you’ve told me... I don’t know.” He touched my hair, brushing it back on the pillow. “He’s warned you he would be bad for you, that he can’t give you the relationship you need.”

“You’re the one who said he loved me.”

“But if he can’t express that love…” He gave me his worried-best-friend look. “What has he brought to your life besides a bunch of drama?”

Oh, I don’t know. Everything.
He’d bought me a place to live. He’d supported my dreams and given me the nudge to make them happen. If he hadn’t left me the first time, maybe I wouldn’t have gone about my coursework with so much focus. Everything he’d done had benefitted me, except this idea that he couldn’t give me love.

“He told me that love lies,” I said. “That’s what he believes. He doesn’t know how to trust.”

“You didn’t know how to trust either, six months ago.”

“Yeah, but I still
wanted
to trust at some point in my future. I wanted someone to prove trustworthy.”

“You think Price is trustworthy?”

“Maybe,” I said weakly.

Andrew frowned at me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Price had said.
I can’t be what you want. I don’t have it in me.
If that was true, why had he done so many generous things? Why all the help? Why all the kisses and poetry?

“He doesn’t realize he’s a good person,” I said softly.

“He can be a good person, babes, and still not be right for a committed relationship.”

“I think other women have made him believe he’s shitty and cruel. But he’s not. They didn’t understand him.”

“And you do? You’ve been a wreck these past few weeks, feeling freaked out and confused all the time. It shouldn’t be that way. Since I’ve met Craig—”

“Oh, Craig. Perfect, well-adjusted Craig,” I snapped. “We can’t all be so lucky. Before you had Craig, you used to gush about Price.
Ooh, he loves you so much. Ooh, he’s so hot. Ooh, I want that.
”

“That was before I knew how, uh, complicated he really was. And I’ve changed now. I have higher standards because Craig has changed me for the better. Can you say the same about Price?”

Yes, I could. He’d changed me. He’d made me see the potential in myself. Now I had to do the same for him.

“I need to go see him,” I said, throwing back the sheets. “I need to explain that I was wrong, that he has plenty of love inside him, that he’s not this monster women have made him out to be.”

“Oh, Chere.”

I could see Andrew was torn between supporting me and trying to protect me, the same way I’d been torn when he’d decided to start escorting. But in my heart, I knew Price and I were meant to be together. We’d been drawn to each other even when we were apart. He’d said himself that I was the only one who ever understood him, and I understood that he’d run away now because he wasn’t okay with himself. He’d held me off all this time because he didn’t believe he was good enough. He was afraid because women had lied to him and betrayed his trust.
Love lies.

My love was no lie, and I had to make him trust me. And somehow, too, I had to let go of my own fears and trust him.

I crawled out of bed and went to the kitchen. I needed some juice and a sandwich, and chocolate to fortify me. I had to make plans. Andrew followed me and watched in consternation as I tore into a bag of chocolate chips, since I didn’t have any other chocolate in the house.

“I think he chooses not to do relationships for a reason,” he said, leaning on the counter. “Think about what he’s into, Chere.”

“He’s into the same stuff Craig is into. He’s a Dominant and a sadist.”

“But Craig takes care of me. Price, on the other hand, takes what he wants whether you want it or not. He’s very…controlling.”

“I like being controlled.”

He waved a hand at my cellophane package of chocolate chips. “What if he decides he doesn’t want you to have any more chocolate? Ever? Dominance seems oh, so sexy, until he says, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re never eating chocolate again.’”

I froze with a mouth full of chips. “He wouldn’t say that.”

“He might say it. Or he might decide you only get chocolate twice a year. Or he might decide you only get chocolate if you let three of his Dom friends stick their huge dicks in you at the same time.”

I stopped scarfing the chocolate and wondered if Price had a stable of Dom friends. “You know, that would actually be hot.”

“It’s a hot
fantasy
,” he said. “But you need to think about realities, because if you draw him into a more serious relationship, you’re going to be dealing with his controlling shit all the time. Sometimes it might be wonderful and fun, but other times it might be awful and depressing.”

“Kind of like my life now?”

“Chere.” Andrew refused my proffered handful of chocolate chips. “Listen to me. Really listen. You’ve just graduated, you’re feeling pressure about a job, you ran into Simon again, Price just deserted you for the second freaking time—”

“Because I blew up at him and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean.” I put the chocolate chips away and rooted through the refrigerator for something healthier.

“Are you sure you didn’t mean it?” asked Andrew. “A few weeks ago, a few months ago, you doubted everything. You’ve always had doubts about him, and he’s always had doubts about you. He had so many doubts, he left you
twice
.”

“Fine. Yes, he left me twice. You keep saying that. I know, Andrew. Do you want a sandwich?”

He shook his head. I made a sandwich for myself and then followed him over to the couch. He picked up right where he’d left off.

“I’m just saying that we feel things for a reason,” he said. “We feel anxiety and fear for a reason.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“Maybe you should be!”

“He cares about me,” I insisted, mostly in an effort to convince myself. “And kink-wise, I don’t know anything that could hurt as much as the way I feel right now. I miss him.”

A bite of sandwich stuck in my throat as emotion overwhelmed me. “What if he was the one, Andrew? What if he was my happily ever after? If I don’t go to him—” I blinked through gathering tears. “If I don’t go to him, if I don’t give this craziness between us a chance, I’ll never know.”