Wrecked (The Blackened Window) (48 page)

Why would I have thought that was a new trick just for me? It’s probably the only reason he wears a belt. Dick. Why am I listening to this?
Maybe I was more of a masochist than I knew.

“I tied one ankle to the leg of the desk with my tie, and pushed her skirt up. I used some scissors to cut her underwear off and, I went after it.” He stopped, as if that was the full story. I waited, but he said nothing.

“Keep going, Xander. I want all the details.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because I heard her last night. I heard her say that she knew your darkness and she had something to match. I want to know what this cosmic
fucked-upness
is that you two share. I want to know how real it is. Have you just been playing at something approaching normal for me? Was it a game? I have to know.”

“Leda, I don’t want to tell you this. It’s the past and a lot has changed since then.”

“The fuck it has. She’s at your door in the middle of the night and you just waxed nostalgic about your
whatever
the fuck it was with her. Your shit with her is not resolved. Now I understand why she has been such a bitch to me, at least.”

“Leda, let’s just let it go and work on moving past this.”

“There is no consideration of ‘past this’ until and unless you tell me the truth. Now.” I knew it was irrational. I didn’t care. I knew I would probably regret it. I didn’t care. I could see something unresolved between them. I had to know before I could decide what to do next.

“Okay. But remember, when you hate me, when you’re disgusted with me—you fucking asked for this.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Xander

The Neighbourhood,
Afraid

When I opened my mouth to tell Leda the truth—the deeply sick shit from my past, I couldn’t speak. I had run into Stacy’s father that morning and his words echoed in my mind, forecasting what Leda was going to
know
about me as soon as I spoke the words.

I had seen Jackson in the lobby as he’d been coming off the elevator. I’d thought he was going to completely snub me, but as he’d passed me, he’d stopped, pushing his face into mine.

“I don’t know what really happened between you and Stacy, but she followed you to Texas. She never said a word against you, even though I saw… I saw what you were doing to her. She never said anything about it, just begged me to leave it alone. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a rapist, sick as fuck and should be in prison. She saved you from that. You owe her, you piece of shit.”

Leda cleared her throat in an impatient sound.

I swallowed against a wave of nausea and continued, “I had her tied down, with one free leg, so I could move her around however I wanted.” I got a reckless feeling, a feeling of fuck it. If it was gonna be destroyed with her, it just proved I really was a monster and I was gonna lean the fuck into it.

“I started behind her, licking her. She wanted it so bad I remember laughing at that. She got offended and said something smartassed. I slapped her ass, hard enough to see the creases from my palm in the handprint on her ass. When she began to protest, I started playing with her, until she forgot she was upset. I got her close to coming and stopped before she could. Just to fuck with her, for no other reason at all. I knew she was afraid of anal sex and I wanted to scare her, so I started fingering her ass. She was so wet that I didn’t need lube. I know I was running my mouth the whole time, just spouting off the foulest, dirtiest, most depraved shit I could think of. I was testing her.”

I paused to take a breath, looking at Leda to see her reaction. Her face was a blank mask, so I continued, “Mostly I wanted her to prove to me that she would really submit, so I gave her the worst of me. I know at some point, I called her a cunt and she got really mad, and tried to turn over some to yell at me, and I slammed her down on the desk.”

In the years since it happened, when I looked back at that day, I knew…I should have been better. Should have been sure she was into it. Should have given her a safeword. A million
should haves.
.

“Looking back, I think I knocked the wind out of her, because she stopped talking. This is how bad of a Dom I was then— Fuck! I can’t even call myself a
Dom.
I was a stupid kid, trying to be something that I had no idea about.” I took a deep breath and continued when Leda gestured at me impatiently. “I thought she was submitting, but she was shutting down. And remember, we had no safeword, hadn’t discussed limits. And I don’t really know, maybe she was dropping into a crap version of subspace, because she got really limp. I stood behind her and fucked her, still running my mouth about what a whore she was and whatever else.”

My brain was a fucking mess. Because this was what I had believed about myself for the last ten years and Stacy had turned it all on its head last night. And now, as I tried to explain it to Leda, I realized I had been replaying all the same shit with her, trying to do it right, but still trying to find a way to be with a girl that I could completely defile. I wanted to be able to love her and hurt her. It wasn’t a real thing. It couldn’t be a real thing. I had already done all these things with Stacy. My mind reeled in a torrent of self-recriminations. Leda was talking, telling me to keep going, not seeing that I was realizing how much I had been mindfucking myself this whole time.

I looked up at her, wishing she could save me, but knowing that she couldn’t.
Ah, fucking hell. It’s gonna fall the fuck apart. And then I’m gonna fall the fuck apart.
I kept talking, because it was the only thing to do now. The end was inevitable. I just had to play my part out.

“I grabbed the scissors and told her I wanted to cut her. She started squirming and crying and then she screamed. I cut her off with my hand over her mouth. And here’s how totally sick I am, just the thought of her bleeding almost made me come. And then it was all I could think of. I wanted to make her bleed. I wanted to taste her blood. I kept fucking her and after a moment, she started talking against my hand. Pleading for more, for something different. She was all over the place. I told her I’d let her talk as long as she didn’t make a lot of noise, but first to hold her tongue out. She obeyed me, and I flicked the blade of the scissors over her tongue and cut her. Just to taste it.”

Jesus Christ, I’m a monster. I’m a monster.
Then it just kept running through my head.
I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster.
The realization came that I had to get Leda away from me. She couldn’t be with me. I had been worrying that I might harm her in some way. Of course I would. I already was. I wasn’t capable of anything else. She was too good. I had to get her away. I let her have the last of my deepest shame, the worst thing I had ever done.

“She started crying and the blood coated her lips. I flipped her over and licked the blood from her tongue as I fucked her, as she cried and whimpered against my mouth, telling me to stop. But you have to understand—she liked to play games like that. Liked to tell me no, just to make me make her. It was so fucked up, I can’t even explain it. But it… It wasn’t that abnormal for her to say something like that.”

There it was. I was as naked as I could ever be in front of her now. She could see the rottenness in me, the wrongness in me. She didn’t say anything but her face was pale. I finished the story, to get it over with. “Her dad walked in shortly thereafter. Her
dad,
my boss’s boss. It was awful. It’s a blur, but I remember him pulling me off her and punching me, while my dick was still out. I was done at the Pentagon. The only reason he didn’t press charges or make a huge spectacle about it was that she defended me and wouldn’t make any kind of statement accusing me. She saved me from a lot of shit—prison, ruining my dad’s life.”

And since that day, I had thought I had raped her, even though I hadn’t intended to, even though it had been a horrible miscommunication. That I thought she wanted what I had, but the way it ended…I was sure I was the worst person ever. But last night, she had told me she wanted it then and still wanted it now. It was fucking with my head. What I thought was true about that night wasn’t.

Leda’s voice interrupted my circular logic. “So what did you do then? Because that was a few years ago.”

“I took six months off and Jason and I went to Europe. When we came back, I worked for a private intelligence firm, basically mercenary intelligence stuff. I did data analysis and some interrogation shit. The medicine of it was still the most interesting part, so ultimately, I applied to med school. That’s the whole story.” I waited a few beats. “Well, do you hate me?”

“No. I don’t hate you, but…Xander. I, I…I just need to think about all of this. I don’t really know what my reaction is. Let’s get through this visit and when we get back to school, I just need some space to figure it out.”

Yep…that’s about the best I could hope for.
“Okay. We should get back to the hotel. I think my mom was actually expecting to meet us for brunch. Just promise me you won’t make any major decisions about us until we can talk more.”

“I won’t. Let’s go.”

The walk back to the hotel was brisk, cold in every sense of the word. I wanted to be holding her hand, have a territorial arm around her. But she kept a solid distance between us, about two steps to the side and one step behind me. Her face was closed off. The crinkle between her eyebrows told me she was thinking.

My mom was waiting in the lobby when we walked back in. She was hungover. I could tell from across the wide space. She could tell before we got close. She got the steel in her spine that meant I was probably going to get yelled at. She kept her cards close to the chest though, let it play out.

“Hiya, kids! Already been out this morning? You’re doing better than me! Ready for brunch?”

I was about to decline and get us out of it, but Leda spoke, “I’m not doing much better, Nancy. I think I’m going to lay back down for a bit. But you two should spend some time together.” She smiled and played it off, but I knew what she was doing. She was getting away from me.

“Are you sure, Leda?” I asked.

She nodded and walked away.

She wasn’t even at the elevator doors before my mom started. “Alex, what did you do?” She was as soft as she could be, but she was angry too.

I scrubbed my hair and rubbed my neck, the need to move overwhelming. “Stacy came to our room in the middle of the night and it woke Leda up.”

“That girl is so fucking crazy now.” She pulled me into the elevator and hit the button for the top floor. She had apparently chosen to treat herself to a suite. “Come on. We’ll eat in my room for some privacy.”

Once we were settled and had ordered, she asked again. “So what happened?”

“Stacy called a few times after we went to sleep and it woke me up. I answered and told her to fuck off, but she was drunk and told me she was going to come down and wake the whole floor up.”

“She’d probably have done it too. At least you avoided a huge incident.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. That was the least of my concerns. “Anyway, I waited in the hall for her, so she didn’t knock.”

My mom nodded. She understood.

The room service arrived and she answered the door to take care of it. After the waiter was gone, we continued. “So, what did she want?”

“She wants to get back together. She wants me to know that no one other than her really understands me. That I’m the only one for her. But she did it the way she does things, convoluted, twisted. And Leda woke up, heard at least some of it.”

“So…why is that so bad? So someone else wants you. She better get used to that.”

“No, that’s not it. She didn’t know about anything between me and Stacy. And Stacy’s been a real bitch to her at school. And Stacy kissed me. She heard it all.”

“Alex, why didn’t you tell her that you had a history with Stacy?”

“Mom, what would I have said? ‘That girl that’s so shitty to you? I used to fuck her and I think I accidentally raped her?’ How does that conversation end?”

“How did the conversation this morning end?” She raised a snarky eyebrow at me, over the rim of her drink.

“Touché, goddammit. Give me some of that,” I said, grabbing at her Bloody Mary. She just switched to the screwdriver she had also ordered. Nice.

“But, here’s the thing that’s really fucking me up the most. Stacy told me that she wanted it that night. That she wants it again, for good.” I stood up and started pacing. My mom blew her breath out on a curse against Stacy. “All these years, I’ve been destroying myself, afraid to let myself have a relationship because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, because I was sure I had hurt her. Shit.” I crumpled onto the couch and my eyes watered at the enormity of how that girl had fucking destroyed me.

I had spent the years since that night convinced that I was morally flawed, one of the things I found most repugnant in the world, and she’d let me feel it. She’d let the rumors her father spread about me go uncorrected. She had seen me, called me enough times to have told me that I wasn’t the monster who had ruined her life—and she never had.

Until now. When I was on the verge of being happy, when I had fallen in love with someone else.

My mom came and sat next to me, rubbing my back. “I love you, son. I’ve never thought you were the monster you thought you were. As much as I want to slap that little bitch, at least she gave that to you. You aren’t tainted. You aren’t flawed.”

My body racked against sobs I tried to hold in and I turned to her. She opened her arms and pulled me into her, the way that no one other than a mom can do.

And it didn’t matter that I was thirty-four, that I outweighed her by a good seventy pounds, that I was half a foot taller than her. I was her little boy again. She guided me to rest against her and she kept rubbing my arm, murmuring to me all the things I hadn’t let myself believe. My heart was cracking open to even consider loving myself again.

After I had quieted down, and we had both finished our drinks, she said, “So. Now. How are you going to figure it out with Leda?”