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I remembered hearing about this place. But it was just an urban legend that wealthy men threatened their kids with to keep them in line. A secluded residence somewhere where sons were sent as punishment, but given free rein to be at each other’s mercy.
“I wish I’d never met you,” I said, almost whispering. He stopped, glass grinding under him. “Believe me, girl, the feeling is fucking mutual.”
I sharpened my eyes on him. “We want what we want.” He glared, those words far more familiar than he wanted to remember, and if I weren’t so fucking scared, I’d laugh.
“Don’t you know that you can have anything you want?” His eyes searched mine. “I’ll hurt anyone for you.”
“Abuse can feel like love.” I blinked, the voice so close that my ears tingled. Slowly, I raised my eyes to look at the side of Damon Torrance’s face, his shirt wrinkled, and his tie draped around his neck. The whole class fell silent, and I glanced at Will next to me, seeing his eyebrows pinched together as he looked at the back of his friend’s head. Mr. Townsend approached. “Abuse can feel like love…” he repeated. “Why?”
Damon remained so still it didn’t look like he was breathing. He looked at the teacher, unwavering. “Starving people will eat anything.”
I loved her attitude and her anger, because I was always too warm and I needed the ice.
I was nothing, and she knew it, and in ten years, she’d be amazing, and I’d be nothing. She would never need me.
“When the bus stops, get in my fucking truck.” I breathed out a bitter laugh. Aw, someone’s lost his temper. “Why?” I asked. And the next thing I know, the bus stopped, he yanked the earbuds out of my ears, and I sucked in a breath as he leaned into my face. “Because you’re mine,” he growled in a whisper.
“I think that’s why I’ve always liked this time of day best. People hide in the dark. They quench their thirsts in the dark. They build their secrets in the dark. We’re more ourselves here than anywhere else. I get to be me...” he swallowed, staring at me, “when nightfall is coming.”
“I would never stop touching you,” he said, his voice almost tired. “And I would touch only you.”
Right now, she thought I was still obsessed and small-minded, every moment we spent together vivid and tantalizing in my memory. I didn’t want her to know that was true. Ever.
I was going to kill Michael when I got home. I was going to drench his fancy, fucking suit in his own blood for sending her here.
And then she looked at me. “Gazebos.” I forced a slight smirk, letting her know that I knew that she knew what I did to hers. She may not have deserved it, but… Okay, yeah, she kind of deserved it after she laid waste to my fucking heart. I wanted to break something of hers, too.
She stared up at me, her eyes piercing. “This is your life, and it’s not my fault,” she said in a hard but low voice. “Drugs and alcohol and more drugs and alcohol, mixed with how many women over the years?”
“God, I wanna knock you up,” he said, rising up and looking down at me as he took out a condom. “I want to ruin you for all the times you made me think you didn’t want me. I want to give you a piece of me you’ll never be able to escape.”
“But you’re going to be fucking mine someday,” he growled. “Come hell or high water, Emory Scott. You’re my woman, and you’re going to come home to me every day and sit at my table and warm my fucking bed.” He kissed me. “And you’re going to give me a Will Grayson IV. Mark my words.”
“Does Will know?” he asked, rubbing my blood between his fingers. “No.” He lifted his gaze to mine. “Because he’s the one pure, beautiful thing untainted by ugliness,” he repeated his same words from the shower. “And we love him for it.”
Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw the girl who made me want to be better. More. I saw Emmy Scott. Alex was like Damon. They loved me. They indulged my dark side. They were too forgiving and too enabling. They kept me from being lonely, but Emory taught me that not everything I wanted was going to come easy. That there were things I was going to have to fight for and there was pain in the world that my shallow lifestyle in high school kept me ignorant of. She made me feel like a man.
I’d loved Emory since the moment I laid eyes on her when I was fourteen.
From that moment on, it seemed I was always aware of her, and everything I did, I did it with it in mind that she was watching.
But it was just another example of how everyone did what they wanted to me because they thought I couldn’t stay mad. I mean, Damon almost killed me. Brutally and so badly, I could barely step foot in any body of water that wasn’t a bathtub, and it didn’t take much for me to forgive him.
I wanted to erase everything about me, because I hated me as much as she did.
Will tensed like he was shocked, but after a moment he exhaled. “Came for me after all, huh? “Always,” another voice said. I looked as Damon stepped through the smoke, laughing as he dipped down, pressing his forehead to his best friend’s.
“I reached for you,” I told her. “In my head, all these years. Even after you dumped me like trash and I couldn’t fall out of love with you no matter how much I drank and snorted, my brain reached for you always.”
“What do you think was the only thing that made me keep breathing?” My tone hardened as I clenched my jaw. “In my brain, I reached for you. I never stopped reaching for you.”
“The role of the villain is only determined by who’s telling the story.”
