Page 119 of Tormented
I’m freaking the fuck out. The night before Sawyer left for Cali, Hooch was in my bed—talking. He basically laid out the ground rules that he didn’t want to see me anywhere near Sawyer in “that” way. If he hears what we did, if Sawyer decides to be a typical male and brag to one of his closest friends, then hell . . . war might be closer to home than anyone thinks.
“Can I grab that drink after all?” I ask.
Callum chooses the perfect time to walk through the common room. “No alcohol for her,” he announces, hand raised and pointed in my direction as he strides by.
Dog jerks his chin up, and then gets back to ignoring me while I slide off the barstool, defeated, and head upstairs to the living quarters. I showered at the motel in Grand Junction, but for obvious reasons I’m suddenly feeling a whole new desire to get clean all over again.
My room’s exactly how I left it—a slip of comfort in turbulent times. I kick my boots off and drop onto the mattress, staring up at the reflection that looks back down at me from the ceiling. I had the mirrors put in back in my pigheaded liberating phase, right before I headed off on my soul-searching trip around the Southwest. Now though, I’m regretting the fact I can see what a fucking wreck I am in full detail.
Potential problems with Sawyer and Hooch aside, I’ve got other slightly more important things to worry about. By simply thinking of letting Sawyer in, I’ve inadvertently opened the floodgates to things I’ve kept buried, issues I’ve compacted with all the other trash. It never occurred to me that in order to tell him about my past, those words have to go through me first. I can’t stay neutral in this, there’s no denying that explaining what happened to me is going to resurrect feelings I’d rather not relive.
Those girls Cash killed, they triggered something deep in me. Their brutalized bodies have played on my mind since we left the filth-ridden house. Was that what transpired for the women Evan would bring home? Or did he do worse? Although I’m not entirely sure what worse would have been. And just how much of his sick shit did I help in my ignorance as a kid?
“Honeypie, won’t you go get Daddy some fresh towels?”
“What for?”
“No askin’ questions, precious. Just do as you’re told, okay?”
I shiver at the memory of his hand stroking my hair off my face while he stood there before me with his knees bent, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. Momma loved that man, and still, to this day, I have no fucking idea why.
Shaking the memory away, I get up and strip down, wrapping the towel that hangs on the back of my door around my body. Gathering up my toiletries, I head down to the shared bathroom at the end of the hall. King’s promised that as soon as he can he’ll remodel and give us all our own bathrooms when he adds in more bedrooms, but I know the club is in the shit financially; I’m not expecting him to work miracles.
At least the bathroom is empty, it being a little after lunch.
I turn the water on and drop my ass to the edge of the bath while I wait on the shower to heat up. Part of me hopes by some freak miracle Sawyer will stride through that door again and give me an encore. The sensible side of me knows that was a one-off. I saw the way he shut me down, not once, but twice before Dog provoked the beast. The carnal part of him might want what I’ve got to offer, but the part I’m interested in, the intellectual, is fighting to keep me at arm’s length.
Did I presume too much? Is he embarrassed by me? Does he not want the guys to know how low he’s stooped?
Maybe so, but I refuse to believe what we did in that motel shower was nothing but raw animal desire. There was something else in his eyes, something that said he felt more than he bargained for too. We had a connection. Maybe it was young, underdeveloped, and yet to fly, but it was alive.
I rise to grab my shampoo from the bag on the counter with new conviction. The Abbey who left to find herself in the back roads of America might have been this timid and doubtful of herself, but the one who came back wasn’t. I owe it to her, the new me I worked so fucking hard on, to keep up the hard work I put in, to not let my doubts win. I didn’t go through hell for this. I didn’t risk my safety more times than I should have just so I can fall apart over a man.
You’re a badass bitch.
Yeah, I am. I need to fucking remember that. And maybe if he’s not so keen to go after what I’ve got, I need to remind him of it daily until he admits that I’m exactly what he needs.
Fuck the maternal hearts like Ramona. Look how that worked out for him.
Fuck the naïve good girls. Look how they run from him.
He doesn’t need something better, something more pure. Fuck what his head might tell him. He needs what his heart clearly desires: me, the female fucking equivalent of his madness to balance his scales.
And it’s on me to prove why.