hand, and she fell forward and caught herself with a palm to my chest.
“You get I haven’t fucked another woman in four years, yeah?” I watched as Hadley’s eyes flared and heated. Yeah, she was getting it. “I didn’t mince words so I don’t know how I could be any clearer but I’ll try again. For seven days, I’ve fisted my cock thinking about how tight and wet you were. I stroked myself to the memory of the sounds you made, the way you looked when you climaxed, the way your pussy felt wrapped around my cock. I’ve had you once yet I have every inch of you memorized. Thinking about any part of that night gets me hard. So for the love of Christ, please cut me some slack and let’s get through the rest of this conversation so you can tell me what scares you and I can put your mind at ease.”
I was holding her close so I didn’t miss the way her body shook. I also didn’t miss her leaning closer.
“Baby,” I groaned. “Bed. Talk.”
The little minx smirked. She liked that she’d rendered me near-speechless.
I knew Hadley was of a different mind when she made no move to the bed. Instead, she tilted her head back and caught my stare.
“I’m scared because now I know what it feels like to have my heart broken.” My stomach dropped and a bad taste slid up my throat. “You said some things last week about you not being the man for me. That scares me.”
I’d said a lot of shit last week that I never should’ve said. Some of it in an effort to push her away, some of it because I was pissed as hell at myself and had taken it out on her.
“I got some shit I gotta work through. I wasn’t ready to face it and I said some stuff I didn’t mean in order to not face it. It was jacked-up what I said and you’re right; it was about me being a coward for not wanting to sort myself knowing it’s gonna be painful. But I have a feeling having you next to me to ride that out will make it easier. Bottom line is, I took a lot of crap out on you and I shouldn’t have. Everything you said to me was spot-on. You scored deep that night and that’s part of what I thought through this week. I wouldn’t be here now if I wasn’t sure I could be the man you deserve.”
“What do you need to sort out?”
Fucking shit, I didn’t want to do this ever and I especially didn’t want to do it now. But I’d said some fucked-up things and now I needed to face the repercussions.
“My dad’s been in prison for twenty years. He’s being paroled in a few months and that’s brought up a bunch of shit I keep buried at all costs. I got the letter the day before I picked you up from the library. It was fresh, it was burning a hole in my chest. Then what happened between us happened and I lost it.”
I watched Hadley’s face screw up and braced for her disgust.
“Honey.” Her hand moved up my chest to my neck then the pads of her fingertips dug in. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. The bastard should stay in there and rot.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m sorry you’ve had to live with that. I can’t imagine. What about your mom? Where’s she?”
More ugly. More shit. More stains I couldn’t wash away.
“Seven years after my dad went down, she successfully drank herself to death. And don’t feel sorry about that. Both of them were drunks. Not alcoholics. Mean, nasty drunks. Both of them rotten to their core. She was never my mom, she was the woman whom I lived with until I didn’t have to anymore. And the day I left I never looked back. Never spoke to her again. Didn’t claim her ashes, didn’t attend her funeral if there was one, didn’t go back to see what happened to her things, nothing.”
Hadley stood in a daze staring up at me. The foul taste that always accompanied memories of the bitch pooled in my mouth. Hate wasn’t a strong enough word to properly describe how I felt about the people who’d brought me into the world. They were vile, inhumane pieces of shit. The dog shit on the bottom of your shoe that you can’t scrape off.