Forbidden: A Standalone (38 page)

“You’re my property until I release you.”

“Yes.” I agreed through all my questions. Habit. Need. Desire. The drug of Deacon Bruce.

He put his cock on my seam, sliding it from clit to bruised asshole. Every sensation went through my body, electric pleasure to sharp pain. He slid into me. First stroke down to the balls, pressing me down by the sternum. I stretched my arms over my head. I was still well-trained.

He put his hand between my legs. “No one hurts you unless I say.” He ran circles around my clit. “No one. You’re my property. When they hurt you, they offend me. And when you lie to me, Kitten…” He slammed his cock into me. “It offends me.”

I was so caught up in pleasure I couldn’t even speak. I came around him, sucking him into me. His hand moved constantly, and the orgasm went on forever, breaking me apart with pleasure. He came in me at the end of it, pushing me down on him.

He flipped me onto my stomach and put all his weight between my shoulder blades. I was pinned.

“Who took you?” He slid his free hand between my ass cheeks.

“No one.”

He found my asshole, and with a finger wet from my cunt, he pressed forward, sliding the finger inside my ass.

I loved ass play, but this hurt in a way I hadn’t experienced. The shredding was more emotional than physical. I smelled wet leaves and soil. Heard the dribbling of the creek behind Warren’s delighted voice.

Oh, you’re so fucking tight for a slut.

I like it dry.

I’m going to get you for this
.

Deacon’s breath on me, so close, watching my face as he slid in a second finger.

“This hurts you,” he growled, taking his fingers out. “It shouldn’t hurt. Who did it?”

“Take me, Master,” I said with my face smushed into the carpet. “Fuck me in the ass.”

I dared him to do it when he knew it wasn’t what I wanted, because these were our roles. He did what he wanted to my body to exhibit his dominance. Usually, that worked out just fine for me, because it pushed my limits. But in my walk-in closet that day, it was I who pushed boundaries, and Deacon, like the Dominant he was, would not be pushed.

He got up on his knees. I leaned on my elbow, crying, face knotted in tight red tension. I swallowed a mess of tears and gunk, wiping my cheeks with my wrist.

He looked helpless, on his knees with his dick out. Abandoned by his most valuable skill, the ability to get what he wanted.

“Who are you protecting?” he demanded.

“You.”

His face fell before the last vowel left my lips. I’d just turned his whole world upside down with a thoughtless and honest word. I would have been gentler if I’d realized what it would do to him, but after the orgasm and the emotional violence of it, I didn’t have the brain power to lie.

“Me?” He asked it as if I’d shocked him so badly he had to repeat it to understand it.

“You.”

I didn’t know how to make him believe it. I didn’t know how to make myself believe it either. But the words hung there, suspended between us, and to leave them unsaid was to lie about what we were.

“I don’t think this is the right thing for me anymore,” I finished. “I’m using you, and it’s not right for either of us.”

I couldn’t look at him while the world slipped through his fingers. I got up and ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on the shower.

Jesus Christ. What had I done? I looked at the shower knob too long, wondering what was next. Where I would go? Who would love me the way I needed to be loved? Would I spend the rest of my life in a state of free fall, doing everything I could to find out where the bottom was?

“I hear you on the other side of the door,” I said. “I need you to just go. I’m not playing.”

I got in the shower. By the time I’d scrubbed myself raw, he was gone. My apartment felt as big and lonely as five thousand square feet could, and I longed for company away from Deacon, away from Elliot, away from parties and drugs. Just company.

I scrolled through my phone and found Karen’s number.

fiona

K
aren’s pool was inside a heated glass building. The roof retracted in the spring and fall, but in the summer, they just used the outdoor pool on the other side of the house. Her parents were gone. Her brothers were in school. The house was empty, as always. Her bikini was hooked around her hip bones, and she wore a huge T-shirt to cover imaginary fat. She smoothed it out so it didn’t touch her skin. I wore a bikini top and shorts to cover the pink paddle marks.

“I used to want to be a fashion designer,” she said. “I thought it would be so cool, you know. The runway shows. Getting girls all dressed up all the time. The parties.”

“You could still do that.”

“I’m too tired. I hear they actually work really hard.” She bit her lip. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

I was twenty-three years old, and I’d always wanted exactly what I had. Always been perfectly happy to be Fiona Drazen.

I said what I always said as if by rote. It all felt cold and hard in my mouth. “I want to be the girl all the paps want to shoot. The girl all the guys want to fuck. The girl who does what she wants. That’s what everyone wants to be.”

And it wasn’t any more true by the pool than it had been in the weeks before Deacon showed me that what I wanted and needed were the same thing. Boundaries. Control. Rules. I’d been so happy to give myself to him, but I hadn’t thought about what to do without him.

“You were always so happy with who you were,” she said. “I hated you.”

I laughed. “Sorry.”

“Nah. It was me being jealous. Now I’m too tired to try to be you.”

“Doesn’t the IV drip help with that?” I popped my sunglasses to the top of my head.

“No,” she said. “And I hate it. Even the stuff in the tube makes me feel full, and then it’s like I can feel the fat getting on me.”

It was no use telling her that she needed fat on her. I’d tried that. At the core of her being, she didn’t believe it.

She laid back. “My nurse got me to take a bite of banana yesterday. I could feel it going down my throat. In my stomach. I felt dirty. It was like I was being invaded. No one gets it. I feel good when I’m hungry. I feel, I don’t know, pure. Clean. It’s the best feeling in the world. I’m not giving that up for a bite of banana.”

“I guess I don’t have to ask if you spit or swallow,” I joked.

“Don’t even get me started. Westonwood put me off men forever.”

I froze, a million questions on my lips, but I knew asking any of them would only clam her up.

A few seconds later, after she put her head back and her face to the cold, glass-blocked sun, she spoke again. “Fucking Warren. I told him I wasn’t taking his dick in my mouth. I said, specifically, no mouth. That stays clean. So what did he do? Fucker. I hate him.”

“Shoulda bit it off.” I said it as if it was nothing, but my heart was racing and my skin crawled.

“He got his buddy, what’s his name… with the tattoos and the piercings he takes out? The orderly?”

“Mark.”

“He held me down and pinched my nose. And Warren put his thing, like, way down. God, it was disgusting. I gagged, but I was empty. I had nothing to puke. He just kept putting it in me. His balls were on my lip. His literal gross balls. Ugh. And then when he came… I breathed and I said, ‘Come on my face,’ because I didn’t want that shit inside me. But he shoved it back in and came down my throat. He held my mouth shut and made me swallow. And when Mark fucked me, he made him put me on my back so I couldn’t puke it up.”

She shook her head, and from under her sunglasses, a tear rolled along the side of her head.

“Karen, that’s terrible.”

“Whatever.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Why? So he could tell them I got diet pills from him? I mean, seriously. It’s not like I didn’t fuck him willingly in Ojai, like, how many times? And his dad and my dad are, like, best friends from Overland. What’s he going to do? Stop making Chilton movies? I don’t think so. Whatever. I washed my mouth out with rubbing alcohol. It didn’t kill me. I just won’t go back there.”

I didn’t want to show her how upset I was, but my heart was racing. She weighed eighty pounds. Her voice was soft and raspy. I could rape her if I wanted. It was like torturing a small child.

“I’m going to pee,” I said, standing. “You want something from inside? A tissue or something?”

“Sure.”

I sat on the toilet in the pool house and buried my head in my hands, because I knew two things for certain: Karen was going back to Westonwood, and Warren was assaulting someone else every day.

The question was, what was I going to do about it?

I couldn’t think straight. My body was crying out for sex. I wanted to get high, just a little high, so I could collect my thoughts. A line of flake would be fine. Just a line though. I couldn’t get so fucked up I wouldn’t be able to think.

But I knew there was no such thing as one line. I was a fuckup. I wasn’t stupid.

If I went back to Deacon, I’d be in control. His control. So I’d be trapped.

Debbie. But she was inexorably tied with Deacon, and that meant she wasn’t safe. She’d do whatever she thought was best for me, but I didn’t want to do what she thought was best. I needed to figure out what was best for myself.

Elliot.

Sure. He’d refer me to the proper authorities. That strategy was a loser from the gate. And he wouldn’t fuck me, which chapped my hide.

It wasn’t that hard. I had to figure it out. Maybe if I cleared my head, I’d wake up with a plan to get Elliot to… I didn’t know. Get Deacon into Westonwood to remove Warren’s asshole?

Even as I snapped tissues out of the dispenser, I knew I was lying to myself. I knew the old head-clearing methods didn’t work. I knew I’d wake up useless. I’d go back to the old ways. Elliot would notice and then….

And then. Right.

Karen was dry-eyed when she took the tissues and left a dense pack of sand in my soul. I felt as if I’d abandoned the world to Warren Chilton, yet a heaviness filled me. Things had to be done. I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how. But a Fiona with an emotionless voice told me that this couldn’t continue. She surprised me with her gravitas and her dominance over the constant questions that circled my thoughts.

You will make this stop.

And there it was. For what it was worth, it brought a peace to my heart.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “I think everyone’s going to The Thing later. Wanna come? They have water.”

She shrugged, not getting my joke. “Sure.”

“I have someone to meet now. See you there later.”

fiona

B
ehind the Westonwood campus, on the shoulder of a two-lane blacktop with the electrified fence fifty feet away through trees and brush, I decided to let it go. My hands clenched the bottom of the steering wheel and my jaw hurt from my teeth grinding, but I could let it go.

I got out of the car.

I didn’t know what I expected to see, or what I wanted, but I walked through the trees to the fence. Yellow-and-black signs warned against contact, and along the length of the chain link, over fallen needles and broken sandy earth, I came to the creek, and the tree, and the place where he’d raped me.

If I was giving up on going back, I was giving up on ever mentioning what had happened. No one would believe me. I was a whore. I spread myself open for anyone who could handle me.

I touched the chain link.

The shock was mild. Barely even painful.

Really?
I’d thought I would get thrown back ten feet.

I curled my fingers around the diamond-twisted wires and looked in. The bones of my hand rattled and itched. My elbows tingled. I took my hand away. That hurt.

Under that tree, where Deacon had given me back my memory and Warren had taken what he wanted, the creek gurgled and the leaves rustled in the breeze. The tree didn’t give a shit. It would go on as if nothing had ever happened.

Margie’s car came up the twisted forest road, just below the legal speed limit. I was already leaning on my car. I’d been early. My sister was on time.

My ass would stop hurting. My ego would heal. I was back in the safety of the world.

Could I let it go?

Warren didn’t have to be a problem if I didn’t want him to be.

I let go of the fence.

“Bitch,” I said, pointing at the spot, “I am not a tree.”

I’d told Margie what had happened with Warren. It was less painful in the second telling, and the listener didn’t want to fuck me, which was also nice. Of course she wanted to “do something,” so I told her I was going to the scene of the crime if she wanted to join me for a little fun.

Margie stopped right behind my car. She seemed to take forever to get out. Me, I just turned off the ignition and got out of the car. She seemed to have a list of tasks. Roll up windows. Turn off radio. Dick with some settings I couldn’t see. Put up visor. Slide folder under seat. Place keys in bag. Pick up bag. Get out.

“Where’s the body?” She tried to hug me, but I turned away.

“He’s not dead,” I said. “He’s still behind a bunch of walls.”

“Sister,” she said, “I thought you had him killed or something when you told me to meet you here. After that story.”

“I don’t know what I want out of you, exactly. I wanted to show you the place because… I don’t know why. You’d know I was telling the truth if you saw it, which is ridic. It’s just a patch of nothing land.”

“You thought I wouldn’t believe you?”

“You wouldn’t believe I said no.”

She leaned next to me, arms crossed, Hermes bag hanging. “I believe you. More than believe you. I’m angry and hurt for you. I have a plan for how to bring charges without—”

“No!”

“What do you mean ‘no’? I can protect you.”

“God, you’re as bad as Elliot. Think about it. Charlie Chilton’s oldest child. More money than the government, and more power too. Do you think he’s going to Soledad? No. They’ll cop a plea to a psych ward, and here he stays.”

“They’ll only cop a plea if the prosecution offers. If we don’t offer it, he goes to trial.”