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I was done.
She wanted me? Well the ball was in her court.
I pounded into the bag until I quieted the voice inside that was praying she picked up a racket to play.
Because that shit just made no sense.FourteenLoThe second I heard the basement door close, I let my legs give out from under me, sliding down onto the floor, knees to my chest. I wrapped my arms around my legs and tried to deep-breathe through the desire that was no longer bordering on, but had firmly landed in, pain. It hurt. It literally hurt I was so turned on.
“Fuck,” I cursed quietly, closing my eyes tight against the memory of what I had done. I had given him what little power I had left. I had admitted he was good. I told him he was the best that I had ever had. I had said I wanted him to call me baby.
Then he had taken that power along with what had promised to be the orgasm of a lifetime... and walked away with it.
I expected the anger to start building, to flood my system with something familiar, something comfortable that I could latch onto, something I could wrap around myself with it's empty kind of security. But it didn't come. All I felt was the soul-crushing unfulfilled desire and a sadness that felt so deep, I could swear that I could drown in it.
It wasn't that it was new. The sadness, it was always there buried deep, wanting to be dealt with, wanting me to acknowledge it so it would finally go away. But I never did, so it never did.
Somehow, it felt worse than I remembered. It wasn't just a swirling, uncomfortable thing. No, it felt sore. I felt sore. I felt like every ounce of happiness, of grit and determination, of hardly won strength got ripped away and left in the wake nothing but pain. It was the kind of pain that started in your soul and heart and radiated outward until you felt it in your bones, in your muscles, in every exposed inch of skin, in every lifeless strand of hair. It was the kind of pain that made you feel like a giant open wound.
The tears stung at the back of my eyes and I didn't bother fighting them. What was the use? What had all the fighting actually gotten me over the years?
I felt my body jolt at those thoughts.
“Freedom,” I told myself quietly. That was what fighting had gotten me- free. It got me a life with colleagues who were like family to me. It got me the chance to build a life that I didn't wake up into every single day wishing to die. It got me security. It got me the confidence to stand up for myself. It got me respect.
And that, well, it was everything.
I absolutely fucking refused to fall back into the sadness, to let it surround me until my arms were too tired to keep my head above water anymore. I wasn't that woman anymore. I was never going to be her again.
I was going to get the fuck off of his kitchen floor, dry my eyes, get my own god damn clothes on, and take my control back.
Fuck him and his games and his demands. Fuck him and his knee-weakening smile and his heart-pounding endearments. Fuck him and his unwanted attraction to me.
He wanted someone to hate?
Well... fucking... fine.
I would give him someone to hate.
It didn't matter. He didn't matter. Who was he anyway? Just a biker. A hard-drinking, casual-sex-having, takes-himself- too- casually, too-good-looking -for- his- own- good, child-man.
I stifled the voice that whispered that in just a couple days, he had elicited a bigger range of emotional responses from me than any man had since I was a teenager. That could easily be explained by the fact that I just got my ass handed to me and was achy and alone without my support system behind me.
Well, that was all about to get fixed.
I pulled myself up off of the floor, swatting my cheeks in what I could only call disgust and stomped over to my duffle bag, hefting it up and slamming it down on the dining table. I rifled inside, pushing three more paperback romances out of the way and grabbing a pair of thick, moss green cargo pants, a bra, and a tan tank top, leaving the thick matching moss green shirt hung off the back of a chair as I slipped newly sock-clad feet into boots. Standing, I felt almost like myself again. The smarting in my ribs was enough to have me wincing when I moved too fast, but that was getting better too. Another two days, I could get back to training.
Unable to do anything that physical, I hauled the laptop out of the bag along with the notebook and pen I stored away, and sat down to get to work. True, I couldn't be at Hailstorm, but that didn't mean I couldn't log into our systems and see what was going on, try to see if I could find any traces of Janie/Jstorm in the deep web. She liked to spend a lot of time in those murky, awful depths, looking for causes for us to champion or sometimes simply to release viruses into real scumbag's systems when she could. Always a maker of chaos and righter of wrongs. That was my strong, yet fragile Janie.
One floor beneath me, the chain to the punching bag was swinging mercilessly and I felt myself nodding as I searched through the internet. Good. I was glad he was in a mood. I hoped his balls felt like they were going to explode.
An hour later, hitting a dead end with Janie, I finally took a deep breath and typed in the name I didn't even want to think of: Damian Crane.
His face popped up along with a couple articles. No social media accounts, not that I had been expecting any. He was never the type of man to put his personal shit out there. His last known address was still the one I was familiar with. His registered car was the silver SUV he had bought new six years before.
