“I’m sorry, Daddy.” He looked so sad as I pulled him into my arms.
Fuck. If he was this emotional over some asshole going at me over sleeping with his son, I didn’t want to think about how much it would break him to find out that his Daddy was a serial killer.
24
AIDEN
Life was going well. Almost too well. The last month had been a whirlwind with Nate since we had started dating. I still got embarrassed over how quickly I introduced him to my family, especially when I considered the first time we went to my parents’ house.
The second time hadn’t been much better. While Thanksgiving had started out normal enough, the snow had proven to be more than what the meteorologists had expected and we’d gotten stuck there overnight.
In my old bedroom. On a full-size bed. Where my Daddy decided he was going to have his wicked way with me, repeatedly. While I’d been a willing participant, what I had failed to factor in was that my sister, who had also gotten stuck there overnight, was in the bedroom next to mine.
Breakfast had been a mortifying affair, to say the least. Thankfully, she kept the teasing to a minimum in front of our parents.
But they loved Nate anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter, since he could do no wrong.
We’d already gotten over some big milestones, like meeting the parents and dating for a month.
Despite the fact we didn’t get to see each other as often as I would have liked, that was as much my fault as his. When we did get together, we tried to make an effort to actually leave my house. Sometimes, we were successful, but more often than not, we barely left the bedroom and had food delivered.
Not that I was going to complain.
Well, I had some complaints about not getting to see my boyfriend as much as I would like, but we talked every day—a lot. Sometimes, I wondered how he got any work done. Then again, I also wondered howIgot any work done.
I definitely had Victoria to thank for a lot of that.
She was also who I had to thank for helping me plan our anniversary dinner.
“What are you so worried about?” Victoria’s voice asked from the phone speaker on the other side of my bedroom.
As I perused the dress shirts in my closet, I thought about how to answer her question. She was one of my best friends and if there was anyone I could talk to about Nate, it was Victoria. Yet I hesitated. Because there were things I couldn’t tell her, things that would have her seriously reconsidering my sanity.
“Well, first of all, there’s our date tonight. I keep second-guessing how I sprang it on him at the last minute. Because he doesn’t seem to like being spontaneous. He’s so… I don’t know. Neat and organized. The opposite of my chaotic mess.”
One of her patented bitch sighs was the response I got. “You are not a chaotic mess. It’s just you’ve just been through more than most people. And he should respect that because you have different boundaries.”
I sucked in a gasp between my teeth. Of course she was able to hit the nail on the head without even knowing all the details.
“He does respect me.” Boundaries, on the other hand, Iwasn’t so sure he understood what those were. But that wasn’t something I was ready to discuss with Vic.
“Then what’s the issue?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t know how to put the feeling in the pit of my stomach into words. But I knew I had to try.
“Sometimes, I wonder if he’s too perfect,” I admitted. “I wait for the other shoe to drop and the universe to laugh and tell me that, of course, I can’t be that happy.”
“Too perfect?” she scoffed. “Do you think you might be looking for problems so that you can push him away before he can do it?”
The barb stung, but it wasn’t unwarranted. I’d done that to plenty of guys in the past. But they’d all given me a reason to think they weren’t invested or were about to bail.
“I’m sorry, Aiden. I love you. You know I do. But we both know sometimes you expect things to go wrong and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where they leave or you leave first before they can leave first.”
I knew she was right. I’d done that more than once. It was why I hadn’t had any serious relationships to speak of. And I also knew Nate hadn’t done anything to give me any reason to think he wanted to leave me. Just the opposite. He wasn’t always the most in touch with his emotions, but he didn’t hold back on what he was thinking—and he thought about me a lot.
“Sometimes it doesn’t seem real. And I don’t mean in the sense that it’s really happening to me.” I paused, trying to figure out how to say what I was feeling, to figure out if I even wanted to put those thoughts into words. “Nate is, well, he’s intense in everything he does. But sometimes, I feel like I’m getting a glimpse behind it all, and it seems…forced. Flat.”
If I ever stopped and was honest with myself about Nate, I would have been able to admit the man was throwing out red flags like penalty markers at a football game. Starting with howhe’d choked me. It didn’t matter that I had ended up finding it hot and came harder than I ever had before.
