Page 79 of Bruised

I breathe out so hard I feel dizzy. I didn’t used to be this fucking paranoid. Maybe I’m getting old. Or maybe this is how you get when you’ve spent eighteen months behind bars.

I scowl, trying to focus on the road ahead and not on my racing thoughts.

“What did you do, anyway?” Lane asks.

It’s only now that I realize how I must have looked when the sirens rushed past. How tense my shoulders must’ve been, how hard I must’ve gripped the steering wheel. It’s no wonder Lane would jump to conclusions. That doesn’t mean I want to tell him anything, though.

“What?” I grit out.

“Why’d you go to prison?”

I clench my hands around the steering wheel, staring straight ahead as images flash through my mind.

Blood splashing my face. Tess screaming. Bloody teeth on the dark pavement.

I wasn’t sorry then, and I’m not sorry now, and yet… I always tense up when people ask what I did, and when I remember how out of control I was, how one decision ruined my life. It’s not a good memory, but I did what I had to. I just wish I hadn’t lost control like I did. Things would’ve been different. My life would’ve been different. But then, I suppose I wouldn’t have met Lane.

“Ask Oliver,” I mutter. It’s all the answer I can give for now.

“But I wanted to hear it from you. I wanted⁠—”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you don’t get what you want, puppy.”

Lane crosses his arms and looks out the window again. I’d rather he be angry with me than learn the truth, but sooner or later, he’ll find out anyway.

I wish things were different. I wish I could talk to him like a normal fucking human being and not clam up when shit gets serious.

Anything for my puppy. But never anything real.

27. A TOY

The next day, I have a hard time focusing on the game Oliver and I are playing in the living room. I didn’t go to Mason last night; it just didn’t feel right after what happened in the park and then later during the car ride back home, and today, I tense up anytime he walks by the living room.

What the hell is going on between us?

He wants me this way, but not that. He tells me what he wants me to do, but he never tells me anything about himself or his own life. He rarely asks me what I think, what I feel, what I want. He just assumes. He just wants to control me.

“He just likes to control people,” Oliver said before this all got started. At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, and if I did, I didn’t take it seriously. Mason likes to control me, but I don’t know if I want to be controlled anymore.

I want to know him, but he won’t let me, and it doesn’t seem like he wants to know me. He just wants to fuck me, and even in that, it has to be done his way.

He doesn’t want to hold my hand. Won’t make me come unless he feels like it. In some ways, it’s been like this from the start, but back then, I didn’t care; I just wanted him, and it didn’t matter to me in what way. I didn’t consider the potential risks.

In a few weeks, I won’t even live here anymore. Oliver will be gone, his mom and her boyfriend will be back, and I won’t have a reason to linger. Mason will move on with his life, and I’ll be expected to move on with mine, but how the hell am I supposed to do that?

Later that day, I’m filling up a glass of soda when I feel a presence slide up behind me.

Mason’s arms close around my middle, and his nose brushes my neck. “Hey, puppy.”

“What do you want?” I hiss. Oliver is somewhere in the house—I don’t know where.

“Sorry I left you hanging the other day. I’ll make it up to you tonight.” He slides his hand down to cup me over my shorts.

My breath hitches when he presses down, slowly kneading me, before he turns my face and places an indulgent kiss on my lips.

“Can’t wait,” he whispers in my ear, then he lets me go and disappears upstairs.

I lean both hands against the countertop, eyes closed, breathing deep.