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I glanced up and he was still watching me.
“Did you forget?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Write it down this time,” he said, all the patience in his voice. “My daddy loves me even when he has to spank my bottom.”
I pressed my lips together, my face getting hot all the way up my cheeks and under my eyes, and I wrote it out with him watching, in my not great but trying-to-be-neat handwriting, my stomach doing weird twisty shit about every other word. I’d always gotten shit grades in handwriting and spelling. They were just such judgey subjects and I didn’t like being judged, so I didn’t try very hard. But I liked trying hard for him. Even if just scribbling this sentence once chopped my brain up like an onion.
“Did you get it?” Caleb asked me, and I nodded, not looking up from the paper, too embarrassed staring at the words to look him in the eye. “Okay, keep writing.”
I squirmed in the chair, catching a whimper in my throat as my sore ass shifted against the wood. Staring at the words was like looking at porn and it also made me want to throw up, and neither of those were probably what he intended, but what could you do. Eventually, all the good smells in the kitchen beat up my nausea as I copied the sentence over and over. I got hard under the table without even meaning to, my dick aching to distraction until I had to reach down and massage it to keep from biting through my tongue.
It wasn’t just a massive turn on, it gave me a mental hard on too. Or something like that. Writing lines, any lines, I guess, just calmed me down. I’d felt it right away, as soon as he’d made me start doing it that day in study hall. Even when it was exciting and humiliating, it was peaceful, just the repetition and the words drumming through my brain as I repeated them on the paper, copying without even thinking, without even looking, and somehow still doing it right.
I looked up. “This is why you made me write down all those elements a million times. To hypnotize me.”
He laughed and dumped the hamburger into the skillet, and it hissed and popped. “To help you remember, yeah. Same as this.”
“And so you could sit there and get off on watching me write lines?”
He turned around and stared at me and finally grinned. “Maybe a little.”
“You’re so fucking twisted. I don’t even know why I like you.”
“So you like me now. That’s new.”
I shook my head, staring back down at the paper, my stomach swirling as I read the words back to myself.My daddy loves me.“Whatever.”
I focused on my handwriting instead of the actual words, trying to fit the letters together neatly in one long string with the cursive I wasn’t so good at, like I was a banker or some shit. By the time I got to the bottom of the page, the tomato and garlic smell was overpowering the whole room and I could barely concentrate, my stomach was so excited. God, I spent so much of my life fucking hungry.
“Can I be done?” I asked him, holding up the notebook. “I filled the whole page.”
He stirred the spaghetti with a big wooden spoon that would definitely tear my ass up, and then put it down and wiped his hands off. “Let me see,” he said, coming over, and I braced myself for some unimpressed comment about how sloppy it was or how I misspelled something. “That looks good,” he told me instead, and he scrubbed at the top of my head like he was petting a dog and I melted a little. “Are you going to remember what this says?”
I was definitely not going to forget, even if I wasn’t sure that was the same thing, but I nodded. “Yes.”
“Okay. Go wash your hands. And try to keep them off your dick.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When I came back from the bathroom, where I’d mostly kept my hands off my dick but definitely washed them afterward, there was a huge bowl of spaghetti steaming in the middle of the table, and another piled up with huge chunks of garlic bread. It looked like a goddamn Italian restaurant. Not that I’d ever been to an Italian restaurant. But I’d seen that dog movie.
“This looks like a fucking date,” I told him, pulling out my chair and sitting down a lot more carefully than I had the last time. I didn’t have to see his face to know he was smirking at me.
“Thanks, I guess.” He reached into the bowl with a big sprongy spoon and scooped about eight pounds of spaghetti out onto my plate.
I waited until he started eating to dig in, and once he did, I didn’t play around. I inhaled it like my stomach was dead empty, and it was fucking good, too. Sure, I’d eat anything and not complain, and sure I acted like Spaghettios were basically the same, but they weren’t. Neither was the weird watery spaghetti with hard meat chunks they slopped about four bites of on the cafeteria trays. This was fuckingspaghettiand The Beast threw down three meals a day.
The second my plate was empty, he leaned over and gave me another spoonful, and tossed another piece of bread on the side without even asking if I was still hungry.
“I can’t eat all that,” I lied.
“Yeah, you can. Go on. Spaghetti’s never as good the next day,” he told me, loading up his own plate again.
He wasn’t shy about food, and Jesus, he ate a lot, there probably wasn’t any way I could match him no matter how hungry I was. I gave it a minute and then tore through the seconds like a buzz saw, slowing down enough toward the end to really taste it when it sat on my tongue a little longer, and it just got better when I gave the flavors a minute to settle down instead of tearing in like an animal.
I didn’t get much food-food up in my stomach, and I always convinced myself I wasn’t missing anything, but if I’d eaten this kind of meal before, I’d have been missing it. I’d sat in for family dinners when I slept over places sometimes, yeah. But I didn’t really do that much anymore, and nobody’s house had ever served up like this.
