Page 95 of Something So Strong

“Ah…”

Fuck!

God knows I want him choking on me, but returning the favor? Honestly, he’s probably got a better chance of fucking me.

Retracting my hand, I step back until I’m leaning against the desk.

“That doesn’t seem very fair.” I can see on his face that Kai isn’t mad, but it doesn’t dislodge the lump from my throat. “I wanna see if your mouth feels as good as I imagine it does.”

“So do I.” I raise my brows in reply.

“I will if you do.”

“Does that go for sex as well?”

“Jess,” Kai sighs deeply. But his eyes dart towards his phone as I open the drawer to fetch mine. “I’ve got a text,” he says, holding out his hand instead of just asking for it.

I slap it in his hand. “We need to both be able to give and take if this is gonna work. I want nothing more than to see you between my legs, but…” My voice trails off as my attention is stolen by Kai’s quivering chin. “What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.”

He throws his phone across the desk so hard it’ll be a miracle if it escapes without a cracked screen.

I step back to him, grab his arms, and make him look at me. “Kai, what’s wrong?” I repeat sternly.

“It was Mum,” he whispers—his eyes unfocused. And like a punch in the guts, all the air is sucked from my body.

This is it.

The thing.

My intuitions are never wrong.

“She wants me to come home for Dad’s fiftieth.”

My mouth opens to speak, but no words come out.

What am I even meant to say? He’s been so sparse with dealing out backstory that his parents may as well have been dead till this point.

“I haven’t spoken to her since I started working here. And now she texts, fucking texts, after all this time. And it’s about that prick!”

I lower my hold to his hands but contemplate whether I should give him my fingers to suck on instead.

“It’s because of him those cunts got away with what they did… When he saw me, he threw me out of the house.” His eyes refocus on me. “Literally… He threw me down the back stairs after ramming my head into the door… He was gonna kill me, and at the time, I wished he had… And you know what?” His gaze shifts over my shoulder as the muscles in his face and jaw contort with increasing rage. “That bitch didn’t do a damn thing.”

“I’m sure she wanted to help.” Goddamn it! Why did I open my mouth?

“No. She didn’t give a single fuck. If she did, she’d have stopped me from moving into the broken-ass shed in the backyard. It barely fit my bed. It had cracks in the panels and was freezing in the winter… I lived in there for two years. And for that entire time, whenever I needed a shower, I had to walk down the street to my friend Millie’s house…”

I squeeze his hands tighter.

“I worked my ass off in that shack… I studied hard and applied for scholarships to every college I could think of. I got a night job at a gym in town, so I could use the equipment for free. And by the time I left carrying a trash bag with the few things I had, I was bigger than Dad. And I could see in his eyes as he sat on that fucking recliner on the front porch, how much he hated it.”

“So you got a scholarship?”

“Yeah,” he smiles humbly, but I can see it’s rehearsed and empty. “A few, actually… I guess I was just too underprivileged to say no to.” He shakes his head and the self-loathing flies off him and slaps me in the face. “The one from the University of Winnipeg came with full room and board, so… it was a no-brainer.”

“What did you study?”

“Counseling and social work.” He pauses, then huffs. “Like I thought I could help myself through the backlog of shit in my system.” Bringing his chin to his chest, Kai then slams his head back against the plasterboard.

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