Page 150 of At Her Pleasure

His half laugh, so miserable and hopeless, squeezed her heart with dread. “I don’t know.”

I wish I’d been shot in the head. He meant it. He was in that kind of pain.

It took her back to Cissy in the bathroom. He knew what those words meant to her, so the fact he couldn’t stop himself from saying them wasn’t intended to hurt her. It was stark honesty.

It was also an unconscious plea for help.

She limped to him. He was staring at the ground, so she touched his jaw, insisting that he look at her. He resisted, but in the end, he did it. She could tell he liked looking at her, finding some measure of peace in what he saw there.

That was a start. The start.

“It takes time, Mick. It hurts like a bitch. When my life started to be more than survival, my sold siblings set up house inside everything I did. They were out there in the world, no way of finding or helping them, especially with my mother dead and gone. She wasn’t exactly a record keeper.”

She let the unsteadiness enter her voice, because this wasn’t a moment to hold it all in, and he was protective of her. She didn’t mind embracing that, using it to draw him out of his head. “I held some of them, Mick,” she reminded him. “I remember the way they looked at me, the way all babies do. The rage I feel, the sadness, the things that sabotage my happiness…I know those demons you’re talking about. I’ve walked that path, but I also kept walking, to where I am now. If you trust me, I can help you do it, too.”

She had tears on her face. His own expression had softened, the pain still there, but she’d reached him. She could give him more, if she could find the courage to do it.

If she’d had those children in her arms again, she would have done everything to fight for them. Go to the police, her and Cissy serving time with her mother. It wouldn’t matter. It was nothing next to the cost of doing too little and living with it. And Cissy would have lived.

She wasn’t losing Mick. If she let him disappear from her life, she would. Because she had no doubt she was in a war for his life, and this was only the first battle. He was an incredibly strong man, but one with a wound infected enough to kill him.

So she cut herself open and let all the pain, pain as overwhelming as his, come out.

“I need you, Mick.”

His gaze snapped up, captured by those four words.

“I need you to love me. To be mine. To fight with me, to let me give you the pain you need, because it speaks to my own, locks together with it.”

His hands were on her hips, holding her. They stayed that way for several silent moments. Seeing the struggle inside him, she steadied herself. “That is one hundred percent an order. I will beat you to death with a shovel and bury you in my backyard, rather than let you leave.”

His eyes sparked, mouth tightening, but it was against the pain of an unexpected smile. “I’ll try, Mistress,” he said. “I swear I’ll try, best as I can.”

She slid her arms around his shoulders as he put his face to her midriff. He was so tense, everything held inside. She knew how to help with that.

“I’ll punish you for the ones who haunt you. I’ll help you put the ones you saved on the opposite side of the scale, not for balance, but for perspective, breathing room.”

He nodded. As she let more tears fall on his head, she made an additional, silent promise. And I will love you for being the kind of man who had the courage to do all of it.

There were rare people in the world, those who tried to help, to fix, because something inside them was so strong they couldn’t resist that call. They knew their life’s purpose. That mandate filled up every square inch of space. The mandate was the person.

She’d had enough selfishness to save herself. To give herself happiness and a life worth living. Up until Mick, she hadn’t apologized for that, had stood stubbornly against her ghosts. She’d tried to believe she was living the life Cissy and the others might have lived, if they’d been given the chance. The way she lived was an attempt to honor their lost lives.

Mick had implied she’d been as much of a victim as they’d been. Victim wasn’t a word she accepted for herself, but in the context of helping him, she’d come to grips with it, without letting it become her identity.

While on a bus, a person was called a passenger. But when she decided to get off, and made that happen, not by waiting for the driver to stop, but by marching up there and forcing open the doors, leaping free, even if the bus was still in motion, she was whatever the hell she wanted to be.

She had to help him find something else he could be as well. Because for the first time in her adult life, she loved a man enough to bear the terror of losing him. Or of him changing into something she could no longer love.

She wasn’t worried about the latter. Mick didn’t know how to be anything but who he was. She also loved him so fiercely she wasn’t letting anything take him away from her. Even himself.

She whispered that to him. And then whispered something else. “I'm your Mistress. You've done all you can this way. It's time to find another way. We’ll find it, together, but first you have work to do.”

He had to reclaim his soul. It was going to be a hard road, but she’d move into his head and share that space. She’d demand a key, the bigger half of the closet, his bed, and everything else. Take over and let him know everything he had was hers.

She knew what it was to have nothing, so she took very good care of what she’d earned the right to call hers.

Mick lifted his head, showing her those beautiful, dangerously still and haunted eyes. “My pain doesn't deserve to be special, Mistress.”

---