Page 31 of Wanted
No, but the effort had exhausted her and she ended up wanting to go back to bed instead of drinking coffee.
Now they were doing the dressing debacle.
“Can’t I go back to Puppy’s and just get my own clothes?” she begged, but from the driver’s seat, already Marcus was shaking his head.
“I already told you, honey. I sent Spencer to get them before we left the hospital. Cynthia’s mom threw everything out. Nothing of yours was left in that house.”
Sitting side by side in his vehicle, they stared through the windshield at the busy Goodwill. She felt sick.
“Can’t you do it?” she begged him. “Please, just this one time?”
“I can.” He nodded, then swung his head to pin her with the same stern look that over the last week she had both come to love and hate. It was a look that said he’d happily give her what she wanted, but she wasn’t going to like how he did it. “In this case, however, I really think you should do this yourself.”
“Why?” she cried, but she already knew.
Normal people didn’t have meltdowns in the morning when it came time to dress themselves. Normal people didn’t stand agonizing in front of their closet, staring at the options—of which hers currently consisted of four pairs of sweatpants and six of Marcus’s cast-off t-shirts—practically in tears because she didn’t know what he wanted her to wear. Followed quickly by ‘Ethen would never let her wear any of this.’ Half the time she’d cry, but eventually she’d pull something out and put it on. And she hated every minute of it.
Every fucking thought in her head went through that ‘what would Ethen think’ cycle first and she couldn’t stop it. Marcus didn’t care what she wore; he cared that she went through the process and put something clean on every morning instead of simply wearing the same articles she’d stripped off the night before. He’d only let her get away with that the first morning, then he pulled several tubs out of the attic and expanded her wardrobe by those extra sweatpants and t-shirts, and even added a flannel nightgown meant for someone a good eight inches shorter than she was. She had yet to wear it.
“Why can’t you just be a nudist?” she muttered, rubbing her face with both hands.
He snorted and laughed. “You can do this.”
Yeah. She could do this. He said that just about every morning while she went through one of her mini meltdowns. Meltdowns because she had to pick her own clothes, meltdowns because she then had to dress herself—and frankly, she’d been struggling to do that for weeks now, all the way back when her relationship with Puppy began to fall apart and she could no longer depend on her sub-mate to be there to help her.The difference there was that those had been her clothes. They were familiar, and had already passed the ‘Would Ethen let her wear that’ quandary. She’d gone through them diligently, breaking everything she owned down into two categories—work clothes and home clothes, and the only reason that had worked was because, like Ethen’s coffee mugs, they were all almost exactly the same.
Shifting behind the steering wheel, Marcus checked his watch. He didn’t even try to do it subtly.
“You ready to go in yet?”
God, no. She shifted now too, and tried again to put her head between her knees. The dashboard got in the way, so she rested against it instead.
“Okay, head back on the seat,” he said.
She did, moaning, “Can we go home yet?”
“Do you have two full sets of cloths and dinner for tonight in the backseat?” he countered.
She couldn’t even get herself out of the car and he didn’t need a vocalized answer.
“Then we’re not going home. Close your eyes.”
Breathing out, she did. After a week with the man, she’d become as familiar with his relaxing exercises as she had his tests.
“You’re sitting on a beach,” he began. “The sun is warm on your shoulders, and the breeze that’s blowing is just enough to keep it from being too hot. It pulls and plays with your hair.”
She had to force herself to picture the beach instead of the store, and the first thing she thought of pulling and playing with her hair wasn’t the breeze. It was the way Marcus took hold of her hair and marched her into the bathroom this morning, forcing her to stare at herself in the bathroom mirror and take back the self-depreciating comment she’d made. She barely remembered what she’d said, but she remembered the fierceness of his stare in the glass as he’d scolded her.
She remembered the pressure in her scalp, too, as he hauled her right up onto her tiptoes and then yanked her pants down, letting them fall all the way to her ankles. She remembered the stab of wanton anticipation that went straight to her pussy as he’d whipped the hem of her shirt all the way up to his hand in her hair, holding it not only well up out of the way, but all the way up to her neck, effectively stripping her naked.
She remembered he’d said, “Five things. I want to hear you say five nice things about yourself, right now.”
She remembered being completely unable to come up with anything at first and that, mad as he’d been, he’d been the one to come up with the first thing.
“You have beautiful eyes.”
She’d looked at herself in the mirror, staring into her own eyes almost surprised.
“Say it,” he’d ordered, and promptly brought his open hand smacking down hard across her ass once she had.
