Page 30 of Filthy Little Secret

He laughs. “Yeah, I’m sure. As if you didn’t get anything out of it?”

I smirk.

“You know how good a fuck you are, don’t you?” I ask, and his smile tells me everything I need to know.

“I know I can put in the work.”

“Then don’t act like you were my victim.”

“I wasn’t. I was just saying you thought I was.”

“For someone who doesn’t like people making assumptions about him, you sure don’t have a problem making them about others.”

“I’m wrong?” Mark asks.

“Yes, you’re wrong. I wanted to have a little fun that night. You clearly wanted the same thing.”

“Well, it’s been more than a night.” He takes a sip from his cup and then sets it on the coffee table, which only has a few textbooks and the used condom and lube packaging on it.

“What does it matter?” I ask.

“Is this how you lure guys in?”

“I told Keith what was up—”

“Come on. This isn’t just about Keith. What about Vince Launder and Mack Jacobs?”

I can’t believe I’m fucking listening to this. “Do I seem like I’m subtle about shit?”

“I think it’s more than coincidental that you have a long list of guys who are emotionally wrecked after fucking around with you.”

“This is bullshit,” I say. I lean forward and grab his cup off the table, taking a sip before setting it back down.

“Do I keep fucking even when I know they’re starting to get attached? Yeah. But is it my fault I still want to get laid? Is it my fault when I’ve told them the way things are? I’m always honest. I get that Keith’s your friend and all, but you can ask him, and at no point in what we were doing was I unclear about what was going on. When I kept saying it was just for fun, I meant it. He’s the one who read more into what we were doing than was there.”

“Why do you think that is? That it’s not just him?” Mark grabs his glass of water and takes another drink.

“Beats me.”

He glares at me like he’s skeptical.

“Okay. Once guys get into my life, they see all this other stuff that’s not just me being a douchebag drug dealer, and they think that means they might be able to win me over. Like they’ll meet my nanna, Kitty. But I live with her because she’s got some medical issues. She had cancer last year. We spent most of last spring pushing through it.”

“Oh, shit,” he says, and it’s almost a whisper. And suddenly I realize, he’s thinking about his sister. I can see it on his face. See by how pale it got at the mere mention of cancer that it took him back to that dark point in his life.

“Anyway, I’ve been with her since I was sixteen,” I say, skipping any details that might make Mark reflect on his own shitty experience. “My dad was the only one around when I was growing up, and he was never that great. Was more interested in coke and meth than his kid. He ended up leaving me at her house one day when she was supposed to be babysitting me. And he never came back. She took me in as her own without even thinking twice about it. So now that she has issues, I take care of her.

“Sometimes guys like Keith think that makes me some kind of saint. Like I’m a good guy because I have someone I care about…or maybe, I don’t know, that I might be able to care about them that way, too. But if anything, Nanna doesn’t mean that I have time for guys. It means that I have too many things on my plate as it is.”

“And so nothing else you do leads them to believe there’s more there?” Mark asks. “It’s because you have this nanna that you care about?”

The expression on his face assures me he knows there’s more to it than that, and so do I. I might as well be honest with him. Why the fuck wait for this to blow up in my face like it has in the past?

“I don’t know if you can tell, but I don’t have a lot of friends, so whoever I’m hooking up with ends up being the guy who I talk to about the shit that’s going on in my life. I don’t think that means I’m leading anyone on. Everybody needs someone to talk to.”

“I agree.” His judgment appears to have dissolved, but it’s replaced with pity.

“Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t have friends because I choose not to have friends. Because I like my space, and I like not having to rely on other people. I can’t have anything serious. I don’t have time for that. I don’t live the kind of life that allows for that.”

---