Page 57 of Biker's Collar: Property of Scrap

“Oh, I’m stupid as fuck,” he says. “Doesn’t change shit. Tell me what the letters said, Vickie.”

He leans over and kisses me on the cheek. That gets his dick nice and hard again. He’s restraining himself. So desperate to know the truth about me that not even my spit slathered all over his dick pulls him out of the trance. He is so fucking desperate to break me open and the worst part is… it’s working.

I already told him more than I thought I would and I don’t know what to do about it.

There is more tension and pressure around this confession than I have had in my life. It’s been years and I’ve never spoken the truth out loud. I just let it all happen to me because I mean… It was my fault, wasn’t it? I ran off with him. I believed everything in those letters and I let my family down. I dropped out of school, packed my things and met Hakeem at a bus station to run away with him.

I had the audacity to leave them a good-bye note. That fucking note haunted me for years. I’m too ashamed to ever go back. I know they have a Missing Person’s case out and that there are people looking for me but… they won’t find me unless I go back to where I came from. They don’t have the money tofind me and I don’t want to remind them of how fucking horrible I was.

“What did the letters say,” Owen says. “You have no choice but to submit to me, Vickie.”

He doesn’t scare me as much as he thinks he does. But maybe his intense pressure on me is a sign that I need to just get this shit off my chest. I’ll say it and hey, maybe I’ll die flying off the back of this maniac’s bike and it won’t even matter. Being vulnerable with him won’t make me love him. Nothing will make me love a man ever again.

“I was a really insecure kid,” I say to him. I can feel myself swirling around the story, like I’m trying to build justifications and excuses for myself. Does being an insecure kid justify what I did?

“It started with him just saying he thought I was really pretty. I ignored the first letter but… when you never had a boyfriend and an older guy sends you ten love letters, you start to pay attention.”

Owen scowls and it just makes everything so much worse that I can’t read his fucking mind. I feel so fucked up about this. I haven’t said these words to a single soul and I hate this man for being so… quiet.

“So you paid attention,” Owen says gently, his voice guiding me along. “What did you do?”

“I did what he asked in the letters. I wrote him back. We started up like that until I graduated high school. He said he didn’t want to do anything until I turned eighteen.”

Owen’s face turns red. He can hide his emotions, but he can’t hide that he’s feeling something.

“Did he wait?”

The guilt, the pain, and the humiliation of everything makes me want to hurl. I might do a little more than spit on this man’s dick if he isn’t careful about pushing me. It feels like he’s tryingto reel this story out with barbed fish hooks on the line as he drags it out.

I am fucking hurting just remembering this.

Physical pain.

“No,” I tell him. “He didn’t wait.”

And it’s so much worse than that. But maybe now that Owen has the information he wants, he’ll stop.

“That man is going to die.”

“I know that’s your grand plan.”

“Tell me the rest of the story. You wrote him back and ran away. I want to know everything that happened. Everything.”

I look up at him with absolute fury. But when I meet Owen’s eyes, the fury melts away. I see his humanity. Something in him that I didn’t allow myself to notice before. He’s different from the other men I’ve been near. He cares.

He cares about me.

I don’t know why that feels so fucking dangerous. All I know is that I’m a fucked up person and I don’t deserve Owen looking at me like I’m… important to him.

“It kept escalating and we met up a few times when I was sixteen. He was my first kiss and that got into my head. Five months away from my eighteenth birthday, I ran away with him. Once we got far away from my parents’ house… he forced himself on me and then sold me to men afterwards.”

I got him to stop, eventually. I promised him I would be more useful somewhere else, and then I learned how to fix slot machines, run card tables and hustle egotistical white boys out of their money. Those hard, painful years of being used are blotted out of my memory and frankly, I don’t want to remember the details. I still have the numbness. The only time I feel anything with a man… is with this one.

“Fuck,” Owen says. Now he looks extremely angry. He can’t hide himself now. He approaches me and grabs my cheeks. “This man will die, Vickie. I promise.”

I want to argue or say something that pushes Owen away from me one last time, but he won’t let me. When he’s done kissing me, he keeps his hand on my head and grabs his dick with his other hand, pressing the tip of his dick against my mouth.

His anger fades once he has me in this position.

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