Page 107 of Bet On Me, Daddy

Jumping up from the couch, Ruby headed for the kitchen, nervous energy driving her every move. “I need ice cream.”

“Oooh, me too, me too!” With a giggle that was completely at odds with her queen-of-the-darkness persona, Silver followed her into the kitchen. “What do we have?”

“Um, a little bit of everything.” Ruby rolled her eyes as she opened the freezer. “Beckett ordered groceries yesterday and he went a bit overboard.”

“Is there really such a thing as too much ice cream, though?”

“I guess not.”

Bowls loaded with frozen, sugary goodness, they headed back to the living room and settled on the couch once more. And Ruby couldn’t help but wonder how the fuck she’d gotten here, eating ice cream in her living room with her favorite musical artist of all time like it was just another Wednesday.

“This is really fucking bizarre. Sorry,” she added with an embarrassed laugh. “I just needed to get that out.”

“Does it help to know it’s a bit weird for me, too?” Silver asked.

“Well, yeah, I’m sure it’s not every day you hang out with obsessed fans in their apartments.”

“True. But I just meant the whole eating ice cream and talking about boys with your girlfriends thing. I never really had that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Scooping up another spoonful of ice cream, Silver shrugged. “We started the band when we were just kids. And everything happened so quickly, you know? One day I was a senior in high school, the next I was touring the world. There was never really time for ‘normal’.”

“I sorta get that.”

Silver paused with her spoon in the ice cream, her brows raising up to her hairline. “You do?”

“Uh-huh. I, um, met a guy. Right after high school. He was like a prince from a fairytale. Spoiled me with gifts and fancy food. And when my dad got a job on the other side of the country, he rented an obscenely expensive apartment for me and begged me to stay behind. So I did.”

“What happened to him?”

“I left. He was… not a nice man.”

Sympathy flickered over Silver’s face. “I’m sorry. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t told anyone but my therapist about him.” She’d been too embarrassed to admit how weak she’d once been.

“Well, I know a bit about not-nice men if you decide you want to tell me.”

For the first time in years, she did actually want to tell someone. So she did.

“He didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, he was everything a girl could possibly dream of. Charming, loved to spoil me. The change was so subtle, it took me a long time to realize there evenhadbeen a change. He traveled a lot, but even when he was out of town, he wanted to know I was home,waiting for him. It seemed kind of romantic, you know? And it fed into a lot of feelings I had, feelings I didn’t really understand at the time.”

“Feelings like wanting to please him? And wanting to have someone so obsessed with you, that they can’t stand the thought of anyone else even looking at you?”

Nodding, Ruby swallowed hard past the lump in her throat. “Yeah. How’d you guess?”

“I felt like that a lot with Ace. It was part of what kept drawing me back to him.” Silver shifted her bowl to one hand, splaying her other out, palm up so Ruby could see the shiny pink scar running diagonally from one side to the other. “Obsession feels like love when you’re making them happy, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” And it healed something inside her, something she hadn’t even realized was still cracked, to hear the simple understanding in Silver’s words. “He taught me about kink. About how to serve him, though it was mostly sexual for him. And because something in me craved the way I felt when I got on my knees for him, I thought I loved him. But one day I just woke up and looked around and realized how fuckingaloneI was. So… I left.”

“Just like that? He let you leave?”

“No. Not at first.” Because it was still so painful, still so fuckinghumiliating, Ruby gave herself a minute to pick at her ice cream some more. “The first time I told him I was leaving, he locked me in my bedroom. That was the day I learned that room only locked from the outside. He’d had it designed that way, on purpose. He left me there for three days without anything to eat or drink. And when he let me out, he told me never to forget that everything I had, I only had because of him.”

“Jesus Christ.” The color slowly leached from Silver’s face. “I’m so sorry, Ruby. That’s… I can’t even imagine how terrifying that must have been.”

“It was. And I’m ashamed to say it worked. I didn’t bring it up again for a while. And for a few months, it was better. He took me out more, showered me with presents. But when one of my high school besties called, asking if I would be in her wedding even though I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year, he said no. Absolutely not. No woman of his was going to dress up like a common whore and parade herself in front of a bunch of redneck assholes.”

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