Page 8 of Dirty Nasty Billionaire: Part 4

We ride our shared orgasm all the way to the end, each clutching the other like we’re going to save each other from drowning. And as we began to come down, our breaths heaving in tandem, we rest our foreheads against each other as we revel in our shared pleasure.

“Delaney Masterson, you’re my everything,” he whispers.

I plant soft kisses along the line of his jaw, relishing the brush of stubble against my lips.

“That’s the future Mrs. Blake, to you,” I reply.

* * *

“So I guessthis means I should meet your family,” I tell him, after we’ve had sex twice more and are now collapsed in a heap in the bed, surrounded by pillows. I fiddle with the ring on my finger, admiring the way it catches the light from the candles on the bedside table, sending it refracting across the ceiling in the beautiful hotel room. “Or, you know, at least hear something about your family.”

He instinctively tenses beside me, and I reach over to lay my hand firmly on his chest. “Hey,” I say in a soothing voice. “It’s ok. It can wait. We don’t have to do this right now.”

He clenches his lips, his jaw twitching, as he sucks in a quick breath through his nose. Then he lets it out, long and slow. By the time he’s done, I can feel the tension start to melt away.

“It’s no secret, at least to you, that I don’t really like crowds,” he says. His voice sounds raw, ragged, and wrung-out. It’s like he’s reached up and opened a vein for me, ready to pour out all the pain he’s been holding inside. I curl into him, resting my head on his warm chest, where I can feel and hear the sound of his beating heart. It’s like I need reassurance that it’s still beating while he tells me what he’s about to tell me.

And then it all comes pouring out.

Nixon is the only child of two very smart people. In another life, they could have been college professors, likely well-known academics and intellectuals. They’d met at New England College as undergraduates, his father studying philosophy, his mother studying physics. They had promising futures.

Until they didn’t.

His father’s family lost everything in a bad stock deal, and he was forced to withdraw from NEC in the middle of his junior year. His mother, who Mr. Blake was already dating at the time, discovered she was pregnant soon after. Life became hard, and their dreams were put on the back burner. They ended up finishing their degrees at a community college and both became public school teachers. It should have been a triumph, that two struggling young parents were able to make something of themselves.

Unfortunately, all they felt was bitterness.

Their lives had spun out of control, or so they thought, and they zeroed in on Nixon as the moment that all started.

“And for all the control they felt they’d lost, I think they decided to regain some of it through me,” Nixon says. He delivers the words like he’s reading aloud from a book with a not very exciting plot. But hearing him tell it, I can barely breathe. “I know now that they were clearly very sick,” he muses. “But back then, it just seemed like what parents did.”

Children don’t always cooperate, you see. Sometimes they don’t follow directions, or fall in line with your plans. That infuriated the Blakes, and so every time Nixon would defy them, they would shut him off.

“What does that mean?” I ask, imagining Nixon as a child, under the thumb of these people who are already coalescing into an image in my mind that scares me.

“It means that any time I did something they didn’t like, they’d simply ignore me. Only, they’d ignore me for days, treating me like a ghost in my own house. They never hit me or spanked me. They simply pretended I didn’t exist.”

“Nixon, that’s terrible,” I whisper into the warmth of his chest.

“Well, of course it only made me desperate for attention, which I’d try to get any way I could,” he explains. “And that’s when the punishment changed.”

I’m practically holding my breath.

By the time he was in grade school, Nixon’s parents had constructed a “quiet room” in the basement or their small, New England cracker box house in Worcester. It was essentially solitary confinement where Nixon would be placed on time out any time he did anything that they deemed “bad behavior.” Only to them, being alive and a child was all it took. Soon, everything was considered bad behavior. Drop a pencil? To the quiet room. Sneeze at the dinner table? To the quiet room. Drop something in a trash can too loudly? To the quiet room.

Soon he was spending more time in the quiet room than out, until eventually he came home from school and reported directly there. He’d sleep there at night, wake up in the morning, and go to school. And when he got home, the cycle began again.

“The quiet room was empty,” he says, and he doesn’t have to describe it further. I know exactly what he means. No furniture. Nothing to amuse himself. No color or life.

Like his apartment.

Like Scour’s headquarters.

“I know it sounds awful, but it just became reality for me. To the point where I needed that kind of quiet, non-sensory environment just to think. Just to be.”

“And so you made your world into a quiet room,” I whisper, the tears starting to roll down my cheeks. I prop myself up on my elbows and look up at him. He looks stoic, but when he sees the tears falling, he reaches up with his thumb to wipe them from my cheek.

“Until you,” he says. “Suddenly I didn’t need a quiet room. You became the place I needed to go to unwind, to relax, to calm down. You became my comfort. I needed you.”

As soon as he says the words out loud, it’s like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He’s poured out his pain, and I’ve collected it all. I’m probably the first person to ever pick up this burden and carry it for him. I know that this doesn’t make it all better. I know that he’s going to have more work to do. But knowing that I can be that comfort to him makes me fall even more in love with him. And I know that no matter what, I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to protect him from the demons that have been chasing him his whole life.

---