Page 54 of Bully

No one was equipped to handle all of me.

Momentarily, I let myself forget I was supposed to stay hidden from everyone. Monsters like me couldn’t reveal themselves. Monsters like me couldn’t coexist with normal people.

My father had taught me at a young age that I was the worst kind of beast out there, because I wasn’t redeemable. There was no good in me, never had been. I wasn’t a machine he had created over time to be useful; I was just demented from the start.

A willing participant in all his sick games.

And now Sloane saw a bit of the boy that had tried like hell to bleed the monster out of his soul, unsuccessfully, all those years ago. Which meant she had worn out her welcome.

Now, she had to go.

Chapter 22 – Sloane

Tamentoldmetoleave. I flipped him off.

He told me to get out of his life. I rolled my eyes.

He told me I was fired. I laughed.

And then the room service boy arrived in the foyer with all the food I had ordered. Thank God too, because if he hadn’t interrupted our face off, who the hell knows what we would have done. I was as stubborn as the day was long, and Tamen was hiding secrets. Which meant neither of us was going to budge on this.

I was bunkering down and staking my claim; he wasn’t getting rid of me. Not now that I finally got to see a real, raw piece of the man inside of him. Of his scars. His pain.

He wasn’t evil like I had thought, like he had wanted me to think.

He was a product of something evil, something dark. It lived in him.

But I wasn’t sure he wanted it to.

So now we sat in silence, on opposite sides of the living room, eating our food while he actively ignored me. Tamen Bryce was about to figure out how fucking annoying I could be when I chose to.

It was why I lived alone all of these years; I could annoy a statue into moving.

I took another obnoxiously big bite of my Reuben, smacking my lips together as he glared at me over the rim of his beer glass, but he remained silent. Breaking the tension, another dinging of the elevator in the foyer alerted another guest was arriving.

Tamen’s blue eyes intensified as I clapped my hands and stood up, still wearing just his shirt, to go get my next delivery.

When I came back with my small paper bag, I knew he wanted to ask what the heck I ordered, but refrained. His goal of absolute silence, like a monk in a monastery, was annoying at best, but it wouldn’t rile me up.

I’d annoy him back with my ability to over-talk if I had to.

I set the bag down on the counter and cheerily began unpacking it, laying down baggies of different herbs and glass bottles of different tinctures. As I lifted the fat smudge stick up and cradled it in my hands like a precious gift from the divine goddess herself, his curiosity could no longer be contained.

“Getting high?” He droned on like he was uninterested, but we both knew better.

“This would be one hell of a doobie if I was.” I grinned and then picked up the crystals I ordered and started placing them around the room.

“What are you doing, exactly?”

“Resetting your space.” I answered, “You’ve got bad juju here.”

“It’s fine.” He sighed, “It’s a hotel, I’m sure it’s seen stuff that would make even you blush.”

I brushed off his dig and continued my task as he silently watched me from the chair. As I lit the smudge and blew out the flame, creating the smoke needed to clean his space of all his evil darkness, he scoffed.

Moving around his space, I wafted the smoke into all the corners and nooks as I envisioned the black aura around him getting smaller and smaller, making space for a peaceful one. When I passed by him, I blew the smoke directly onto his head and he coughed dramatically.

“That shit burns.” He grumped.

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