Page 63 of Bully

My intention hadn’t been to anger him with my game, but it was inevitable at the same time. He refused to share anything of meaning with me. Nothing of depth or importance ever passed his lips when we were together. To have something more than surface deep, I needed to know his brain and his reasoning.

My whole adult life I kept everyone at arm’s length, living like a cast member in a show, always on and hiding the real me. But with Tamen, I saw his darkness and his scars.

Now I wanted to know the story behind those parts of him.

“Why do you cut yourself?” As soon as the words passed my lips, I saw the grief in his body open up, threatening to swallow him whole.

“I don’t.” He replied in a strangled voice, “I used to.”

“Tell me why.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He argued defiantly. “My life was shit.”

“Tell me why, though.” I urged, “Please.”

He growled and tightened his hands into fists where they were bound above his head. He wanted to deny me, but he wanted to avoid further clamps. I stayed silent, letting him decide his fate. Eventually, he parted his lips and admitted the truth, “To bleed the evil out.”

“How old were you?” I asked, praying my voice would stay firm and flat to hide my sorrow as he told me about his pain.

“I don’t know. Grade school to high school, I can’t remember.”

There were dozens of other questions I wanted to ask, but I knew he was teetering on the edge of losing his mind to his memories and if I pushed, he’d shut down out of spite.

“Did you do it anywhere else but your thighs?” I asked, silently lowering myself onto my knees so I could kneel between the bottom part of the cross and come face to face with the blackout tattoos covering his thighs.

“Why do you care so much about them? What does it matter, it’s done. They’re old and I’ve moved on.” He snapped again, letting his anger take control of him.

“Because I want to kiss every single scar you gave yourself.” I whispered, before leaning forward and laying my lips directly over the raised flesh on his inner thigh. Using my flat palms against his legs, I grounded him to my presence as I slowly and erotically laid kisses over every inch of skin that he had marred in his painful childhood.

“Sloane.” He gasped in a pained voice, bucking against my touch like each touch of my lips branded him again. “Are we done?”

“No.” I gingerly rose to my feet, sandwiched between his big hard body and the padded cross at my back. “I’m just getting started with you.” I kissed my way up his abs and to his chest, running my hands over his flesh as he growled and groaned. It was the first time I touched him so freely, over every inch of his body. I pulled his head down so I could kiss his lips, and he hungrily ate from them as if my kiss could soothe his demons. “You aren’t evil, Tamen.”

“You don’t even know me.” He argued and pain bloomed in my chest, but I forced it down. Tamen lashed out on a good day, not to mention when he was tied up, forced to expose his inner struggles to me in a power switch. Of course, he’d lash out and try to hurt me to match his own pain. “I don’t know you.”

“If you truly believe that, then I guess this is done.” I replied, sliding my body to the side, but he instantly pressed me into the cross harder, immobilizing me as I dragged my nails through the hair on the back of his head, holding him to me.

“I can’t—” He shook his head as his body trembled, “I don’t know how—”

“I know.” Kissing his face, I soothed him gently. “But you can’t shut me out when I try. One of us has to try.”

I held him just like that, and after a while, he broke the silence. “I was sixteen the first time I killed someone on purpose. My first job, for my father. Dane and Maddox were on a different job and something came up he needed me to handle. So I did it. I killed a person for him and came back to Harlow House, and sat down to dinner like everything else was fine. Yet the entire time my brain was screaming and bouncing off the inside of my skull like it was trying to convince me to run away from that life, even though I had spent a decade trying to prove I could handle it.” Lifting the blindfold off his eyes, I stared up at him as he shared parts of himself with me willingly. “My reward for doing such a good job was his hired whore for the night. I was a virgin even after I became a killer, and he thought I should cross off two big items on the same night.”

“He didn’t.” I gasped, as if that was the worst part of the whole story. My composure was a mask, carefully constructed to prevent Tamen from seeing my disgust at his part in the events he was describing, the stench of his sick childhood heavy in the air between us.

Tamen smirked slightly. “I guess that’s where my fetish for prostitutes started.”

“And I guess I’m where it ends.” I countered, tsking my teeth at him snidely. “Thank you for sharing that with me.” Though it left me with way more questions I ached to have answers for. What was Harlow House? Why was his father running these jobs he kept talking about? And why couldn’t he leave if he wanted to?

“I’ll share more with you.” He backed up, releasing me from captivity against the cross. “But not like this. I want to do it in my own time. My own way.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes theatrically, knowing he was right. “Fine. But that’s a shame because your reward tonight was going to be—” I hummed and licked my lips seductively, “So fucking worth it.”

I went to slide out from my spot to release his bindings, but he held me tight again, pressing his body into mine. “Wait, I answered your questions. I earned my reward.”

I grinned and pet his chest mockingly, “You didn’t answer all of my questions. There are so many more. And they were far more fun than the difficult ones I wanted to start with. I was going to get through the dark stuff and into more of the—” I hesitated like I was trying to think of the right word, “pleasurable stuff.”

“Rainbow.” He growled regretting his call to end our game. “We have the room all night.”

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