Page 18 of Marrying the Gardener
“You’re not wrong,” she hisses.
I hum. “So?”
I think her nails strike blood as she swears right beside my ear. “Did I do okay earlier?”
“You did beautifully.” Phenomenally. I’m never going to getearlierout of my head again. “You’re doing less beautifully right now.”
Shaking breath enters her body as she removes her nails from my wrist, slips her touch up my arm, around my shoulder, and into my hair. Her grip tugs the follicles, and it takes everything in me not to groan.
“Is this better?” she asks.
It’sperfect. “Yes.” Controlling myself, I delicately bruise herthroat while she brands my mind. Once I pull back, I catch a glimpse of the mark beneath the spattering of stars on her flesh, and it undoes me in ways that nearly cripple my senses. “I’m going lower,” I whisper, dazed. “Stop me if it’s too much. Don’t push yourself. I want you to trust me. I need you to be comfortable around me. You need to be in love with me. That’s the point.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Her breath hitches when I press my mouth to the space several inches below her collarbone, to the soft rise of her chest. Her inhale rocks against my lips, trembling, and I grip the wood of her dresser, battling for sanity.
It’s not my fault she wears low cut clothing.
It’s not my fault she’s asked for this.
It is my fault when I flick my tongue out to taste her. It is my fault that I am—so thoroughly—enjoying her…while she suffers.
Sometimes I really, truly, hate myself.
Despite the constant undercurrent of self-loathing, I dapple her shoulders and neck before leaving a few stray kiss marks on her wrist and in the crook of her elbow. Once I’m finished, I draw back, scan her, forget how to breathe.
“Am I done?” she asks. The words leave her reedy and thin.
I force my attention to her eyes. They’re as determined as they are broken, and it hurts.
It just…hurts.
I say, “Yeah.”
“Your turn?”
Stretching my fingers, I reach for the top buttons of my polo and pull them loose, confirming, “Yeah, baby. My turn.”
Chapter 6
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Attraction: a force under the influence. (Of stupidity.)
Crimson
Kaleb tastes like salt and sin, and I really wish that thought weren’t replaying in my brain. I don’t even know what people mean when they say that sort of thing. I suppose it implies a sense ofwrongness? But then I only ever hear it said as though it’s positive.
I’m focusing wholly on the wrongness. The stark negative.
Because even I know that two wrongs don’t make a right and outwitting the horrible men in my family isn’t thecorrect thing to do. This entire ploy is based in deceit, and deceit is wrong. And, no doubt, it will end up hurting people around me whom I love. But I am so tired of living like this and feeling stuck. I want to be free enough to live according to my beliefs of kindness and goodness and rightness, where I consider that humans—all of us—are just products of the messed up world we were born into.
Deserving of mercy, grace, something other than a throat punch…
I can’t reach that serenity while I’m stuck in this tangled web of hate.
It hurts that I have to sell parts of myself like this in order to obtain the things I should have been born into. My family rests securely at the height of society. I shouldn’t have had to grow up in a world where I learned my place, where I feared being hit, where I had to outgrow that fear before I was ten in order to survive.
It makes me somad.
