Page 51 of Our Shattered Pieces
Very hard.
Fiddling with the hem of Lorcan’s shirt, I stared this beautiful man in the face, and began to tell a story that I haven’t told in years. “So, you know I went to Berkeley…”
“Yeah, I do,” he remarked softly.
“So, well…my freshman year, I started dating this guy named Ethan. Ethan Harris.” Taking a deep, steady breath, I went on. “We dated for about six months. It was serious, but not…I wasn’t madly in love with him or anything. Just…committed, I suppose.”
“Okay.”
“One night we were having sex.” I noticed a tick in his jaw, and I imagined he wasn’t too eager to hear about me having sex with another guy. After all, I didn’t want to hear about the women he’s been with. “Well, he started…saying things. Started laying out fantasies. Started calling me names. Started just…he started amplifying the sex play. It…and it worked. I started getting super turned on by the name-calling and the filthiness of it all.”
“Did you ever like it before?”
I shook my head. “I was only nineteen, Grayson. The only sex I’d ever had, before Ethan, had been normal, adolescent, teenage sex. I had no idea there was another world out there that I’d find myself enjoying.”
“Okay, so you discovered you liked dirty sex,” he surmised.
I nodded. “Yeah, I did.” Another deep breath escaped. “But then the fantasies became more…graphic and taboo. He started talking about…multiple partners and the…well, he kept asking me to imagine what it would feel like to be pleasured by more than one guy.” Grayson slowly nodded but didn’t comment. “Then one night, while I was…uh, on top of him, he asked me if I trusted him, and when I told him I did, two guys walked into his bedroom to join us.” Grayson took a deep breath, but his expression remained stoic. “At first, I had panicked. It was one thing to fantasize about something like that, it was an entirely different thing to go through with it.” I wipe at a runaway tear, determined to get through this. “Ethan had started whispering promises of pleasure, and I caved. I gave my consent, and Sawyer and Calvin joined in.”
“And?”
Heat rushed up my chest and over my entire face in embarrassment. “And I liked it,” I admitted. “They’d been…they’d been good to me. It was like…as if…like they’d been there to pleasure me, not the other way around. And since Ethan had been the only one to call me names, if felt like…like it was still just us. Like Sawyer and Calvin were…props, almost.” I shook my head at how ridiculous I probably sounded to him. “And…and we’d…we’d done it all. Whatever you think of with that kind of scenario, we’d done it.” I couldn’t utter the words double penetration. I just couldn’t.
“So…that’s how you guys-”
I shook my head. “It only happened that one time,” I told him. “But…there’d been times, during the following week, where I had replayed the night in my head, while I’d been having sex with Ethan. I hadn’t been opposed to trying it again.”
Grayson let out a deep breath. “So, you need multi-”
I shook my head again, stopping him. “That’s not the end of it.”
His brows shot up. “Okay.”
“A week later, or so, I had showed up to campus early to surprise Ethan with some coffee, and I found him huddled up with Sawyer and Calvin, talking. They hadn’t seen me, and so…walking up, I was able to overhear them discussing how they had paid Ethan a thousand dollars each for that night.”
“What?”Grayson exploded.
“Ethan was having problems with his tuition, and his plan had been to pimp me out for money. Sawyer and Calvin had been the first.”
Grayson stood up and started pacing. “I’ll fucking kill him,” he hissed. “I’m going to find him, and fucking kill him.”
I stood up and grabbed him by his arms to get him to stop pacing. “Grayson, it’s okay-”
He glared down at me. “The fuck it is.”
“Lorcan…Lorcan took care of it,” I told him. “I promise.”
His blue eyes searched mine for the lie, but when he didn’t see it, he gave me a tight nod, and sat back down on the couch.
Sitting back down where I’d been, I finished my story. “Needless to say, I lost my shit. I’d broken up with him, obviously, and had done my best to move past it. My only saving grace was that it hadn’t been recorded. If Ethan had chosen to tell people, it would have been my word against his. However, Sawyer and Calvin had been…pushy in wanting to do it again, and when I finally couldn’t take it anymore, I confessed to Lorcan and…well, Sawyer and Calvin never bothered me again, and Ethan had to walk with a cane for about a year.”
“Molly-”
“I went to counseling for a while,” I said, talking over whatever he’d been about to say. “I…I struggled with how I’d been so hurt and offended by being turned into an actual whore and liking how it sounded during sex, that I was messed up for a while.” I shrugged. “I’m still messed up, I think.”
“That’s why you made that comment of being a real whore,” he said. “It makes sense now.”
“Well…it…Monday wasn’t about you or us or anything we’d done over the weekend,” I finally confessed. “I’d been rushing to the office and…Christ, what are the odds, Grayson? What are the odds that I’d bump into Sawyer fucking Baker, here, in Chicago?”
