Page 126 of Unorthodox
I head to the bed, too tired to contemplate sleeping on the floor to prove a point. Instead, I hide under the covers, pulling them over my head as I face the wall. I hear him moving around in the darkness, the floor shifting beneath his feet. I hear the sound of steel against wood, the flick of lamp turning off, and then I feel the bed dip as he climbs into it.
It’s not the first time he’s done this.
“All you need comes from me, baby girl.”I can still taste his saliva in my mouth. Feel his hand around my throat.
I can still feel how he was so much gentler than Ben was.
How the haze of the drugs helped me believe he wasn’t therealmonster.
That was four weeks ago, and yet I feel a lifetime has passed since then.
I feel his arm come beneath me, one around me, and he pulls me to his warm body.
I want to fight him. I want to not want his hands on me. I want to hate him.
I do nothing.
He holds me tight, his chin resting on my head. And as I close my eyes, trying to ignore how good he feels against me, trying to remember that just a week ago, he left me, and just a week before that, he killed Dante, he whispers, “Addison?” like a question.
I say nothing.
He takes my silence as a sign he should keep talking, because this is Max Bennett.
“Tell me what happened.”
I keep my eyes closed, my arms tucked underneath my pillow. “I don’t want to talk about that right now, Max.”
He holds me tighter, and I feel something hard against my back.
I force myself not to react to his erection. Not to think about the fact that my virginity is long fucking gone—years gone—and as he’s proven twice before, he has no issue taking advantage of that fact, even if he believes the first time was with his dead guard.
He shifts behind me, then his lips are against my ear, and I shiver, my nipples tightening into points beneath my shirt.
I squeeze my thighs together, but otherwise, I try not to move.
“I need to know, love,” he whispers against my skin.
I fight back against the flood of warmth I feel when he touches me like this. “Why?”
He reaches a hand up, tucks a lock of hair behind my ear, and presses a kiss higher up, above my eye. “Tell me, baby girl,” he says softly, his hand skimming my arm, then lower, coming to rest on my hip, his fingers slipping beneath my shorts.
I tense in his arms, my jaw tight.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Addison. But I don’t want to ask you again.”
There’s Max.Even when he’s two seconds away from dying from exhaustion, even when the circles under his eyes make him look like a deranged addict, even though someone obviously hurt him, he’s still demanding. Still threatening. And still manipulative.
Well fuck him. If he wants to know, I’ll tell him. Maybe he’ll learn he’s not the only one with demons.
“My uncle used to make me and my brother touch each other,” I tell him, the words coming out in an angry rush as I keep my eyes closed. “For hours, every day, one summer. Then sometimes after that, when he got us alone. He’d watch us do it, instruct us, while he got off on it.”
I feel Max tense, his fingers biting into the flesh on my hip, the arm tucked under me, wrapped around my chest, tightening.
I keep talking, realizing I’ve never said this aloud,ever, to anyone before. “Afterward, he’d bathe us.”
Max’s grip is painful, and I grit my teeth, but I don’t tell him to let go of me. I need the pressure. The anchoring down to this life, where my uncle is nothing but a haunting nightmare. But not here.He’s not here.Shortly after he had his way with us, he moved far, far away, and I haven’t heard a thing from him since.
I only had to suffer my father then, but that’s a shame I’ll take to my grave.
