Page 171 of Unorthodox
“Why not?” He still runs his thumb up and down the side of my neck, his mouth against my ear so I can feel his every breath.
“You’re not this,” I whisper against his throat. “You’re not this. You’re better, Max. What they did to you, what happened to you, you’re so much more.”
He laughs against me, shifts between my hips so I feel his erection against my stomach. “You know better than that, baby girl. I’m not more.I’m so much worse.”
My mind spins, my stomach clenching as I think about what he’s going to do with that gun he’s holding to my head.
“You killed Ben,” I remind him in a hoarse whisper. “You killed Ben and last night, what you did for me—”
“You’re a means to an end.” He runs his nose along my jaw, breathing me in. “If you think I did those things foryou, you’re delusional. I did them forme,Addison. For what I get from—”
“That’s not true,” I say quickly. “It’s not true. You care about me, and you can pretend you don’t, and you can pretend that you only want to destroy me, but I know better. I know you have a heart and—”
“I never thought of you as a stupid girl, love. But right now?” He presses a kiss to my cheek. “Right now, you sound really fucking stupid.”
“Stop it!” I scream, trying to move my hands, but I can’t with the way he’s on top of me. “Stop, Max.” I try to turn my head, to meet his gaze, but he nudges my face to the side, further into the barrel of his gun. I tense but I don’t stop talking, even as tears run down my face, warm and wet and a sign of all the ways I’m weak. “I don’t care what you say. I don’t care if you kill me. I don’t care if you fuck me again or sell me or shoot me. Someone hurt you, just like they hurt me. And you think if you hurt everyone else, you can heal yourself. But it doesn’t work like that, Max.”
He brushes my hair off of my face as I catch my breath, but he doesn’t let me turn my head to look at him. Instead, I’m staring at the floor.
“Oh yeah? It doesn’t? Is that whyyou, with the bleeding heart of gold, trying to find compassion where there is none, have a gun to your head andI’mthe one holding it there?”
“You saved me,” I tell him, ignoring his words.“You saved me last night.”
“Just as I would have any kilo of coke, Addison. You’re nothing more than—”
“And when I told you what my uncle did to me, you were angry,” I continue. “And if he ever walked through the doors of your house, you would—”
“Kill him,” he finishes for me, and for the first time, I feel him tense against me. The pressure of the gun against my head lets up. “I would fucking kill him.”
I take a shaky breath, inhaling his scent. “If this isn’t love, if this isn’tsomethinglike it, then what is it, Max?”
He pulls back. “It’s simple, baby.” His eyes meet mine. “It’s just a game. The rest? That’s all in your head.” He taps the gun against my temple for emphasis. “I don’t love you. I don’t know you, and I don’t want to know you. I told you, I want to fuck with your mind. It gets me off. And having you thinking that I might actually give a fuck about you because I’d kill a pedophile?” He smiles as he stares down at me. “That really gets my dick hard.”
My chest caves with his words. It feels like my heart shatters, too.
All this time, I thought I saw something in him, beyond the monster.
But there’s nothing.
He’s not in there. He doesn’t have a soul. His father and whoever else hurt him took it, or maybe he was born like this.
Either way, there’s no reasoning with the devil.
So, I don’t even try.
If he wants to fuck me again, if he wants to rape me, I’ll let him.
I’ll go somewhere else, just like I did last night. Max can take my body, he can fuck with my head, but I won’t let him strip my soul. I won’t let him take that piece of me that believes somewhere in the world, there’s goodness.
Maybe it’s delusional. Maybe it’s a conspiracy theory, as far-fetched as alien abductions, but I don’t care.
I won’t let him take that bit of hope.
“Nothing to say?” he asks me, propping himself up on one elbow, half off of me as he traces the gun down my body.
I barely feel it as I stare at the ceiling, and I don’t answer him.
“I’ll make a deal with you, baby girl.”
