Page 61 of Play Dirty (Brooklyn Dawn 1)

Just not the kind I could put into a Christmas song.

Happy dick suck day, fa-la-la.

She tucked me back into my jeans, zipping up as best she could considering the sudden tightness of the denim. Silently, she finally pulled on her tight top and layered the hair band one over it before yanking on her pants. She left her boots for last.

Locks on a trunk snapping shut.

Regret stole through me, so profound that I almost missed her sitting down again and sliding her notebook across the slick wood.

I’d get no more of her unforgettable pussy, but she would give me this.

Cold comfort.

I picked up her pad and read what she’d written.

Facade that hides what we see

Broken mystery

Lost inside me

I can’t seem to find

Catch the fragment

Lost again

Until a touch sets off a memory

I crush it underfoot

Watch it die

Don’t want to be her anymore

Don’t want to feel that way again

Not again

I clutched the notebook until my knuckles went white. “You made me think you were writing about hope.”

Instead, she was writing about how I’d poisoned her with my touch.

Maybe. I didn’t even fucking know.

She wasn’t supposed to be this hard to read. I’d thought I had her pegged, and here she had all these goddamn layers, each one thicker and harder to permeate than the last.

Not my job. She wasn’t a riddle for me to decipher.

She wasn’t anything for me.

So, why couldn’t I remember that?

“No, you thought what you believed about me. You think I’m the good time girl who only sees sunshine and rainbows. Who can’t understand anything else because I’m fortunate enough not to have been broken in the same ways you have.”

“No. I don’t want you to understand that. It’s not for you. And fuck broken.” It took everything in me to not throw her notebook as I’d thrown mine, but I wasn’t a baby tossing things out of the pram.

I thought I’d slaked the edge of violence inside me, quelled the jagged bits that never quite let me rest. And here she was stirring them up again.

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