Page 99 of The Tangle of Awful

Different tactic. Try talking to him.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Tell me why I’m here.”

His anger melts away and his eyes darken as he rakes his stare over my body. It’s then I realize my swimsuit top is askew, brazenly revealing one of my nipples. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip and then grins. “You look just fucking like her. Even your nipples are the same.”

My heart races in my chest. I don’t like the salacious look on his face. But sex is something I can do. If it keeps him from killing me, I’ll seduce him if that’s what it takes.

“How do you know my mother?”

He rests a knee on the end of the bed between my spread legs. “We go way back.”

“How far back?”

“I’ve known her since I was seventeen and started my own business. I’d given her my business card and she hired me on the spot.” He brings another knee onto the bed and crawls over my body, inspecting every hair and beauty mark along the way. “She has a freckle like this one in almost the same spot, too.”

I whimper as his thumb brushes along my lower stomach at the edge of my swimsuit bottoms. The zip ties are cutting into my flesh. A blood rivulet runs down my arm, tickling me along its path.

“We were off and on for years,” he explains, fingers trailing up over my ribs. “I fell madly in love with her.” He freezes and pain twists his features. “Imagine my heartbreak when she told me she was marrying Hugo fucking Park. Some rich asshole who couldn’t love her like I could. It was wrong!”

I flinch at his outburst toward the end but don’t say a word, waiting for him to continue.

“She promised me, though, we could still see each other. She said, ‘Drew, baby, it’ll always be you and me. We need him for the money, but I need you for everything else.’ I may have cleaned her pool, but I was more than that.”

Drew is his name. And he’s the pool cleaner? Never in my years of living with Hugo and Spencer did I ever notice the pool guy. Ever.

“I promised her I’d make us a shit ton of money one day so she could leave him and be with me. Everything was going smoothly until you took things too far and ruined my life.”

I gape at him in confusion. “What did I do? I don’t even know you.”

He hooks a finger under the fabric between my two breasts and pulls hard. I can feel the strings biting painfully into my back and ribs. Squirming, I attempt to roll away from his abuse to no avail. A ripping sound echoes loudly as he finally tears my swimsuit top away, leaving my breasts naked to him.

“Don’t touch me,” I snap, shooting him a nasty glare. “Do not fucking touch me.”

He scoffs, grabbing a handful of one of my tits. “These are real. Your mother’s are perfect and symmetrical and expensive. God, I miss her tits.” His softer tone when speaking about her changes on a dime and he snarls at me. “When you got it through your slutty head that you wanted to fuck your stepbrother, my world imploded. Neena started behaving differently.”

I squirm, attempting to wriggle away from his wandering palm. “I didn’t try to fuck him. We just kissed!”

He smacks my tit so hard I see stars. “Shut the fuck up. I know what a whore you are. When your mother put distance between us to ‘work on her family,’ I lost my shit. You eventually moved away and I thought it was over. That me and Neena could be something again.”

I blink at the tears that are forming from the pain of being hit. This guy is a complete nutjob. Delusional. Insane. And I’m his captive. Lovely.

“But she stayed distant. Sure, we still fucked, but her mind was always elsewhere. I figured she felt guilty about you leaving or something.” He grabs a nipple and twists until I’m sobbing. “On one of Neena’s and my many breaks, I drove my ass to LA. God, you were such a slut in LA.”

Shame burns hot across my skin. How does he know what I did in LA?

“I would go visit several times a year to check up on you. Always fucking and sucking dick.” He clucks his tongue. “And I was the only one who knew just what a whore you were. I even tried to tell Neena so she’d let go of the guilt. So we could go back to being a secret couple.”

His rough palm roams over my hip and then tugs at a bikini string there. I whimper as he unties the bottoms and fully removes them. I’m naked and at his mercy.

“W-What happened next?” I choke out, eager to keep him talking and not touching.

“Time passed and then Neena stopped taking my calls.” He scowls at me. “I thought she was pissed at me again. I fucking left.” He chokes, tears welling in his green eyes. “I fucking left and lost myself to the Seattle scene for a bit this past winter. Even told myself I was quitting her for good, and that when summer hit, I just wouldn’t go back and clean any of the Parks’ pools. That I’d be done with her.” One of his tears rolls out and splashes onto my breast. “Which is why I didn’t know she was gone until I overheard Tasha bitching about it a few weeks ago.”

I shudder as Drew runs his thumb over the wetness of his tear, circling my nipple almost reverently.

“Gone?”

“Missing. And those motherfuckers had something to do with it.”

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