Page 47 of Legendary

Before that happens—if it happens—he should know the man he’s taking into his body. Because the only thing worse than not having Eli would be to have him, only to have him regret it.

When Eli told me about what happened to his parents, he let me see all of him. I guess I need to know that if I let Eli see all of me, even the parts I’ve tried to forget, he’ll want to keep on looking.

He finally notices somethings up about fifteen minutes later. “Where are we?” he asks, scrunching his face in a way I shouldn’t think is cute, but I totally do.

“Inyan, South Dakota, I say.

“Where?”

I laugh, but there’s not much humor in it. “A flat ugly piece of land where I grew up.”

At that little piece of information, he stashes his computer and locks his attention on me. “You grew up here, on this piece of land?”

“No. I was born about three miles as the crow flies from here. This used to be a truck stop where all the long-haul truckers would stop for coffee, greasy, late-night breakfasts and—”

“And?”

“And maybe a quick ten dollar blow job or, if they were flush in Andrew Jacksons, they could buy themselves a fuck any way they wanted it.”

“Jeb?” Eli reaches out toward me, but I pull back. Right now, I crave touching him more than anything, but not yet. Not until I tell him everything.

“My mother worked the trucks here and when she got too strung out to care about us needing food or rent for our shitty trailer, well, then it wasmethat worked the trucks.”

Eli’s face doesn’t change at my reveal. He just continues to look at me with his dark eyes that, for once, don’t reveal his emotions.

“She disappeared when I was about fourteen and that meant no more shitty trailer to live in, so I spent that winter trying to blow enough truckers to make sure I had the thirty bucks a night Mike charged to sleep in the truck stop’s storage room.”

“Thirty dollars?” Eli’s voice is outraged. “Did he know what you had to do to get that money?”

“Firsthand,” I answer, swallowing down an old bitterness that tastes like bile. “Anyway, one night there’s a blizzard, and he changes the nightly rent to fifty bucks, so I go back out into the snowstorm to earn the extra twenty I needed to not freeze to death.”

“I’m desperate, so I take the first offer from this trucker everyone called Road Rage Carl. I’d always avoided him before, no matter how much he was offering, because I’d heard stories of how he liked to hurt his tricks. That night I was desperate, and he was paying enough that once I was finished with him, I could go back to the diner and afford a burger before I bedded down in the storage room.”

Eli’s fists are clenched, and he’s digging his nails into his palm. I reach out, unclench them, and start rubbing the indents his nails made on his soft skin. “I was a pretty tough kid. I thought there was nothing left anyone could do to hurt me more than I’d already been hurt.” I take a deep breath. “I was wrong.”

I pause, memories of that night striking through my brain in lightning-like flashes. The red-hot pain from the things he did to me not as bad as the way he fucked my head up. I skip giving the details to Eli. I don’t think I could tell him without puking my guts out.

“He wouldn’t let me leave until I admitted I was nothing. At first, I called him names and spit at him, but by the end I was begging him to believe I was nothing just so that he’d stop.”

A tear slides down Eli’s cheek. I capture it with my thumb and brush it away.

“He finally let me go, but I’d lost too much blood by then. I collapsed in the snow and couldn’t even crawl my way back to the diner.”

Eli makes a pained sound, but I’m too lost in that night to stop talking. “I fucking hate being cold. It gets in your bones until you feel hollow.” I wrap my arms around myself even though it’s summer and I have the heater going in the truck I picked up in Boise. “But that night I went numb. It was actually kinda nice. I stopped caring how cold it was and looked up at the stars. I thought they were going to be the last thing I ever saw.”

“You survived though,” Eli whispers.

I nod. “Some trucker found me and got me to the hospital. They discovered my mother had run off, so they sent me to foster care.”

Eli lets out a sigh of relief. “Were they nice?”

I can tell Eli hopes this is one of those news stories where the troubled kid gets a new family and lives happily ever after.

“Nah. Derk and Rina were pretty much shitheads who used the money they got fostering for their ‘real’ family and locked their fridge with a padlock.”

Eli growls, reminding me of the feral little beast he can be when he’s not being tamed by a soft touch.

“It wasn’t that bad. I had a roof over my head, a warm place to sleep, and despite being a total asshole, Derk never tried to exchange those things for sex, so I was way better off than I’d been before.”

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