Page 4 of Cruel Endings

Her auburn hair flowed like a river of fire down her back, and she had light-green eyes. Her lips were the delicate pink of the rose petals in my mother’s garden. Because we went to private school, we wore school uniforms, and hers hung on her willowy frame. A lot of the girls wore expensive designer shoes and carried thousand-dollar purses, the only way to show off their family’s wealth, but she had scuffed white sneakers and a small battered denim clutch.

I thought about doing bad things to her.

I didn’t waste time, jumping into action.

As I headed in her direction, my best friends Antoine and Simon looked my way. I usually sat with them, but they also knew how I was with girls, so when I strolled past them, they just smiled.

Camille sat at the end of a table by herself, eating a sad-looking wilted salad and an apple.

“My name is Bastien,” I said to her in French. “Move over.” And as I said it, I felt a strange thrill inside me. Ilikedgiving her orders. I wanted her to do what I said.

She looked up at me with disdain, taking her sweet time to chew and swallow a bite of apple before answering. “You didn’t say please,” she said in prim French with a thick American accent.

Somehow this thrilled me even more. I realized that it wouldn’t be any fun if she just obeyed my orders. Those girls who stared at me with their huge, cow eyes, so eager to obey me, bored me to sleep. I wanted tomakethis girl do what I said.

My parents had drilled manners into my head, though, so I said, “Move over,please,” but as I said it, I made my eyes flash in the way that scared people.

She frowned at me, looking a little suspicious, like she knew something about the way I said it was wrong, but she didn’t quite know what to do about it. That was part of my game. I liked keeping people off balance.

I set my tray down next to hers. Most of us didn’t bring our own lunches. I had bread and cheese andparmentier de canard, a dish made with duck, onions, shallots, and butter. She stared at the dish with big hungry eyes before she tore her gaze away to look at me.

“I’m Camille,” she said.

“That isn’t all you bought, is it?”

She looked unhappily at her salad and picked at it. “It’s all I’m allowed to have. My mother says I’m getting a little fat.”

That was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. Americans and their obsession with weight. Our lunches were ten times better. We got an hour for lunch, and none of the girls in my school were heavy.

I shoved my tray at her. “You can have half of mine.”

Her head shook back and forth. “Oh, I couldn’t. If my mother found out, she’d be furious.” But she was staring at it like a famine victim. She ran her tongue over her pink lips, and heat flooded my body. I wanted to watch her put a forkful of food in her mouth and swallow.

“You’re actually too skinny, and you’re hungry.Eat it,” I said to her, my voice commanding.

She stared at me, startled. At first, I thought she’d continue to fight me, but she reached over, grabbed my fork, and took a bite. She opened that pink rosebud of a mouth and slid the food in. Closing her eyes, she let out a little moan of pleasure. Fierce arousal shot through my body, and the fabric on the crotch of my pants was suddenly too tight. My cock too hard.

She obeyed me.

And I knew right then that I would make her mine. I would give her orders and do mean things to her because that’s what boys do when they like a girl. My mother even said so. Or maybe she told me lots of things about how a boy should treat a girl, and I filtered her words through my darkness and shaped them in a way that justified my terrible behavior.

I would be the boss of her. I was sure of it.

And she would fight me all the way, but she would like it. I could tell.

But also, I would do nice things for Camille because I wanted to do that too.

We would be boyfriend and girlfriend, and as soon as she was old enough, the very day, I would marry her. We would live together on a big estate like my mother and father did, and I would be her Master. She would obey me, and she’d enjoy it most of the time. She would live to please me, and she would be my world, my love, my everything.

There was no other possible outcome for us in my mind.

Funny how life turns out.

CHAPTER2

Bastien

Present day

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