Chapter Eight

“Nathaniel, are you ignoring me?”

Yes. The word almost slipped out of my mouth, but I lifted my eyes from the papers on my desk and gave my father as apologetic of a smile as I could muster.

“Of course not, sir. What can I do for you?” Always sir, never father, definitely not dad. All too informal and grating on the sensibilities of Richard Easton.

He sat in the chair across from my desk, propping his ankle on the opposite knee. The way he looked at me, with eyes the exact same shade of blue as mine, it was like he could barely even stand to lower himself enough to spend time in my office. My small, cramped office with no sweeping view of the quad, quite unlike his.

“You didn’t answer my email.”

“Which email?” I asked on a sigh, tossing the pen in my hand onto the desk, officially giving up on the short story I was grading. Not that my father respected written words of the fiction variety. Honestly, the fact that he and I shared biology never ceased to amaze me.

He brushed a nonexistent speck off the dark wool of his pant leg and then glanced up at me, like he hadn’t broached this subject. “Oh, it was details for the scholarship dinner in a few weeks. Obviously, it would be best if the entire family could be present when they acknowledge the recipient for this year.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Could you send it to me again?”

“I’ve already sent it to you once. Obviously you just didn’t see it. Maybe you could check again before I go through the hassle of finding it.”

I stared across at him, holding his steady gaze in the battle of wills that was as familiar to us as breathing. And as he did every time, he won. I pulled my cell out from the top drawer and tapped on the email icon.

“It’s not here, sir.”

“Check your junk folder then, your phone probably filters me out because it can sense how little you care to hear anything I have to say.”

Probably. I wanted to say it. But I didn’t. Scrolling through spam from the last couple days, I saw his name. I was about to click open the message when another email right below his snagged my attention.

From: Alice Carroll

Date: Saturday, September 19, 2015 12:19 AM

Subject:

To: Nathaniel Easton

My bruises are fading, but my memory is everlasting. I’d like to be bruised again.

The way you debased me, made me feel like what we were doing was forbidden. You punished me for a crime I wasn’t aware I’d committed. I want to be punished again, by your hand. By … your … cock.

Please, please, punish me. Hurt me. Take what you need from me, because I need it too.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.

• • •

In an embarrassingly unconscious reaction, my heart started pounding in my chest as I skimmed the email again, not caring in the slightest about my father sitting two feet away from me while I read Adele’s words.

“Well?”

“Yeah, yeah, I found it,” I all but stammered, ignoring the attachment and clicking back to my father’s email and only giving a cursory glance at the information. “Should be fine.”

“Should be?”

“Fucking hell, I said it should be fine, and that’s as much of an answer that you’ll get out of me right now,” I snapped.

He simply raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips in annoyance, standing from the chair and walking out of my office without another word. The way his eyes had widened at my reaction should have brought me pleasure, because I never snapped at him, but it wasn’t there. No glow of pride at surprising him and robbing him of speech, of getting in the last word.

Because there was only one reason why I’d even let him get to me, let his condescending bullshit actually get the better of me, and that was Adele. Trying to filter through her words, studying the picture attachment she absolutely should not have been stupid enough to send me, I’d actually lost my temper with my father.

“Shit,” I whispered, slamming my phone back into the top drawer of my desk so I wouldn’t look again.

I did well, surprisingly enough, for the rest of the day. Kept my eyes off the email completely until I finally walked through the back door of my house. It was like I managed to evade her pull until I was vulnerable. Which meant the place that she’d catch me at my weakest was at home, in the dark, quiet place where I slept alone.

Every time the anniversary of Diana’s death passed, I told myself I’d move, start somewhere that wasn’t tangled up in memories of her. But I couldn’t do it. And now, as I pulled a frozen dinner out of the freezer and popped it in the microwave, I had to admit something pathetic to myself.

Reading that email again, in any room of this house that my wife had once filled with so much love, felt wrong. Like a betrayal. You’d think that would have been enough to stop me, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t because of the empty, aching darkness that always filled my body when I was home alone. It’s what had driven me to that bar last week. And it’s what made me pull my phone out once I’d cleaned up my dinner dishes and fell backward onto the couch.

Because there were no other lights on in the room, pulling open her email felt desperate and secretive. No one would see me. She’d have no idea how many times I might run my eyes over her words, the effect they’d have on my flesh and on my brain. Earlier, I hadn’t been able to open the attachment, not with my father standing there and judging every single fucking move I made. I let my thumb hover over the link for a few prolonged seconds, imagining what I might see and never, ever be able to unsee.

Click.

“Oh fuck,” I said under my breath, even though I was achingly alone in the room and no one could possibly hear me.

It was the curve of her breast, taken from a low angle. Her nipple, which I knew was the perfect shade of bronze-hued pink, and the barbell that pierced through it were in the far upper right corner of the photo, just on the edge of being cropped out. But front and center, covering the soft flesh, were four small bruises. Bruises from my teeth, when I’d sucked on her so hard that I thought I might tear the flesh from her body.

She’d fucking loved it, too. That particular round was when she’d been riding me, and when I’d bitten down on that perfect, bouncing tit, she almost came on the spot, curse words falling from her mouth in one unending stream. I didn’t let her come, of course.

I pinched my eyes shut, wishing very much that I could pour bleach into my ears if it would only scour my brain of memories of Adele. When I opened them again, the screen of my phone had gone dark. Didn’t matter though, I was hard as fucking nails.

Keeping the phone tightly gripped in my hand, I used the other one to flip open my belt and slide the leather out of the buckle. I breathed hard for a few seconds, my hand just resting on the button of my pants before I went any further. There was this tiny part of me that was screaming raw in my brain that told me that if I did this, if I took my dick in my own hand and thought about Adele, she had won whatever little sick game we were playing now. The one that had her taunting and teasing me, the one that I was doing a pretty damn good job of resisting so far.

So far.

But when she’d sent that fucking picture, she’d known exactly what she was doing. I thought that the sound of my breathing had been loud in the silence of the room, but when I pulled my zipper down, it fucking echoed everywhere, disproportionate to the action itself.

When I used a tight fist to pull my cock out from my unzipped pants, I hissed in a breath. Not like I was a martyr, but I just didn’t jerk off all the time, maybe a few times a month. But this, this felt so different, because I was picturing her. The impossibly tight squeeze of her pussy when my grip tightened around myself; her high, round breasts against my tongue when I pumped the skin up and down, rolling my palm over the head of my cock. The way the skin of her ass had reddened perfectly from the strikes of my hand, over and over and over.