I’m just me.

Waverly shuts her book and pulls in a deep sigh as if she’s just read a beautiful passage and needs to let it marinate for a bit before she can move on. I know that feeling. I get that way after I draw something I never knew I was capable of drawing.

She turns to me demurely, her eyes falling on my paper and then narrowing as she realizes the girl on the paper is her. “You drew me?”

I shrug. “You were convenient.”

She pulls the sketchpad from my lap and inspects the grayscale drawing. Her eyes soften a bit and she fights a smile, not unlike the first time Juliette found my drawings for the first time.

“You do these?” Juliette asked, flipping through the pages of my sketchpad. Women. Nothing but beautiful women.

I was sixteen.

Playboys were contraband in my house and the vast majority of websites were adult-filtered on our family computer—I had to use my imagination. I held my breath until she came to the drawing I’d done of her from memory: a sketch of her seated at the family breakfast table when her peach satin robe had come untied, gaping open in the front to reveal her ample cleavage as it peeked out from the top of her matching teddy.

That was the first time I got hard for my father’s girlfriend.

Only I never saw her as a mother. She was always just… Juliette. And truth be told, Josiah treated her like his daughter most of the time, too. He controlled her. Told her what to wear and how to act. He treated her as if he were raising her, as if she were a teenager and not a thirty-something woman.

My only conclusion was that she enjoyed it—that and she had daddy issues up her tight, stripper ass.

When Juliette found the picture I’d drawn of her she stopped. I expected her to yell at me, to take it to my father, to scold me and tell me how dirty and fucked up I was. Instead she set the pad down gently on my nightstand and shut my bedroom door.

“Are you curious about me, Jensen?” she purred. Her overfilled lips curled into a smile. “It’s okay if you are. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m curious,” I said, sitting frozen on the edge of my bed. Juliette had never come onto me like this before. “Juliette, have you been drinking?”

Her fingers traced down the front of her white silk blouse until they found the top button. One by one, her blouse came undone. She stepped toward me, reaching down for my hand and placing it over the outside of her bra. The warmth of her body radiated through my palms and her breast overflowed in my hand.

“You’re not a virgin, are you?” she asked with a wicked glint in her eyes.

“You’re not going to tell my dad, are you?” Not that I cared what he thought, but I wasn’t in the mood for another one of his lecture-and-beatings.

“We’re on the same team, you and me,” she whispered, pretending like my hand on her breast was the most natural thing in the world. My eyes trailed up to her pretty face. Her hollow cheeks and hollow eyes were shadowed, covered up by layers of makeup. For the longest time, I wondered why she wore so much of it, and then I saw the bruises. “We’re stuck here. We’re bound to him. What if I told you there was something we could do to make ourselves feel better about our… situation? Don’t you want to feel vindicated, Jensen? Satisfied?”

I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Scratch that—I knew damn well what she was getting at. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.

“You’re testing me.” I retract my hand from her bra cup.

“Oh, but I’m not.” Her face fell, morphing into something I could only describe as the greediest lust I’d ever seen in my entire life. “He punishes us all the time. Let’s give him something to punish us for.”

“Why don’t you just leave him?”

I was sixteen. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t leave unless I wanted to dive headfirst into foster care, but Juliette? She could walk out the door at any time and never look back.

“It’s complicated,” she cooed, raking her pink fingernails through my hair and pouting. She reached back and unhooked her bra, her double-D tits bouncing into a perky position. Her nipples hardened. “Adult stuff. Someday, you’ll understand.”

She climbed onto my lap, sending my cock throbbing. Grabbing fistfuls of my shirt, she tugged it over my head before pressing me back onto my mattress. “God, Josiah would be so pissed if he knew…”

Every beating. Every harsh word. Every hypocrisy. They all rushed through my mind at the same time, painting a picture of the monster that lived and breathed and abused us both for no other reason than to build himself up, make himself stronger.

We could fight back, her and me, in small, stolen moments and behind locked doors.

I stared into her despondent gray eyes, and I decided then and there that we could help each other. We could fuck the shit out of each other and not feel a damn thing except revenge toward my father.

“I never knew you liked to draw,” Waverly says, snapping me into the present moment. I can’t help but feel dirty against her pure-white presence.

I pull the sketchpad out of her grasp and shut the cover, shoving everything back into my bag. Mrs. Davenport is talking at the front of the classroom. The hour is over. Waverly’s stare is invading, intrusive. She can have me at face value. I’ll give her that. But my past? That’s something she’ll never touch. I won’t allow it. She wouldn’t understand.

“Do you have more of those?” she asks. She won’t fucking drop it. I’m not sure why she cares.

“Of you? No.”

“No, any more drawings.”

“In my art class, sure.”

“At home.”

I shake my head. “Left everything at the old house.”

It was true. I left that place with a few clothes shoved into a duffel bag. Juliette cried as my dad assured her since I was eighteen that it wasn’t statutory rape. I’ll never forget my father standing there, knuckles bruised and bloody, and he’s calm as a fucking yoga instructor as he shoots the shit with the cops our neighbors called when they heard Juliette’s guttural shrieks. I left with a bag of clothes and the social worker. As for Juliette’s fate, I’m sure my father roughed her up pretty good, and for the first time, I wasn’t there to protect her.

“You’re incredibly talented,” Waverly says.

“You seem surprised.”

“It’s not a bad thing. I’m impressed, is all.”

Claire Fahlander spins around and shoots Waverly a dirty look before shushing us both. I have half a mind to break her heart just for the sport of it. I bet she’s one of those girls who ugly cries.

“That’s what happens when you judge a book by its cover.” I smirk.

She leans close, her steady breaths tickling my ear. “Likewise.”

I knew it.

I fucking knew it.

Underneath her prim and proper façade is a girl dying to break free from the confines of her ass-backward religious restraints. She’s straddling the line. I can see it. It’s written all over in the way she looks at me, like I make her feel things that terrify and excite her all at the same time.

Any guilt I might have felt by pushing her buttons last night evaporates. I have my work cut out for me, that’s for sure, but I’m so not done with her yet…

CHAPTER 10

WAVERLY

I forced myself to talk at dinner tonight. I couldn’t take another family meal smothered by the weight of Jensen’s stare. I’m a big girl. I made a decision. I touched myself last night, and I enjoyed it.

End of story.

Bellamy always says everyone has secrets; some are just better at hiding them than others.

So now I have a secret. It burns hot inside me, fresh as the instant it was placed there by the most earth-shattering orgasm I could’ve ever dreamed up. But it’s there now, and there’s no getting around it.