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Instead, I’ve been vexed with the cries of children, the begging of faceless women I never hurt myself but also didn’t lift a hand to save either. It’s as if I’m being haunted by the choices I’ve made in life, and I’m realizing that I’ve never once made the right one.
I don’t understand people not helping themselves. It’s as if they’re incapable even though they know what will eventually happen.
I know the psychology of it. I know my mother stayed after being abused. I know leaving was more than walking out of the house and getting in the car.
I know my father tortured her, threatened my life, and she didn’t want that even though I never lifted a hand to help her. That forgiveness she always had in her eyes when she would catch me crying as a young boy for witnessing her abuse wasn’t there that last day. There wasn’t whispered I love yous. There was nothing. Cold, dead eyes in the morning sunshine. That’s what I got that day.
“Fuck you!” I growl, slamming my fists against the dingy tile of the shower.
If there was a way I could keep all cognitive function but get rid of every fucking memory I’ve ever created, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
Give me my house and my money, and I’d be a happy man.
Instead I have thoughts of my mother, thoughts of Lauren, thoughts of that little girl I didn’t help in time, bouncing around in my skull and threatening to make me fucking insane. I hate all three of them.
I hate the power they have to control my mood. I hate that I miss my mother, that I wonder if Lauren is safe. I hate that innocent little girl for just fucking existing.
The towel is abrasive on my skin as I scrub at it. The water on it at this point doesn’t matter. I just need an escape, a way to get my damn mind off of everything that seems hell-bent on hitting me at once.
I don’t like feeling. I never fucking have.
I need a decent night’s sleep and my house. I need silence.
I need—
“Fuck you, too,” Lauren says, her words heavy as she lifts a glass half filled with amber liquid when I step into the room.
I manage to hide my shock at her being in my hotel room, but the fact is that I never anticipated her being here. Lubbock is fucking over five hundred miles from where I saw her last.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snap, dropping my towel to the floor before grabbing a pair of sweats from my bag. “Haven’t I hurt you enough?”
Her eyes drop to my legs as I pull my sweats on, but I’m too fucking riled from not hearing her come into the room to let it affect me the way I know she’d like it to. I’m also a little grateful to see she’s safe. She walked away in Farmington when I went to pay for a tank of gas, and at the time, I figured she’d show up just like she has now, but she never did. I left town not knowing what the hell happened to her.
“Having a drink.” She points to the nearly empty bottle of whiskey before lifting the glass to her lips and draining it.
“Getting drunk in the room with me isn’t going to end well, Lauren.”
A slow smile across her face. “Yeah? You gonna hurt me some more?”
My lip twitches at the challenge in her voice. “I like to cause pain in the moment. A drunk woman who only feels it in the morning isn’t my thing.”
“How often do you hurt women?”
“As often as I can,” I lie, because honestly it’s hard to find a woman who’s willing to go through it and not threaten to call the cops. I’ve had the safe word called too many times for it to even be worthwhile looking for a woman who can withstand what I have to offer.
“How would you hurt me this time?”
“I’ll fuck your ass until you bleed.”
Her eyes narrow, but she gets distracted by the empty glass and promptly starts refilling it.
“The last guy who fucked my ass ended up with a slit throat.”
“Sounds like a hell of a date,” I say, but the information makes me seethe inside.
I can only imagine the situation she was in. Lauren is no fucking stranger to being at the whims of some of the evilest men I’ve ever set eyes on.
Housewives claim to be unvalued because their husbands don’t take out the trash, or they don’t feel valued because they caught the man they married looking at other women, or watching porn and jacking off after her fourth headache of the week.