Page 115 of Carved Obsession

“Squirt? Yes, kitten. Yes, you fucking did.” Pride laces his voice.

But I was about to ask if I peed myself. For a few moments there, that’s what I thought was going to happen.

Then ecstasy rolled in waves through me, and I swear, even my body is in disbelief that it was able to do that.

A man has never even given me an orgasm before Carter. And now...I squirted at his hands. And cock.

I’m ruined.

Chapter 30

Carter

Scarlet told me she’s not sure how to process what I just did to her, but as I watch her walk back from her cottage after running to the bathroom, stark naked, bare feet sinking into the grass, I struggle to process what she’s doing to me.

Slow, sultry sex isn’t my thing. Visualizing a future with a woman isn’t either. But here I am, imagining this dark-haired woman in my home, in my bed, on my lap, in my kitchen, reading next to her, cooking and goddamn murdering together. I can see all of this happening. It’s almost palpable.

She plops down on the blanket, nestling into my side as she wraps her limbs around my body. There’s no protest on my part as I lay here naked, stretched out, arms braced behind my head as I watch the stars flicker across the dark sky, thinking of Scarlet’s damn dinosaur displayed in the middle of my church. The thought doesn’t just intrigue me—it excites me.

“How was your childhood, growing up with your condition?” I ask, something inside of me desperate to learn more about her.

She sighs, fingernails digging into the skin covering my ribs. “Likely much more different than yours.”

That wouldn’t be hard to achieve . . .

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s not really pretty. But not entirely bad, either. I have my dad to thank for the latter,” she confesses.

“Your mother for the former?”

“And then some. She’s a crazy fucking bitch.”

Well then, it sounds like we have that in common. Maybe our childhoods weren’t so different after all.

“I don’t remember finding out I can’t feel pain, or hot and cold sensations. I just remember it always being a thing in my life. My mom told me about the moment they realized I wasn’t ‘normal.’ Repeatedly.” The exasperation in her tone shelters buried vulnerability. “Apparently, I was playing with my brother. I only just started walking, and I fell and cut myself on these big decorative rocks they had around a garden bed. I was bleeding, but I kept playing and didn’t shed one tear. That’s what started it all.”

“It must have been quite difficult to play with other children, where hurting yourself is normal.”

“It wasn’t difficult at all, because I was never really allowed to play with other kids, not without very strict supervision. Every minor injury, scrape, or stub ended in a doctor’s visit since we had no way of knowing how bad it was. I didn’t really understand, either. It’s hard to, when ‘pain’ is just a word to you. It bears no consequence or physical reaction, and it certainly doesn’t strike fear.” She lets out a deep breath, mindlessly scraping her manicured fingernails over my ribs.

Goosebumps break out all over my body.

“I didn’t make things easy, either. I was a wild child, even after I started understanding what could happen after seeing it happen to others. With time, things got even worse. Eventually, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. That’s how I got good at hacking. I’ve never really been a teenager. The only reason I remained in school was because of my father’s insistence on it. But outside of it, I was tostay safeand locked inside.” She creates air quotes with her fingers.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, love.”

“It wasn’t even the worst of it.” She pauses, untangling herself from my body and lying on her back as she rests her head in the crook of my armpit. “Paranoia and delusion set in eventually. Mom became consumed by the idea that I would hurt myself and die. Then she found some crazy-ass doctor who believed CIP could be cured by targeting the brain and spine with electroshock therapy and other deeply invasive procedures. It never crossed her mind that the guy could be as delusional as her or be feeding his own fucked-up agenda.”

My muscles tense with every word she speaks, the conversation falling in a direction that I certainly didn’t expect.

They hurt her.

They fucking hurt her!

“What did they do to you, Scarlet?” I ask between gritted teeth.

“Experimented,” she says, too lightheartedly. Like she’s repeated it to herself so much that it became mundane. “Mostly electroshock therapy, though there wasn’t anything therapeutic about it. They strapped me to a table, face down, and shocked my spine. My neck. My head. Pierced me with needles, cut me and pretended they were making progress. My mother was so fucking stupid. She believed it.”