Page 71 of Suck This

“Then why, at this point, does it matter whether I’m with you or not?” she challenged me.

I pulled myself away from her so fast that she stumbled, catching herself on the glass.

“Eighty years ago, when we first came out, the lady that was seen with me the night that it was made public…” I stepped toward the window and stared down at the club. “Was gang-raped by over forty human activists. She killed herself after she found out she was pregnant.”

“What did you do?” she whispered brokenly.

“I killed them. Hunted every last perpetrator down and disemboweled them. Made them swallow their own feces.” My smile was harsh. “The men that raped Margo… those men turned on each other. I locked them all up, forced my mind upon them to make them see each other as targets, and let them go to town on each other until there was only one standing.”

Her voice was shaky as she said, “And what did you do with him?”

My grin was nothing close to nice. “I made him relive the night that Margo spent in hell, over and over again, for the last eighty years.”

She swallowed.

“I can’t find any fault in that,” she whispered quietly. “I don’t see that as wrong.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t tell you that to make myself look bad. I told you all of this because you needed to know what being with me comes with. Pain. Death. And sometimes things worse than death. I can’t do this. Have this happen again. Not to you.”

“If you don’t, they win.”

Her words made a shard of pain streak straight through my heart.

“Sixty-six years ago, when I thought things had settled down, and I finally worked up the courage to try again, finally allowed myself to believe that maybe mankind wasn’t as bad as I thought it was, my wife sold me to the activists. Gave her life, and the life of our child, all because she was convinced that I was bad. I was evil.” I leaned forward. “Let me tell you something. I am evil.”

“You’re not,” she said defiantly.

Her insistence was maddening.

“I am,” I informed her. “They made me evil, though. I was stubborn and pigheaded before, but now they made me into a ruthless man who cares for only the lives of those that are his. The day they took my child from me, they made me that man.”

I watched her reflection in the glass as her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “Sorry isn’t going to bring my baby back. They don’t care that I am a man. That I bleed and can be killed. They don’t care that I love just like them. They only care that I’m different, and they’re bigots who don’t care about anyone else but themselves.”

Her hand on my cheek had me turning.

“Nothing will happen to me,” she promised.

I shrugged. “I thought that seven different times and the last time ruined me. I’ll never be able to be that man again.”

Her breath hitched.

“But…”

I wrapped her hair around my fist and pulled her face forward, only a few millimeters between us now.

“I can only offer you mindless sex. I can only do it when nobody knows. Is that what you want? To be my dirty little secret?”

Her eyes went wide, and I wanted to kiss away that surprised look that took over her face.

“I’d be anything as long as it was with you.” She brought her hand up to my beard, sifting her fingers through the rough curls. “You make me want anything that I can get.”

“That’s pathetic,” I whispered.

Then I kissed her.