Chapter 7
I wanted more, especially from her.
Neil
Sick in the head.
That was what Selene had called me.
As usual, I couldn’t control myself when my brain went foggy. That girl needed to keep that in mind if she wanted to avoid similarly heated arguments in the future.
I knew she’d clocked my frequent, strange, and inconsistent behavior in the past, but I wasn’t expecting to hear her say something like that.
She hit the fucking nail on the head.
Like I didn’t already know I was sick.
And what about her? Did she actually know? Or had she just been talking out of her ass? Had she figured it out?
In any event, I’d never have the guts to talk to her about my history. I’d never talked to anyone about it, in fact, outside of my family and Dr. Lively.
What was I supposed to tell her? That a grown woman abused me? That I’d been subjected not only to physical violence but also the emotional and psychological kind? That what I had gone through made me essentially dysfunctional in any human relationship?
Kimberly had exercised her power over me, a type of possession that had turned me into nothing but an object.
I was nothing to her and, even now, I still felt like my body was worthless, just like it had been back then.
I couldn’t “talk” to Selene the way she wanted because, in my mind, there was only one form of communication: sex. My body, my corporeality, was the only way I had of seeking peace or relief. I could never have had a normal relationship with her.
And that was the problem.
Sooner or later, Babygirl would have demanded a real relationship with me.
But she was absolutely perfect, and she deserved better than a man who still lived cheek to jowl with his fractured sense of self.
Someone who lived with the memories of blackmail, humiliation, and the wordless violence inside him that nevertheless cried for vengeance.
That’s why I had behaved so disrespectfully toward her. It was why I tried to make her feel inferior, to make it clear to her that she could never have me.
And she bolted away from that.
She bolted away from me while I just kept smiling like a total dick as I thought about how I’d made her so weak for me with just the slightest contact.
I rubbed my crotch, adjusting the hard-on that I’d had to force myself to keep in check when I had her pinned up against the door.
What I should have done was ignore her completely—from the moment I sensed her presence to the moment I caught her peeping at me to the moment I got a whiff of her coconut scent. But, in the end, I gave up.
I gave up like a fool the moment my eyes met hers—blue as the ocean, deep and so pure that they triggered the kind of lustful thoughts I’d never had toward anyone else.
All I had to do was glance at her for a moment, and I was longing to wipe that prim, little-girl look off her face.
I wanted to strip her passionately, lick her everywhere, and touch her voraciously—I wanted to fuck her.
I wanted with all the visceral desire surging inside me to fuck her.
I wanted more than some boring, childish fumbling because I was accustomed to lewd, filthy, perverse sex.
I wanted to bend her over and dominate her completely.
I wanted to take my pleasure from her, pounding into her right there against the door without so much as cursory foreplay.
No sweet nothings or chivalrous compliments.
Just the way I always did it with everyone else.
Maybe with her I’d even achieve orgasm, as I hadn’t in weeks.
I could have performed an experiment, but instead reason prevailed.
Instead of taking it all from her, I restricted myself just to touching her and breathing her in.
I was still pissed off from the morning—I hated how she’d thrown such a bitter truth in my face—but I also didn’t want to use her like an object.
I wanted more, especially from her.
Because she was just a girl. My Babygirl, to be precise.
And it wouldn’t have been fair to demand something she wasn’t ready or wanting to give me. Like I’d told her, I felt her arousal and her fear as well. She wanted to kiss me, sure. But I could also see the terror in her eyes.
In the end, that was the same reason I wanted to push her away and why I hadn’t gotten in contact with her after the accident—a choice that made me feel guilty—because I was still living with the fallout from what had been done to me.
All I could do was perpetuate the same pain over and over again using a psychological mechanism that punished me but soothed the Boy.
That’s why I didn’t want her to get involved in my whole clusterfuck. The women I usually had sex with were always consenting—they agreed to use me and be used in return. But they weren’t like Selene.
Lost in my musings, I stared at the door Babygirl had backed into during her weak escape attempt. I smiled again and ran a hand through my hair, still soft and damp from the three showers I’d taken. I’d need to take another right away, though, because that ordinary girl had me ready to erupt.
Under the spray of the water, I once again found myself lost in a vortex of my own thoughts. The world was full of girls like her. And yet, Tinkerbell was something rare as fuck.
She was so lovely, and she felt like a dream. So pure, she reawakened my desire every time.
She was beauty and pain at the same time, seductive and awful, like an angel was awful. She provoked awe.
She was the opposite of me.
It seemed impossible to me that fate had chosen this completely ordinary girl to test me, the boy who had been initiated into sexuality far too early, the one who had been with so many available and experienced women.
She had all my desires etched upon her in the incredible form and curves of her body, all of it coming together to create something larger than life.
Everything.
I wanted everything from her.
I wanted her ocean eyes and her perfect little nose. I wanted her lips, whether bent in a cheeky smirk or the dizzying smile that set the very air I breathed aflame. She was too much of everything, and I wanted her.
I wanted her underneath me as I rocked between her open thighs, losing myself in her heat and…
Fuck.
I needed to knock this off and start acting like a man who wasn’t obsessed with her.
A normal man who wasn’t constantly having sweet thoughts about her followed by depraved ones. And then more sweet ones, and then even more depraved ones…
I was having a hard time managing all these deranged feelings. I was losing my shit.
I huffed noisily and decided I needed to distract myself with something.
I got out of the shower and dressed quickly, throwing on black jeans and a black sweatshirt before heading out to join my family on the beach.
Matt had this idea that we should have a bonfire by the water, which sounded like bullshit to me, but I didn’t say anything when he suggested it. We were there to celebrate his birthday, after all, and I didn’t want to ruin it with my shitty mood.
I was feeling pent-up and frustrated.
I’d taken a “break” from the blonds I spent most of my time with because my therapist had told me to; otherwise, my sexual dysfunction would get worse.
I certainly didn’t want to get to the point of being unable to feel arousal or sexual urges.
I’d quit picking up women for sex and taken a pass on more nasty scenes with Jennifer (or Jennifer and Alexia) and had instead focused on myself and what my body really needed.
A ceasefire.
A ceasefire on the self-inflicted violence I’d been putting my body through for years.
It wasn’t easy, though, maintaining this self-imposed abstinence. A man like me had frequent carnal urges combined with quite a strong sexual appetite. Controlling all that took a lot of willpower.
I sighed and ran my fingers through the tuft of hair on top of my head, arranging it over my forehead. It was a mess as always, but women seemed to like it that way for some reason. They told me the unruly look of it matched my spirit.
My feet sank into the soft sand as I set off under the starry sky, moving toward the only source of light illuminating the beach: the bonfire.
My siblings were already seated around the fire on a pair of logs that had been repurposed into benches.
Mia and Matt were talking happily over a colorful packet that I couldn’t identify from a distance.
None of that was what I was looking for, though.
My eyes scanned the scene impatiently, searching for the object of my desires.
And there sat Selene, radiant and lovely, staring into the eager flames as they rose up toward the sky.
She shone like the moon lighting up a dark sky.
She was a fairy creature who rekindled my desire to imagine a better life. The kind of childlike fantasies and raw emotions that I hadn’t felt even when I was a boy.
Sometimes, it felt like she was giving me back the childhood I’d never had.
“Finally decided to grace us with your presence, huh?” my mother chided me sternly. I had disappeared all day after my argument with Selene in the morning.
“Hey, Neil, there you are. Found anything interesting around here?” Matt put in with a sly wink.
He was likely talking about women, ignorant of the sexual issues I was having.
He was well aware of my ability to find girls even if, as was the case more often than not, I wasn’t even looking for them.
My looks went a long way in terms of getting what I wanted easily and I never had to work hard to find someone with whom I could share a moment of physical pleasure.