Chapter 33
Stella
“How much longer until we get to the hotel?” I asked.
“We’re almost there,” Tyler said.
I rested my head against the window as he drove, watching the sun dip toward the horizon. We’d just gotten out of the hospital, having spent most of the day there thanks to a combination of long wait times and the barrage of tests the doctors put me through, just to be sure.
Nothing was broken, and my concussion was minor.
Mostly, I was just bruised and scraped to hell, and while the hospital staff had cleaned my lacerations, the rest of me was still filthy from the tunnels, and I badly needed a shower.
I was starting to smell. And I was fucking exhausted.
Not only had I been up for almost two days, but they’d been two of the most harrowing days of my entire life.
“Is Blake okay?” I asked. The least Tyler owed me was some goddamn answers.
“I don’t know, but he did manage to get past my goons.”
“You’re not going after him, are you?”
“No. Next time I see him, it’ll be to apologize, thank him for stopping me, and give him this.” He pulled open the center console, and there sat my grandfather’s Patek Philippe watch.
I snatched it up. “I’ll give it to him. You can’t be trusted.”
“That’s fair,” Tyler said, and I glanced over to see him looking resigned.
A few minutes later, we pulled into a dusty parking lot.
Of course the hotel was a tiny roadside place, but that’s what I got for telling him to book the closest thing he could find.
At least it was clean inside, and looked like it’d had a somewhat recent renovation—no shag carpeting or roaches in sight.
The only problem was that there was only one bed.
I shook my head. No, actually, it wasn’t. Tyler could sleep on the fucking floor. There, problem solved.
I paced to the bathroom and turned on the shower, dropping the clothes we’d grabbed at a local Walmart on the counter. Steam filled the room as I stripped out of my ruined dress. I turned, saw a zombie in the mirror, and gave myself a jumpscare.
Oh, Jesus, it was me. I looked like shit. Pale, gaunt, covered in scratches and bruises, bags under my bloodshot eyes.
A knock sounded from the door, and I was grateful I’d locked it.
“Do you need help with anything?” Tyler asked.
I opened my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but thought better of it. Let him have a taste of his own silent treatment instead.
The shower was calling my name, and I threw back the curtain and stepped into it, sighing when the heat hit me.
The only thing better than taking your bra off at the end of a long day was a hot shower when you were dirty and exhausted.
I closed my eyes and sank to the floor, letting the water run over me.
Everything hurt, not just physically, but also emotionally.
The last time I’d been this drained was the day after Runa’s accident.
I closed my eyes, resting my head against the tile. The only saving grace was that I was so tired my brain was starting to turn fuzzy, thoughts slipping away because it required too much effort to hold on to them.
For the next twenty minutes, I was on autopilot, groggily climbing to my feet and washing my hair and body with the cheap hotel products.
Drying off. Getting into clean clothes and wrapping the towel around my hair.
Plodding back out into the room. Grumbling something unintelligible when Tyler asked if I was okay.
I was in the middle of towel-drying my hair when he reemerged after his shower, his own towel slung low around his waist, hair slicked back, water droplets coursing down over his heavy muscles.
He saw me looking, dropped his gaze, and fell to his knees. I blinked a couple of times to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was. I’d pulled the blackout curtains shut, and only a single, soft lamp illuminated the room, its light dancing over Tyler’s crouched form.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Whatever you want,” he answered.
I sighed. “Look, it has been a very long, very traumatic day for both of us, and I am begging you to stop with the games. If you’re not ready to talk about what happened, that’s fine.
I understand that you probably need time to process or have your existential crisis in peace.
Just, please, can we not do whatever this is? ”
He stayed where he was. Same position, head down, hands resting on his knees.
“Tyler,” I said, careful to keep the rage out of my voice because this man just found out that his dead mother had told him a massive lie that effectively set him down a dark path that could have ended very badly if my little brother hadn’t called the cops and potentially saved all our asses from whatever nuclear-level catastrophe Tyler might have unleashed.
“This isn’t a game,” he said. “I’ve done nothing but bully and threaten you. I won’t apologize again, because I don’t think you should forgive me. But I want to offer myself up for punishment instead.”
“Punishment.”
It wasn’t a question, but he nodded. “Whatever you think I deserve, I’ll accept.”
This fucking asshole. Hadn’t he messed with me enough?
I put my hands on my hips and turned fully toward him. “So if I told you I wanted you to kiss the floor, you’d—oh my god, no! Don’t actually kiss that, ew, are you serious?”
He froze with his mouth an inch away from the carpet, leaning forward like a knight paying homage—which, I mean, yes, thank you, finally the kind of recognition I deserved.
“Where is this coming from?” I asked.
He stayed right where he was while he answered, muscles starting to pop from the strain of holding himself in place.
“All this time, I’ve been pushing you, intentionally pissing you off because I did want any reaction I could get.
Good, or bad. But mostly, I think I wanted bad.
I wanted you to be mean to me because it made it easier to lie to myself, made it easier to convince myself that I hated you when the truth is, I think I’ve been obsessed with you since the moment we met. ”
I didn’t say anything to that, was too mesmerized by the fact that he was still holding himself in place, right where I’d told him to stop. Maybe I should have relented and ordered him up, but I wanted to test this, see how serious he was, see how long he could last. Also? I did want him to suffer.
I started counting seconds in my head.
Ten.
Thirty.
One minute.
His shoulders trembled.
Two minutes.
Veins were starting to pop on his biceps.
Oh, Tyler was dead serious.
“You can sit up,” I said.
He pushed back to kneeling, head down, hands on his thighs.
“What is this? What are you doing?”
“I think I’m a brat.”
“Tyler, everyone thinks you’re a brat.”
“No, like brat kink.”
Oh. Ohhh. “So you really did like it when I was mean to you.”
“I did.” He glanced up at me from beneath his brows, his gaze hot, searing. “And I think you did, too.”
My breath whooshed out of me, because, fuck.
Was he right? I mean, I had felt a little thrill zing through me whenever I got the better of him.
I had been turned on against my will almost every time we were together, but I thought it was just because of the annoying spark of chemistry between us.
And my thoughts about Tyler had strayed toward him needing to be put in his place a time or two.
But there was no way to know for certain whether I was really into this until I put it to the test.
“Who said you could look at me?” I asked, my voice cracking like a whip.
Tyler snapped his gaze back down, and in that moment, I learned something very critical about myself: I liked when he did what I said.
Like, liked it, liked it. And I didn’t know if that was because, so far, I’d been the one forced to do whatever he wanted, or if I just plain enjoyed having this big, loud, bossy douchebag of a man finally shut the fuck up and kneel there in silence.
My eyes dropped, and it was clear from the way Tyler’s towel was starting to tent up that he enjoyed it, too.
“I’m so mad at you,” I told him.
“You have every right to be,” he said. “I’ve been the world’s biggest bastard.”
“How does it feel to find out it was all for nothing?” I asked, because I also wanted to be a little bit mean to him, now that I knew he could take it. I wanted him to pay for all the things he’d done and all the other things he almost had.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m numb. I think I might be in shock.”
“And you think brat play is somehow going to help?”
“All I know is that I don’t want to be in my own head right now. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to make decisions. I just want you to tell me what to do.”
“And you’ll do whatever I say?” I asked, feeling a little shocked myself.
Tyler, just quietly doing whatever I told him to?
No way. This had to be some cruel, elaborate prank.
One final fuck you before he disappeared out of my life forever and never faced the consequences of his actions or tried to make amends for what he’d done.
He nodded.
“So if I said crawl over here and kiss my feet, you’d—”
Oh, dear god, the man was crawling right across the grubby hotel carpet, shoulder muscles rolling, back flexing, head down like he’d been a very bad man and was ready to beg for forgiveness.
I was absolutely going to draw this next, because I never wanted to forget the sight of so much languid power brought low in supplication, even if it was a prank.
He stopped when he reached me, the towel barely hanging on, and brushed his lips over the top of my foot. I’d been ready to turn down the A/C a few minutes ago because I was cold. My body was plenty warm now, humming with energy and awareness, my nerves firing on overdrive.
“I’ll do whatever you tell me to. The worse, the better. I’ve been bad, and I deserve to be punished in a fitting manner,” he said, sounding like he couldn’t wait for me to order him to do something degrading.