47. Bay
FORTY-SEVEN
bay
The moment I step out of Dad’s hospital room, I find Torin waiting for me. His muscled arms are crossed over his broad chest, biceps stretching out the sleeves of his red shirt as he watches me approach.
My stomach, that’s already in knots, eases up a tad, fluttering at the fact that he’s here waiting for me, and I didn’t even ask him to. That he’s taking this girlfriend-boyfriend thing to the level that it’s supposed to be at.
“Hey, Wildfire,” he greets me with an easy smile that looks great on him. Especially after the fact that Levi is holding shit over my head that I have a grand feeling I don’t want to know. “How’s your dad doing?”
I force my lips to cooperate and throw on a mellowed-out grin. “Still sleeping.”
Torin reaches for me when I’m within arm’s length and pulls me into him, squeezing me with authentic comfort that I didn’t know was possible with him. “You in there alone?”
And here we go…
If I lie, my luck is that Levi will stride right outside that hospital room.
If I tell the truth, I’m going to receive the full-blown Torin glower.
“Not tonight, Pretty Boy,” I beg as tiredness begins to ascend through my body. “I’d rather not receive your whiplash.”
“Why would I pin that on you?” he asks me, almost innocently. “Unless, there’s something you need to tell me.”
One of my brows rise in challenge for him to say what he wants to say, and we can have it out right here. Even though I’m not in the mood to. “And what may that be?”
“That you’ve missed the shit out of me. His tawny eyes flick over my head toward the door. “That I have nothing to worry about.”
“Once I’m done with men, I’m done with them. Did you see me running back to Matteo?”
“No, but I have a feeling Wallace had something to do with that.”
“He did.” Torin flicks his eyes back down to me. “You can thank him.”
Torin smirks. “That’ll be a good day in hell when that happens. However, as long as he keeps his damn hands and threats to himself, I’ll leave it alone.”
“I won’t hold my breath then.”
“You don’t need to worry about me, baby.” He kisses my forehead softly. “I’m not gonna be the one who stresses you out.” His nose rests along my forehead before he asks, “Have you thought anymore about letting us help you?”
I have.
And Levi will have a damn fit.
“I appreciate you offering?—”
“Bay.” His tone dips, that haughtiness coming out because he believes I’m about to turn him down. “If it makes you feel any better and you feel the need to repay me, let me kiss you every day and you can suck my cock once in a while if that’ll make you feel better.”
My lips hoist. “You’re an idiot.”
Torin smiles before his lips descend on mine, devouring me with his cedar and mint smell and the way my body just demands to be swallowed by him.
It doesn’t take long for Pretty Boy to weasel his tongue between my lips and take it a step further, dirtier. For me to desire for him to take me right to his damn car and have every single way with me.
“Hope I’m not interrupting.” Breaking from Torin’s destitute mouth at the sound of the new male voice, Reeve stands at Torin’s side, blankly staring at me.
His sandy blond hair is askew, but it doesn’t take away how fucking edible he looks like he got caught in a windstorm or catching a wave.
“You are,” Torin responds back with a sliver of irritation, but then he raises his chin and puts on his big boy face. “I was just taking her to get some lunch.”
Reeve’s expression doesn’t falter a sliver. “Great.” Then his fingers are suddenly wrapping around my wrist and pulling me from Torin’s hold. “We’ll be back.”
My feet stumble a bit before my brain catches up, and that’s when I give a small yank on my limb to get him to release me. “I’d rather not.”
We’ve never fought, and I hate it. But I’m not ready to face that conversation, nor do I want to hear his side. I’m fully aware it’s not fair, but I just want a day when I’m not getting hit upside the damn head with something.
Today’s already out.
Reeve doesn’t stop, for once, not give a flying fuck about what I want or say, as he continues guides me down another hallway.
He opens a random door and gives me a slight shove inside by the base of my spine when darkness fills the space around me.
Within another second, the lights turn on, illuminating a plain as hell room with a small desk, two chairs in front of it and ugly green curtains.
Then whipped around, my hair slaps me in the face when Reeve’s on me, forcing me backward and farther into the room.
“You’ve been neglecting me,” he leers with displeasure laced in each and every single word. “And I don’t like it.”
I scoff. “Do you think I give a shit right now?” I meet his frown with one of my own, and I can’t help the itch in my fingertips that wants to run this his disorderly hair. “I can’t trust you.”
“But you can trust Torin?” His features clash together, like that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t. “Why, because he shows up like a douchebag knight in shining armor?”
“No, because he tells me straight up what he thinks and does.”
“When the fuck was I supposed to bring that up, McQueen?” He takes another menacing step forward. “You’ve been doing a lot of shit behind my back in the last forty-eight hours that you’ve decided not to talk to me.”
“Like what?”
“Like agreeing to date Torin.”
“So?” My ass hits the edge of the desk, then and I have nowhere else to go, so I lift my chin in defiance. “I thought he was my hall pass?”
“You think I wanted to find that out by him ?”
Obviously not.
And I wouldn’t put it past Torin to have done it on purpose.
“He’s an asshole.”
Reeve’s hands find my hips, and I flinch, not in disgust, but because he touched me. I hold back the small gasp that almost breaks free from my lips and demand my body to relax. Everything about him calls to me. I want that soft breeze of ease that he gives me so freely. The undeterred knowing that I never have to worry about Reeve hurting me.
But he’d hurt my father.
“How do we hash this out?” Reeve mutters above me, hazel eyes glued to mine. “Because I’m losing my mind over it.”
“Maybe you should stop taking jobs that involve killing innocent people.”
“I was told that your father was an evil man who kept little kids in basements.”
My brows clash together. “Who the hell told you—” Emilio.
I inhale, hoping that fresh air will rid me of all the animosity and rage that I feel for my father.
“It hit home, McQueen.”
My shoulders slump on their own because if it resonates with him… “It does?” He nods, but he doesn’t give away any more. It doesn’t take away what Reeve almost took from me, but if he’s been hurt like that, I could see why he’d want to rid someone else of something so horrific. “You were abused.”
It’s not a question.
Just a need to understand something about Reeve that makes him tick.
“And I was the abuser, too. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s a demon I live with every day?—”
“No,” I carp out, because I instantly don’t believe him. “You would never abuse kids.”
“I abused my sister.”
My blood runs cold then. My skin breaks out in goosebumps, but I don’t sense any warnings of danger that he would ever lay a finger on my sisters or me. I’m not sure if it’s naive confidence and denial or my precarious radar is turned off.
“Why would you do that?”
Reeve only stares at me for a second longer before he looks to something else in the room. “It’s not a pretty story, McQueen. It’s one I’m ashamed of. One that eats at me every day. It’s why that night…in The Landings…”
“The one with The Void?”
He bobs his head because doesn’t bother looking at me. “It killed me to even fake rape you that night because it brought back so much shit I did—” I can hear the disgust in his tone, and it mindlessly makes me grip the sides of his face to force him to look at me.
“You’re not a bad man,” I tell him as I hold his broken stare. “I won’t believe it. I know you’re not.”
“I almost blew your dad’s head off,” he deadpans, conjuring that thought to run through my head, but I understand that he’s trying to fend me off after all.
“I heard you when you said what Emilio told you. And, if that hits home?—”
“I raped my sister over and over again so that my mother would stop fucking torturing the gay out of me.”
My fingers slip from his skin and down his cheeks before they land at the edge of his jaw.
I refuse to accept that as the full answer.
I know that’s not him.
It’s a gut feeling. One that I’m not going to dismiss as my being stupid again. Reeve would never hurt a woman like that.
“Reeve…”
He blinks, hazel eyes shrouding in unshed tears, and my heart immediately breaks for him.
I obviously don’t know the story, but it’s never going to change the way I feel about him.
“I think I love you and I don’t want to lose you over this.”
Talk about getting hit over and over again with words of vulnerability and secrets today. I’m not sure how much more I can handle, but Reeve’s words sink into my head and soul like a permanent tattoo that’ll never leave.
“I’m not sure if you’ve caught on, but I’m bi,” he tells me. “My mother hated it. Despised me because I didn’t center my focus on just girls. She caught me making out with some dude when I was thirteen and practically beat me to death with a fucking pan.” My grip on his jaw tightens as I hold on to him for more. “The bitch doesn’t cook.”
He swallows, and I can tell how hard this is. That he doesn’t want to divulge in all the secrets lining underneath his mellow skin, but he opens himself up to me anyway.
“Rosie.” He says the name with a broken pain that hits me square in the gut. “She was my twin sister and a little bit of a wallflower. We were super close, typical twin shit. I was her voice most of the time and she was my sounding board. The night my mother found out that I wasn’t abiding by girls lead to everything that happened after that.”
I brush his face with my thumb, urging him to go on because I have this deep-seated notion that he has to explain all this to me.
“My mom smokes Camel’s…all the time. She told me that I’d like pussy. That there was nothing like it in the world. She held a butcher knife up in the air and told me that if I didn’t find one to screw than I’d have to keep doing what she had planned all along. But it didn’t stop her. It only served to teach me a lesson and for Rosie to eventually commit suicide over it.”
“No,” I blurt from my lips. “Reeve, I’m?—”
“She forced me to fuck my sister to see things different. She had men watch us and make sure I finished so that it would magically make me straight. Rosie would cry…she’d beg me to stop…” A warm tear hits the top of my hand, and I instantly want to hug him, but I don’t think he wants that. I’m almost positive that Reeve requires his own sounding board right now. “I didn’t stop. Even through her sobs and the way she began to cringe every time she saw me, I didn’t stop. I was beaten unconscious one time because I didn’t want to cause my sister any more mental pain, but my mother told me that she would start cutting my sister and having the men rape her instead, and I…I didn’t fuckin’ know what to do.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen. I should’ve known better, right? Maybe I should’ve called her bluff?—”
“No,” I retort softly, trying to will that into his head. “How could you risk it?”
“I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve gotten Rosie out of the house, but my mother had such a stranglehold on her. She was going to marry rich, but she was broken. I broke her.”
“Your mother broke you both. She’s sick, Reevie, not you. Not you. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I killed her, McQueen,” he leers through flooded eyes. “Rosie couldn’t take any more, even when it stopped and began bringing girls around so my mother would get the hint that it worked. Nothing brought her back from those nights. I moved on…but she still lived in the darkness and the memories of what I did?—”
“She had to have known,” I counter because how could she not know her brother? That he would never do something like that without being forced. Obviously, it’s fucked up to the extreme, but there’s not a sinister bone in Reeve’s body.
“She abandoned me, and I screwed her,” Reeve replies with a stronger edge to his voice. “That’s when I had to do all that shit to you…I just?—”
“You protected me. Just like you did her. It’s not ideal, Reeve. But I get it.”
“Yeah,” he says, but it’s clearly mocking in his tone. “Rosie got it when she put a bullet in her head.”
“ Stop ,” I plead through tears of my own. “You were her brother. I can’t imagine you being different back then than you are now.”
“I am.”
“How?”
He pauses a minute before admitting, “I dunno, but I’m fully cognitive to the fact that if I lose you, I’m done.”
I don’t know what that fully means, but I dare not ask.
“You’re not going to lose me,” I promise.
“I already did.”
“You didn’t,” I assure him. “Nothing changes between us. Not this story, not what you’ve had to do, nothing.”
Reeve begins to step away from me. “You don’t mean that. You can’t possibly?—”
“Don’t start comparing me to a basic bitch, Reeve Stanton,” I argue as I put more pressure on his face to stay with me. To not run away and hide. “I’m serious, look at me.”
His hazels continue to stare deep into the depths of my blues, and I feel mainly protective over him right now.
“Nothing changes.” I force back my fear of my next words and extract them out. “You’re mine.”
Reeve’s eyes widen a bit before his features suddenly soften. “You mean it?”
“I mean it.”
His forehead falls to mine, and we remain in silence together.
Levi tiptoed around the fact that I’d choose them over him. That I am getting too deep within their clutches to where I’m blind to everything.
And maybe he’s right on the latter.
But if they make me choose between them, I’ll die before they reprise an answer.
“I promise you that I’m going to put you first,” Reeve mutters around me. “That you’re going to be so happy that you’re not going to know what to do with yourself.”
My lips coil into a small smile. “I can see that.”
“It’s going to happen. I’m going to have you so in love with me that, when I ask you to marry me, you’re going to fuck me so hard I can’t see.”
“Oh, well, of course. That’s how I imagined it in my brain.”
“I meant what I said,” he says quietly, grazing his fingers along my hip. “I think I’m falling for you, McQueen.”
I bob my head in acknowledgement and refuse to let it go without a bit of vulnerability myself. “I think I’m…falling for you, too, Reevie.”