Chapter 13 #2
“My brothers were assholes, committing felonies in their teens. I had four ‘stepmothers’ between Mom leaving and me leaving, none of them official, all of them skanks, users, and every one of them was the same age when he started it with them, so the last one that I knew was only a few years older than me. Obviously, Dad always had cash, and he liked to be the big man, he liked to swing his dick. He threw huge parties. We were exposed to shit no kid should be exposed to. Drunks. Drugs. Fights. Porn. Firearms. He might have evaded the law, but he didn’t put on any pretense.
Everyone knew the kind of man he was. Everyone knew he was garbage. ”
He took in a breath, and he was looking at me so intently, I felt the burn of his gaze.
“And everyone thought we were like him.”
Oh God.
“Knox—” I tried again.
“And Crew and Poe confirmed it for them.”
Damn.
He kept going.
“I had a girlfriend all through high school. And her parents were so against her spending any time with me, we had to hide it. So we did. For four years.”
Hide it.
For four years.
I couldn’t hack it.
I shifted back and wilted to my ass on the arm of one of my living room chairs.
“I’ve told one other woman what I came from,” he carried on.
“We’d grown tight. She meant something to me.
But after I told her, she acted like I was some kind of creep.
Like that was a latent gene that hadn’t woken up yet, but I was eventually going to turn into that and drag her down with me.
She broke it off with me within forty-eight hours. ”
I could not believe that some bitch was so stupendously dumb.
But I couldn’t get a handle on that thought because Knox wasn’t done.
“Growing up, I was the bad element, when I wasn’t. I was the freak, when I wasn’t. I was to be avoided, so the filth on me couldn’t get on them. I had my girlfriend, and one close bud, Matty. Everyone else treated me like a pariah. Like I was what Dad was, Crew was, Poe. Like I was trash.”
It was all making sense to me now.
All of it.
And the only worse pain I’d felt when it came to Knox was breaking up with him.
Even so, knowing this about him killed.
“I did everything to prove I wasn’t that.
I was the quarterback of the football team that led them to a state championship.
That didn’t matter. I had a summer job at Lowe’s, working full-time, and the only member of my family I was ever seen with was Gypsy.
That didn’t matter. It did a number on my head,” he went on.
“Mom leaving. No one inviting me to their sleepovers. Eventually having to walk to practices myself, until I could drive. Being voted most likely to get incarcerated my senior year, which was supposed to be a joke category, but those assholes believed it, even if I did not one thing for them to think that shit about me.”
Oh boy.
Now I was getting mad.
“And I end up close to home. My sister is up in my shit to return to the family fold. But I’d put that behind me.
No one in the army knew what I came from.
I had friends. I proved myself worthy. I proved I had loyalty.
I get out, Cap tells me I’d be a good addition to the Nightingale team.
He’d talked about those men a lot. I knew they were the kind of men I wanted to be.
Cap thinking I could be one of them meant everything to me.
Cap seeing that in me. Then Lee, Mace, Darius, Luke, all of them, all of these good, solid men seeing that in me.
Taking me on board. Making me a part of something that felt right.
Putting me where I always hoped I should be, but no one ever thought I should be there.
Then I meet this hilarious, gorgeous, curly-haired girl—”
Oh God.
“Honey—”
“And she’s got a loving family who throws a Thanksgiving dinner so big, they gotta borrow chairs—”
“Knox—”
“And sure, her sister is a pill, but even through that, my girl looks out for her, so do her parents—”
“Baby—”
“And I’m falling in love with her, and it seems like she’s falling in love with me.”
I got quiet, mostly because my chest caved in.
I’m falling in love with her…
“And I’m worthy of her too.”
Worthy.
I closed my eyes as the pain of it all washed through me.
I opened them when he continued.
“I tell her my garbage. It doesn’t faze her.
I tell her I might have to put distance between me and my family, she says she’ll leave behind everything she knows, and she’ll come with me.
Every fucking day for two fucking weeks, I live through the time I’m away from her feeling good and right and decent.
And I feel this not because I’m with solid, respectable men, but because, eventually, I’ll be with her again. And because she wants to be with me.”
“Stop talking,” I croaked.
He didn’t stop talking.
“Then shit goes down…twice…with her and her girls wading into the underbelly I fucking escaped, and I’m down to play cleanup.
What I’m not down with is her being immersed in that underbelly that should never, not ever, touch her.
She’s too good. She’s too right. She’s too decent.
She’s about love and loyalty and laughter.
She is not that. She’s not fucking that. ”
Okay.
He was losing it.
But I had to ask.
“Why didn’t you explain it like this?”
“Because I’m an asshole. Also because I’m an asshole, and because I am trying to wash the taste of you out of my mouth, after you and I were through, I get with the first bitch who’s willing to put up with the fact I’m in love with another woman.
I wring her dry. And she ends up stalking me and the woman I love, which I deserve because I played her. But you do not.”
“Cheyenne’s antics aren’t on you.”
“They aren’t?”
“Not even a little bit.”
He didn’t respond, and apparently he was talked out because he didn’t say anything else either.
“You didn’t think you were worthy of me?” I whispered.
“Babe,” was all he said.
But his gaze went to my dog. My couch. Then he lifted his arm in his sling.
And he spoke again.
“I went to a sit-down with my sister’s boyfriend to end their bullshit once and for all, things deteriorated, and one of his lackeys fucking shot me.”
So that was what happened.
It was a skeletal sketch of events, but at least I knew part of it.
So I could say, “That isn’t on you.”
“That’s my family. That’s my life.”
“That was your life. No, that was the life other people around you lived. But you escaped.”
He lifted his slinged arm again. “I have?”
“You take on too much of other people’s shit.”
“I had to get a Lyft here, like I had to get a Lyft to the club, because I won’t be cleared to drive for at least another week.
By the time I left for basic, Crew and Poe used to compare GSW and graze scars, the more you had, the more of a badass they thought you were.
I’m one of them now more than ever before. ”
That made me stand and snap, “Stop it.”
He shut his mouth.
“You should have told me this,” I stated the obvious.
“And there’s me being an asshole again, baby,” he drawled. “Because I didn’t. And I didn’t because I didn’t believe in you. I didn’t because, you didn’t know it, but that whole two weeks was a test.”
Uh-oh.
“A test?” I asked quietly.
“Every fuckin’ day.”
“A test,” I spat.
“Waiting for you to turn on me. Waiting for you to take off on me. Waiting for you to be done with me. Like everything good I had before.”
“And then you made that so,” I declared.
“Yeah. I made it so.”
“Did you ever want me to leave the Angels?”
“No. I wanted you to want to leave the Angels. Be willing to leave the Angels. For me. Can’t say I wasn’t tweaked you were skirting the edges of that underworld.
Fuck yeah, I was tweaked. Huge. I didn’t like that one fuckin’ bit.
But that was your final exam, proving above all you were going to pass, if you did that for me. You didn’t pass. You failed.”
“Motherfucker,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “And then, I knew where you were at, and I used how you felt about me, made you keep our secret from those closest to you and made you be my friend.”
Jacques let out a whine.
Oh yeah.
My pooch felt me coming apart at the seams.
Knox extended his good arm out to his side. “So there you go. No more shadowboxing, Luna. I’m right here. I’ve made my move. The target is in your sights. Hit me.”
I stared at him.
“Hit me,” he repeated.
I continued to stare at him.
He spiked my way and thundered, “Fucking hit me!”
Oh, I hit him all right.
Full force.
Full body.
Jacques let out a sharp bark.
I wrapped myself around Knox Chambers—the man I loved, the man who loved me—yanked his mouth down to mine…
And I kissed him.
It didn’t take him even a nanosecond to return it, darting his tongue into my mouth, taking…
Taking…
So damned greedy.
God, I missed giving it all to him.
Then he broke it and I was up on his good shoulder.
“Knox, you shouldn’t—”
“Shut it,” he growled.
I shut it.
We hit my bedroom, and he tossed me on the bed.
I’d barely finished the first bounce when his hands—both of them, he’d pulled his arm out of the sling—were under my arms, and he yanked me deeper in bed.
Off went my shoes.
Off went my jeans and panties.
He pushed my legs open, put his chest to my bed, and his mouth was right there.
“Oh God,” I moaned, sifting my fingers into his thick, soft hair.
Knox tossed my legs over his shoulders and went at me.
I guessed there was one thing that could stop me obsessively taking care of him, and that was Knox risking reopening his wound because he was going down on me.
He proved magnificently how much he liked the taste of me, because it wasn’t a year-plus-long dry spell that had me coming into his mouth within minutes.
It was his skill.
His hunger.
His need.
I exploded on a cry of his name and a clutch of his hair.
And he was over me.
Still swimming in the dazzle of the orgasm he gave me, I heard him grunt, “Still IUD?”
I gave a weak nod.