Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Josie
The girls are already seated around the fire by the time King and I return from the store. My lengthy shower and a flat tire ate up entirely too much time. I hurry toward the blaze with a fresh bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and several bars of Hershey’s chocolate.
Imagine my shock when I see that they’re already making s’mores without me.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say as I drop the grocery bags next to theirs on a nearby folding table.
Cat bites into her snack, and white goop oozes on all sides, reminding me of earlier. I try not to smile.
She chews a few times, then looks at it. “Does this taste a little off to anyone else?”
I grab what I need and join them at the fire as Kindra sniffs her graham crackers.
“It does smell a little strange,” Kindra says. She takes a nibble, and her lip curls, but then she shrugs. “Fuck it. Nothing is getting between me and melted chocolate.”
As she shovels the rest of it into her mouth, I look around at the group. “Where’d you guys get more ingredients? I didn’t figure Chef would have given us anything after the way we’ve been raiding his bus.”
Frankie turns to me as she holds a mallow over the fire. “We just grabbed the ingredients from your RV. Hope that was okay. The door was unlocked.”
“Yeah, the locks don’t—” My blood freezes in my veins as her words register. “You’re using the marshmallows from . . . my RV?”
Frankie takes a bite and grimaces. “Yeah, but what did you do to them? They taste funny.”
“They were kind of sticky, too,” Eve says.
I jump to my feet and race around the circle, swatting sticks and snacks from hands. When they land in the dirt, I stomp on them for good measure, ensuring no one else will make this mistake.
“Spit it out!” I yell at the poor women who are chewing and looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You have no idea where those marshmallows have been! And you don’t want to know.”
The girls stop chewing, but instead of gagging and spitting, they burst into fits of laughter. While they hold their sides and rock back and forth, I’m left standing here, mortified. Do they not understand?
“I put the marshmallows in my—”
“Oh, girl. We know!” Quinn says through giggles. “We really did go to your RV for ingredients, but one whiff of that bag told us everything we needed to know.”
“Your sex-mallows are safe in the cupboard,” Cat says. “Thanks for giving me and Bennett a run for our money. It’s nice to share the spotlight.”
Kindra nods. “And you didn’t even bother cleaning up the ties, so I can see that you share mine and Ezra’s love of bondage.”
“We learned a lot about you tonight.” Eve pushes another marshmallow onto her stick. Then she pats the empty space beside her on the log. “You fit right in, so don’t be ashamed.”
I go and sit beside her, very much ashamed.
“Oh, so all of you have allowed yourselves to become human pinatas?” I ask.
“I’ve never shoved anything like that inside myself,” Eve continues, “but I dated a woman whose ass was like a Mary Poppins handbag. One time, she shoved sprinkles in both holes, and when she came, it looked like confetti.”
“Whatever happened to Silo?” Kindra asks.
Eve shrugs and pulls her marshmallow from the fire. “Last I heard, someone slit her throat and tossed her body into the ocean. She’s never been found.”
“Then how do you know her throat was slit?” I ask.
“Oops,” Eve says with a devilish grin.
Frankie clears her throat. “Enough about us. You said you needed to run something by the girls, and we’re all dying to know what it is.”
“Yeah, are you planning to confess your love for King?” Cat asks, her eyes gleaming with hope.
Quinn nods and looks at me. “That’s my vote too. Seeing you two together has given me so much inspiration for my next book. Second-chance romance is such a fun trope.”
“I hate to rain on the romance parade, but that’s not quite it,” I say. “It’s a little less fun than that. It has to do with something that happened when I was much younger, before I met King. I was raped.”
Eve lowers her s’more from her mouth. “Who the fuck plans to tell their friends something like this over s’mores? This calls for liquor, honey, not sweets.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I say. “Well, it’s not okay that I was raped. That part is pretty awful, but I’ve come to terms with it. King helped me work through a lot of my pain, and so did therapy.”
“If that happened to me, I think killing the bastard would be the only form of therapy I’d accept,” Kindra says with a shudder.
Quinn nods. “At the last retreat, my biological father tried. It certainly felt good to kill him.”
“And I thought my story was traumatic,” I say. “Yeesh. Your dad?”
“He watched my cam show for months. Aven’s helping me work through the baggage. But this isn’t about me!” Quinn flails her hand in my direction. “How did King help you work through it? Seems like having him humping your leg all the time would be the opposite of what you needed.”
My heart hammers a bit harder against my chest. We’re coming up on the exit, my last chance to bail before pushing ahead and telling them everything.
I press my figurative foot to the gas and hold on tight.
“Before we get to how King helped me, we have to go back to the bit where I tried to kill myself.”
The words hang in the air. The women look at me, and as my gaze meets every pair of eyes, I search for judgment. I find only understanding and innocent curiosity.
“The assaults started when I was young, and they continued until I was a teenager. The boy worked for my father, and when I told my parents what was happening to me, they told me to keep quiet. They said it happened all the time, and it wasn’t a big deal.
Boys have urges, and girls are meant to satisfy them. ”
“Fucking sick,” Kindra groans.
“The problem was . . . I had urges too.” I look into the fire, unable to meet their eyes now. “I would orgasm when he raped me. I liked the way I felt, but I didn’t like who made me feel that way.”
Eve’s hand lands on my thigh, and she gives it a squeeze. “That had to have been so confusing for you. Are you sure you’re okay to talk about this?”
“I’m okay to talk about it. It beats the hell out of pretending it never happened.
But thanks for asking.” I place my hand over Eve’s and squeeze right back to let her know I’m really okay.
“It was confusing, especially once I ran away from home and realized that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
When I learned there were men who loved women in ways that were healthy, I felt so dirty.
Like I could never have that because I’d been used up. ”
“That’s when you decided to kill yourself,” Cat says.
“I didn’t know how to rationalize who I was.
Once I understood my parents were wrong and that what happened to me was a violation of my body, I couldn’t meld that with the part of myself that felt pleasure during the intrusion.
I thought I was broken.” I take a deep breath.
“So I went out on a fishing vessel, and when we were far out at sea, I jumped. After that, I don’t remember much.
Pretty much sank like a stone since I can’t swim. ”
“They didn’t come back for you?” Frankie asks.
“No. To this day, I don’t remember my rescue. I just recall waking up in a facility and being asked to join a suicide study.”
“Wait a minute,” Frankie says, and I nod.
“I was part of Jim’s experiment, though I didn’t know it was Jim’s until recently. He collected a group of suicidal individuals and put us through some weird brand of therapy. That’s where I met King. He took me out of there and taught me his brand of therapy, and that clicked.”
“Murdering pedophiles and rapists really is the most healing thing you can do,” Quinn says, and the others agree.
“Please tell me he helped you hunt down the asshole who hurt you,” Kindra says as she pulls a marshmallow from the fire.
I look down at my hands. “He did. We killed him and bathed in his blood. It was probably the most romantic evening I’ve ever shared with someone.”
The girls swoon, fanning their faces and leaning on each other.
“But that brings me to what I wanted to discuss with you ladies,” I continue.
“King helped me cope with a lot of the trauma I experienced, but I’ve had a coping mechanism of my own for a long time.
I’ve held on to it for so long that I’m not sure if it’s a bulletproof vest or a security blanket at this point.
I wanted to tell all of you and let you make sense of it for me. ”
The girls shift on their logs, all of them positioning to face me fully. I’m touched that they’re taking this so seriously. It makes me feel safe enough to tell the rest of it.
“That boy took my virginity. He took everything from me. He forced himself on me in every way but one.” I take a deep breath. This is it. “He never kissed me.”
The pieces fall together for them, and Kindra gives me a knowing look. “King was your first kiss, and that’s why you’re so hung up on him?”
“Close,” I say. “I’ve never been kissed, and I refuse to kiss a man until I know he’s the one. It’s the one thing that wasn’t stolen, and it’s the only thing I have left to give. At least . . . that’s what I’ve always told myself. Now I’m questioning if that’s silly.”
“Not at all, honey,” Eve says with another reassuring pat of my leg. “That makes perfect sense to me.”
“Me too,” Quinn says with a solemn nod. “I think it’s beautiful that you’ve protected part of yourself for so long. It’s the furthest thing from silly!”
The other women agree, and I’m faced with a possibility I never considered: complete acceptance.
Tears fill my eyes, and I can’t fight them back.
I expected them to poke fun or at least share a few side-eyes, but the way they’re all looking at me, as if I’ve done some brave thing, makes me feel so far removed from bravery. I feel weak and vulnerable.
“Does King know why you won’t kiss?” Cat asks. She bites into a s’more and sends a blotch of chocolate onto her chin. She swipes it off and licks her fingers clean, pausing as a thought hits her. “Are you thinking of making him your first?”
“No, and definitely not,” I say with a wrinkle of my nose. “I want the first person I kiss to be the last person I kiss, and we all know he’s a rolling stone. If I try to tie him down, he’ll just drag me through the mud.”
The girls nod and mutter their agreement.
“I’m thinking about telling him, though.”
The muttering stops.
“Do you think that’s a bad idea?” I look around at them, and they look everywhere but at me. “I guess that’s my answer.”
“No, that’s just it,” Frankie says. “At first, we didn’t think he’d be good for you. We worried he’d just break your heart again. But now . . . we’re kind of worried about the opposite.”
“What?” My head rears back. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Quinn motions toward the RVs. “I don’t know the man as well as the other girls, but I noticed a change in him from the start of the trip. He’s smiling. That’s fucking weird.”
“And laughing,” Cat adds. “Also weird.”
“That wasn’t enough for us three at first,” Kindra says as she motions between herself, Eve, and Frankie, “but it’s pretty undeniable now. He’s smitten.”
“I don’t know about all that,” I say. “I mean, yeah, he enjoys spending time with me, and the sex is exceptional, but let’s not forget that he let Blayne shoot me in the fucking arm. That doesn’t exactly scream fondness.”
“If it came down to it, if it really came down to it, he’d go through fire to save you.” Frankie shakes her head. “I can’t say how I know. It’s just a feeling. After working with him for so long, I should know best. He’s got it bad, Josie, and I don’t care what he says to the contrary.”
“Or what you say to the contrary,” Kindra adds.
Eve stands and places her toasting stick beside our log, then stretches her back. “Just accept it. He’s got it bad, and so do you. Oh, don’t try to deny it. Even if we didn’t see the way you look at him like he hung the moon, we hear you screaming about it from your RV mattress.”
My proximity to the fire has nothing to do with how hot my cheeks are right now. “So you guys think I should tell him about my reasoning behind no kissing? But what if he thinks it’s stupid?”
Kindra points her s’more at me. “If he thinks it’s stupid, you have your answer right there. He isn’t deserving of anything else you have to offer him if he receives that poorly.”
She’s right, and as their encouragement sinks in, I can’t deny it. I might not be the only one falling without a safety net.
“So we’re all in agreement that I should tell him?” I ask, giving them one final opportunity to talk me out of it.
But they don’t. They only double down and say that his reaction to my pact with myself will tell me everything I need to know.
I smile at the semicircle of supportive women who are becoming fast friends. “Thanks. Sorry to bring the mood down. I bet the guys aren’t having deep discussions like this.”
“Who knows?” Quinn says with a shrug. “Maybe all the guys are sitting around discussing the very same thing?”
Yeah. Maybe. Though I highly doubt it.
Perhaps it’s time we joined them. I’m dying to see how King’s plan for Blayne went. With how well things played out for me, I can only hope he had a similar outcome.