Things were going to change.
Snowden had only begun to tear Forest down.
"You said ‘big dick.’" His low chuckle filled the shower with a dull rumble.
I spun around and pressed the tip of my finger on his breastbone. "Do not let it get to your head."
"Which one?" He glanced down, and I made the mistake of following the path of his eyes.
Down past my finger, following the drops of water as they crawled down his skin, my gaze tripped on a perfect six-pack, made a sideways move to admire the V-grooves which angled from his hips to the apex of his thighs where his erection jutted out between us.
I couldn't help but gasp and jump back.
Forest let loose another rumbling chuckle which lodged itself deep in my chest and settled over my heart.
"Sorry." He took a step back. "It's a natural reaction. I can't really stop it."
"But if you're gay, how…?"
"Told you, I'm not gay. I'm bi."
"Bi?"
"As in bisexual."
It was a struggle to hear him. His voice was so low I could barely make the words out over his natural rumbling tone. The water pouring down on us didn't help.
Bisexual?
I didn't believe it. If he were bisexual, I would know. I would have seen him showing an interest in other women. Hell, with the crazy hours my job required, I practically lived with him. Granted, that was within the confines of work, but I was the person who managed his life.
I knew about all his illicit liaisons. I would know if he slept with women.
A sudden stillness overcame me, and I didn't like the thoughts swirling in my head. If he was bisexual…
All my hopes crashed around me. We spent far too much time together. If he was attracted to women but showed no interest in me, then he wasn't interested in me.
I didn't want to contemplate what that meant.
I was in love with a man who could love me back but chose not to.
Devastating didn't begin to describe the destruction ripping through my heart.
I tried to be strong and pretend his words hadn't crushed the last vestiges of my vain hope, dumb dreams that he could love me back, but my eyes misted.
Tears fell.
Thank fuck we were in a shower where the water washed it all away.
"But, you don't date women." Surprisingly, my voice sounded steady and sure.
"I don't date men either." His response returned to me in a flat baritone, as if that were obvious.
Which it was.
I knew this. Why the hell was I dancing around the obvious?
Because you don't want to get hurt.
He'd already hurt me more than I could bear.
"You just fuck them."
"But I don't fuck women." He took my hand in his. "Why don't you rinse that shampoo out of your hair, and let's talk? I need you to know what happened with Skye."
I knew what happened. Skye told me the gist of it. No real details, but I understood.
Skye and Forest were two foster kids, unrelated, who had been taken in by Clark Preston, a wealthy lawyer. He abused them, sexually and physically, and loaned them out to his friends for a fee.
John Snowden was one of those people. He developed an obsession with both Skye and Forest. He had plans to turn Skye into his sex slave and to make money on Forest in some kind of illegal fight club.
Skye spared me the details, but I inferred the rest based on my own experiences. When people use words like sex and slave, there was little left to the imagination, and I knew Snowden abused Forest.
After being forced to watch Snowden with Forest, there was little left to imagine.
Chapter Nineteen
Forest
I didn't like touching Sara.
The only reason I washed her hair was because the poor thing was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
The shock of the last day, Skye's death, Snowden's violation, all of it was too much.
It was easy to bottle up my emotions. I'd been doing it my entire life, but Sara was a gentle soul.
She felt life with this incredible passion I didn't understand but yearned to experience. Her emotions bled all over the place. They were impossible to ignore, and I needed a little distance from her pain.
Her pain made me weak because I had a moral imperative to make things better for her.
Hell, it was far more than a simple imperative.
I hadn't been lying when I said she made my black and white world fill with a riot of color. I couldn't imagine life without her, but she was a liability.
Which made our current situation untenable.
To save her, I would have to lose her forever.
My thoughts had been to hold her and provide some of that human interaction she always went on about. She needed the comfort human touch brought about.
I could do without it.
Oddly, holding her hadn't been as awkward as I thought it would have been.
It felt good.
I felt too good—whole even.
But washing her hair?
I'd done it to soothe her with no thought about myself.
Women always went on and on about how good it felt for a hairdresser to wash their hair, how the scalp massage felt so damn good. I wanted to do something, even as small as a scalp massage, to try to ease some of her suffering.
How hard could it have been?
I knew the answer, and I needed to tamp down the shitshow happening with my dick.
It wanted Sara.
Sara!
I fucked men because they were strong enough to handle my needs. Women were too fragile. And Sara?
There was no way I would subject her to the hunger stirring within me. I cared about her too much to expose her to the vileness swirling in my veins.
No fucking way.
It was time for some tough talk and to scare her away.
I braced my back against the wall of the shower and slid down until my butt hit the floor. Glancing up, there was no way to avert my gaze from the perfection of Sara's curvy body.
Her long, toned legs flexed. The graceful flare of her hips narrowed at her slim waist. Her breasts, softness personified, had me aching to feel them against my body, to cup them in my hands, and to feel her nipples tighten as I drew her into my mouth.
My assistant was an attractive woman, one graced with an hourglass silhouette. She crossed her arms over her chest, hiding the perfect globes of her breasts and putting an end to my fantasy.
I'd already seen everything. I towered over her, and the view I'd had washing her hair wasn't one that would leave me anytime soon.
The way the suds had fallen over the soft swell of her breasts and parted around her rosebud nipples hadn't caught my breath. It shattered the foundation of my world.
I'd never thought of her sexually before. She'd always been kind of a nag, to be honest.
Maybe taking a shower with her hadn't been the best of ideas.
I couldn't unsee her delicate perfection or remove the X-rated thoughts swirling in my head.
Her brows scrunched as she looked at me.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting comfortable."
"You're sitting in a shower."
"And?"
"It's a shower."
"Have you never sat in a shower before?" I patted the floor beside me. "Come on. Sit."
"I'm not a dog. You can't bark at me and expect me to obey your commands."
"I wasn't barking."
"Sure sounded like it."
"Will you pretty please sit your damn ass on the fucking floor?"
She crossed her arms under her breasts, which drew my eyes, enflamed my fantasies, and caught the attention of my dick.
The fucker twitched.
Sara caught the movement, and her gaze cut to my crotch, where it lingered.
Just what I didn't need. I bent my knees and propped my elbows on my kneecaps. I would hide the fucker if it didn't behave. Th
is was Sara, after all.
After I bent my knees, her attention shifted to the bathroom door. I knew what she was thinking.
"Hey," I needed to draw her attention back to me and not what might be waiting for us beyond that door. "We need to talk, and it's best to get comfortable. Don't worry about what's out there. He could barge in on us any second, or leave us for the night. Don't worry about what we don't control. Trust me; it'll help."
"Are my thoughts that transparent?"
"Not really. I'm thinking the same thing. Maybe it helps me to say out loud what I'm trying to tell myself."
"Is it working?"
"Not really."
"This is crazy." She blew out a breath.
"Come. Sit." I patted beside me again. "Let's make each other a promise."
"Okay? Like what?"
"When we're alone, we focus on the moment. Not what might happen, or what just happened, but just that moment. You and me, together. We gather up all those moments and use them to get through the others. Can you do that?"
"I can try."
"Good, now sit. I want to tell you about Skye."
My history with Skye formed the man I was today. I loved her as much as I hated the impact she had on the man I was today. Not that any of it was her fault, but there was one truth I never spoke.
It was time.
If I didn't deal with it now, then Snowden will have already won.
Sara slid down the wall and mirrored my pose. She bent her knees, wrapped her arms around them, and propped her chin on her kneecaps.
I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. It would be easier to speak about the past if I didn't have to look at Sara.
"We don't have to talk about Skye if you don't want to." Sara placed her hand on my arm.
I opened my eyes, glanced down at her, then closed them again. I wasn't ready to think about Skye's death.
"I want you to know what they did to me; to us."
"You know, Skye and I talk…" Sara choked up, and she corrected herself, "Talked. We talked about it. I know what happened."
"You don't know it all."
"She told me they forced the two of you to have sex like you were a sideshow in a circus, sold tickets to it, loaned each of you out, beat you, raped you, raped her. There's no reason to—"
"I didn't just rape her, Sara." I ground out the words.
"You were forced to do the unconscionable. The things they made you do aren't your fault. They weren't then, and they aren't now."
"You don't understand…" I pinched my eyes tight. This was the despicable truth I hid deep inside. "I didn't just rape Skye…I liked it."
God, did I love the pleasure flowing through me when I did it.
The first few times, Skye had been beaten until she had no choice. I grew hard in her hands with fear coiling in my gut if I couldn't get it up. But I did. My body responded with the potency of a young man just coming into his sexuality. We were forced to perform. The better the performance, the greater the reward; time spent locked in our rooms. It was the only place they didn't molest us.
Snowden, in particular, got off on making us do things to each other. He fucked us both, me more brutally than Skye, but he loved forcing us to perform for his pleasure. The man was a sick fuck.
Skye could fake what she needed, but I couldn't.
My orgasms were ripped from me, orchestrated by Clark Preston and Snowden, to be as depraved as possible.
I'd been a boy going through puberty and all that entailed. My body reacted to pretty much everything. I was a horny, lust-fueled, pubescent teen forced to have sex every day with my foster sister.
Every.
Damn.
Day.
The beatings and the rapes I endured merely filled the hours between when I could fuck Skye again. I craved her with carnal hunger, and I loved it.
I loved that fucking her was the only release from my living hell. The pleasure coursing through my body became a drug, and I became an addict.
I became the very monster I hated.
I was just as sick as Clark Preston.
Worse.
It was worse because I had to pretend I was forced. Skye didn't know this, and she never would.
A sharp tearing ripped at my heart.
Skye never would know the truth.
I'd lost my chance to confess the darkness within me.
The disgust I had touching Skye came not because I couldn't stand to touch her, but rather because her touch woke the beast within me.
It made me feel things and want things.
Depraved things.
Like Pavlov's dog, I'd been conditioned to respond. I'd been trained to take.
Touching Skye led to instant erections.
I always feared I would rape Skye for real. Not as an unwilling participant but rather as a sex-crazed lunatic.
Slowly, I grew aversive.
My body reacted if I touched her, but I had learned how to train myself to develop an aversion to Skye.
Our foster father turned me into that man.
Snowden only made it worse.
The better my performance, the greater my rewards.
My aversion to touching Skye was far more complicated than she ever understood.
"I was forced to have sex with Skye, but I grew to love it. I looked forward to it. Snowden and Preston did that to me. They turned me into a monster. Skye never understood my aversion to touching her. It wasn't because it was a trigger to the abuse we endured. It was because I wanted more."
"Forest…"
"I want you to hear this."
It surprised me how much lighter my soul felt admitting this secret. I'd never had anyone I could tell before.
"What they did to you—"
"Snowden will do again." I glanced at her, worried about what I had to say next, and scared how she would react.
"I don't understand."
"He never says anything without reason, and I've been going over everything he said. One thing stands out."
"Only one?"
I wanted to vent a small huff of laughter, but Sara needed to understand what was in store. Snowden had no intention of physically hurting Sara. He didn't dare touch her out of fear for what I would do in retaliation.
But he would use her against me, and that was going to hurt her on a level she couldn't process.
"It's big."
"After the past twenty-four hours, nothing will surprise me," she said.
"Never say never."
She needed to understand, and I didn't know how to tell her the disgusting truth.
"I was forced to have sex with Skye. Preston got off on making us. He craved the control it gave him over us."
"Preston is dead, Forest." She placed her hand on my arm. "He can't hurt you anymore."
"But Snowden isn't. He's very much alive, and he's dying to do whatever he can to hurt me."
Her fingers flexed, and she sucked in a breath while I braced to continue.
"I see…" She expelled her breath in a slow, steady stream.
"I don't think you do."
There was no way to prepare her for every possibility, but Snowden's words kept echoing in my head.
"It's incredible that this world creates such monsters." She blew out another breath. "They feed off our fear."
"That they do."
I braced to tell her the rest of it. My suspicions could prove invalid, but I knew Snowden.
The man was capable of vile things.
"So…what do you want to do about it?" She dropped her hand from my arm and twisted her fingers together as she stared forward.
"Excuse me?"
Her head tilted, and she glanced up at me. "The only way to win is to take from him. Does he know you're bisexual?"
"He watched me fuck Skye. I'm pretty sure he knows."
"But you were a kid then, a highly impressionable kid, and I would venture to say…hypersexual?"
I didn't like that word.
My se
xual appetite wasn't 'hyper.' It was insatiable. Hypersexual downplayed my need for sex.
When I didn't answer, she gave a sharp nod.
"I take that as a yes. This explains a lot of things, but it doesn't answer the question. Does Snowden think you're gay?"
"I don't know."
"If he thinks I'm your girlfriend, he can't. If he believes you're gay, then he knows we're not seeing each other. Which means…"
"I won't be able to protect you."
She thought about that for a moment. Pressing her head against the tiles, she stared at the falling water for what seemed like forever.
The tips of my fingers were turning into prunes. We'd been in here for too long. The longer we sat, the more I didn't want to tell Sara what needed to be said.
The poor thing would be scarred forever, at least if the shock didn't kill her first.
"We should probably get out and get some sleep." I'd find a way to talk about this with her tomorrow.
"You have me thinking."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" I didn't want to ask because I didn't want an answer, but I needed to know what it was I had said that triggered her into thinking?
"He wants to lord his power over you, make you do whatever he wants."
I nodded. That about summed it up.
"But that's not what he wants." She tapped her chin as if thinking this through.
"It seems pretty cut and dry to me."
"But it's not. Oh, Forest, you need to think like him. We need to know what drives him. What are his motivations? What is it that he wants? Figure that out, and we have him."
"I think it's pretty clear what he wants, and I'll continue to give it to him to keep you safe."
"No. I'm the tool…the excuse." Her head shook. "He needs me in order to control you."
"And it's working. As long as it's in my power, I won't let him hurt you."
"I know…valiant and all, and I appreciate it, but it feels off. I don't trust him."
"You shouldn't. The man is a monster."
"A psychopath."
At least we agreed on that.
Sara was smart. I kept forgetting how quick she could be. It was easy to do. Her intelligence wasn't like mine.
I figured out analytical shit. Computers, mathematics, and puzzles were my things. Sara knew people. She had a crazy innate sense about them I couldn't begin to comprehend.
Forest's Fall (Captive Hearts Book 3) Page 16