Our Shattered Pieces

by M. E. Clayton

  But missing out on that little bit of help this morning, I hadn’t been paying attention when I was racing towards my first class of the morning and ran smack dab into a hard chest. Strong arms reached out to steady me, and when I looked up at the poor soul who I had tried to run over, my blood ran cold, and I quickly stepped back.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I fired off hurriedly.

  “That you are, Molly Cavanaugh,” he replied, and I did my best not to wince.

  “I’m running late, Calvin,” I said. “I need to get to class.”

  Calvin Hackett didn’t care apparently. “We could always just skip first class,” he suggested. “It’s close to the end of the semester anyway. What’s one class?”

  I stared up at his handsome face and wanted to slap it. A six-foot wall of muscle, Calvin Hackett was a hot commodity at Berkeley. A senior, he was one of the most popular guys in school. Light brown hair with hazel eyes that were more green than brown, he was a good-looking sonofabitch.

  “Not interested, Calvin,” I told him. “It might be one class for you since you’re already on your way out, but I don’t have that luxury.”

  I went to side-step him, but he matched my move. “C’mon, Molly,” he whispered darkly. “It’s one class.” He stepped closer into my space. “And you know I can make it so good for you, babe.”

  Holding his gaze was hard.

  Very fucking hard.

  But Lorcan taught me at a young age not to show weakness when surrounded by bullies. He taught me how to defend myself and how to stand up for the meek. I wasn’t necessarily Joan of Arc, but I wasn’t completely weak either. Shame was my only handicap right now, but I could deal with that.

  I could deal with him.

  “Get out of my way, Hackett,” I said. “I’m not interested, and even if I were, I still wouldn’t skip class.”

  His eyes ran over my face, and it was almost as if he were thinking out loud when he said, “I can’t believe Harris let you get away. You’re so fucking beautiful.”

  “Move,” I snapped, not caring about his opinion of me and Ethan or his opinion on my looks.

  He threw his hands up in surrender and chuckled a bit. “Fine. Okay.”

  The second he stepped to the side, I walked past him, prepared to put the entire encounter out of my mind, when he called out to me. Not wanting to cause a scene, I turned around. “What?”

  “Maybe next time, yeah?”

  I turned around and ignored his laughs trailing behind me. With only minutes to spare, I made it to my class, and it didn’t even bother me that I was stuck sitting in the back row. I seriously doubted I’d be learning anything this morning anyway.

  Along with Ethan, Calvin Hackett and Sawyer Baker were the two other guys on campus that I’ve been trying to avoid. Where Ethan had brown hair and light brown eyes and Calvin had light brown hair with hazel eyes, Sawyer had blonde hair with bright blue eyes. And looking at all of them together, they looked like your typical All-American youth. Good-looking, fit, and smart, they looked like the perfect guys you took home to meet your parents.

  But they weren’t.

  They were far from it.

  Ethan, especially.

  And while I’d been fooled for a long time, my eyes were wide open now. And I saw life in a completely different light these days.

  Since breaking up with Ethan, I’ve only seen Calvin once-just now-and Sawyer a couple of times, but only in passing. The first time, he’d been pulling into the student parking lot while I’d been heading to lunch with Gina. The second time, he’d been coming out of the library stacks with a gorgeous blonde, and when he had winked at me, I had turned around and left. The only consolation there was in all this was that Sawyer was also a senior at Berkeley, so he’d be gone soon, along with Calvin.

  As for Ethan, I’ve done my best to avoid him, and it was rather easy since I knew his class schedule. However, it’s only been a couple of weeks since I broke up with him, and I knew I couldn’t avoid him forever. A part of me suspected that he might be giving me space, but if that was the case, he was wasting his time.

  I’d never been so done with another human being in all my life.

  But no matter what I thought of Calvin and Sawyer, they weren’t the ones who had betrayed me. They weren’t the ones who had sold my secrets. They weren’t the ones who had violated my trust. Sure, they were complicit, but only up to a point. Ethan was the one who had kicked this entire shitshow off, not them.

  And as much as I wish I could go back in time, I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t undo what’s been done, and I was going to have to find a way to learn to live with it.

  I glanced around at all the females sitting in class and I wanted to scream at them in warning. I wanted to tell them nothing was a guarantee, not even a ring on your finger. Phones got hacked all the time. People lost their phones and laptops all the time. Couple broke up every day, no matter how in love they might have once been. Sending pictures of yourself or videos was dangerous, no matter what.

  You might feel safe sharing your secrets with the man you love, but if technology has proven anything, it’s proven that our secrets were never safe.

  And, sure, there were laws in place these days against revenge porn and all that, but so what? So what if your ex-boyfriend or ex-husband or ex-friend gets fines or jail time? Your pictures and/or videos have still been seen by other people who were never meant to see you like that.

  We trusted too easily and, these days, it was a hard lesson learned.

  But since I couldn’t scream my warning in a room full of people, I did my best to clear my head and pay attention to Professor Stevens. I did my best to ignore my caffeine withdrawal and my encounter with Calvin Hackett.

  I did my best to get a handle on my shit.

  With Lorcan’s surprise visit this upcoming weekend, I had no choice. Knowing me the way he did, he’s going to know if something’s up, and I could risk that.

  Lorcan’s temper was insane.

  Chapter 6

  Grayson~

  Today was really kicking my ass, but my Thursdays were always full days for me. Between a heave class load and practices, I always felt done at the end of my Thursdays.

  So, walking back into the apartment should have been a good thing. It should have felt like the weight lifting from my shoulders, if only for a night.

  It should have felt relaxing.

  Instead, I was thrown for a loop when, as I walked through the apartment on my way to my room, a female walked past me, letting herself out the front door.

  When I looked back, Eric was coming out of the hallway, pajama pants on only, a grin on his face as wide as his face.

  Now, it wasn’t that a girl was leaving our apartment that bothered me. I’ve seen plenty of that over the past two years. While Eric, Travis, and I had agreed to no parties when we had become roommates, having a girl staying over was perfectly fine. Hell, Katy has spent the night plenty of times. So, that wasn’t what had me wary.

  No.

  It was that the girl looked barely legal.

  And I do mean barely.

  “Christ, Eric, how old is that girl?”

  He laughed as he made his way to the kitchen. “Relax, Dad,” he replied. “She’s of age.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Because…are you sure?”

  He started to look annoyed. “I didn’t ask for her ID, if that’s what you want to know, but she’s a student. She has to be legal.”

  While she didn’t have to be, odds were that she was, but still. “She looks like she’s fucking fifteen, dude.”

  “And she fucks like she’s got daddy issues,” he replied smugly.

  That rubbed me wrong. “And you can’t get girls your own age?” I asked smarting. “What happened to Lydia Jackson?”

  Eric scoffed. “Just because she’s a hot fuck doesn’t mean I was going to propose?” He reached for a beer from the fridge. “Besides, who ca
res how old they look as long as their eighteen?”

  I stared at Eric and wondered if I was projecting, but that statement couldn’t be…okay.

  Right?

  I adjusted my practice bag over my shoulder, the weight of it suddenly too heavy. “Are you telling me you’re okay with fucking a face that fresh?”

  He shrugged. “Again, Grayson, she’s legal.”

  My brows shot up. “So, when Hadley goes to Michigan next year, you have no problem with a senior making a move on her?”

  “Leave my sisters out of this,” he snapped, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d snap, too, if someone used Rowan as an example of comparison.

  “Well, that girl that just walked out our front door is someone’s sister or daughter,” I fired back.

  “Look, just because you’re particular about your pussy, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to live by the same guidelines, Grayson,” he said. “If a girl is eighteen, and willing to spread her legs for me, I’m fine with that.”

  “Fine, Eric,” I relented. “It’s not my business, anyway.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

  At that, I turned around and headed to my room. After dumping everything on the floor, I grabbed a change of clothes to go shower. When we had moved in, I had scored the master-bedroom because I had been the one who’d had the money for the deposit and the first and last. Having a successful criminal attorney in the family was a financial benefit that Rowan and I had benefited from often in our lives.

  Once I was in the shower, I cursed my knee jerk reaction to seeing that girl walking out of our apartment. Going after Eric like that had been unfair. Just because I didn’t agree with his sexual practices, that didn’t mean it was any of my business. As long as the girls he was with were of legal age, that was the important thing.

  But I couldn’t help but think of Rowan.

  She had been of legal age when that campus cop had taken advantage of her. But she had still been a senior in high school, and that should have counted for more. Sure, he had gone to jail and all that, but I still struggled with what she’d gone through while I’d been here, not a care in the world. I was still fucked-up over it, as evident by me snapping at Eric just now.

  Besides, I was the last person to judge someone else for what they liked in bed. If anyone knew the truth about me, they’d think I was a heartless bastard. All over the world, women’s rights groups would be throwing darts at a picture of my face.

  And I wouldn’t blame them.

  Getting out of the shower, I got dressed, but instead of hitting the books like I normally would, I called one of the two only females on the planet that I loved.

  After three rings, I heard her breathless voice. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Busy?” And then I immediately winced, hoping she wasn’t.

  “So, there’s this new dance-kickboxing-workout thing I’m trying,” she said. “I had to race across the room to get my phone since I needed a lot of space for this new idiocy I’ve embarked on.”

  I laughed. “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Other than my boobs threatening to knock me out? Oh, great. Just flippin’ great.”

  “Christ, Rowan,” I muttered. “I don’t need to hear about your…things.”

  Rowan laughed, and it was one of my most favorite sounds in the world. Especially, now. “They’re called breasts, Grayson,” she teased. “C’mon, you can say it.”

  “Stop it,” I growled, my threats having no effect on the girl.

  “Okay, okay,” she chuckled. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your phone call?”

  “You’re such a jerk, Row.” She just laughed harder. “Okay, fine. I was thinking of flying home next weekend to visit Mom and Dad. Want to come with?”

  “Hell yeah,” she enthusiastically agreed. “I miss all your faces.”

  “Dude, I just saw you two weeks ago.” With Georgetown so close to Boston University, I made sure to see my sister as often as I could.

  “I can still miss your face, jackass,” she retorted.

  Ignoring her snark, I said, “I’ll send you all the flight information once I secure our flights.”

  “You’re the best, Grayson,” she automatically replied. “Now, I gotta go before I give up on this workout session completely.”

  I chuckled. “See you later, twerp.”

  We hung up, and if nothing else, I did feel a little bit better about my shitty Thursday.

  Chapter 7

  Molly~

  It was past seven, but with Lorcan scheduled to visit this weekend, I had been kicking ass in all my assignments, so that I could actually spend some time with him without having homework hanging over my head like a dark cloud.

  Normally, I never would have been at the university library this late, but I wasn’t overly worried. I owned a car, so there’s be no walking home late and alone. Plus, the school was very good about excessive lighting on campus. I knew that didn’t guarantee safety, but did anything? Sometimes women were raped in their homes, children snatched from their bedrooms at night. Safety was more of an illusion than anything, if you asked me.

  “Molly?”

  The library student parking was already in my sights. I could see my car parked near the front, only a few feet away.

  I kept walking.

  “Molly?” It was said a little bit louder, but that wasn’t going to get me to stop and turn around.

  Nope.

  I was going to keep going, and I wasn’t too ashamed to admit that my feet were power walking the closer I got to my car.

  Just as I was about to reach my car, I felt a hand latch onto my arm, turning me around. “Goddamn it, Molly, will you stop?”

  I wrenched my arm from his grasp. “For what, Ethan? I have nothing to say to you.”

  He closed in on my personal space, but unfortunately, a part of me was thankful he was making the effort to keep our argument private. “How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?” he hissed out.

  My grip tightened on my bag. “Do you seriously think you can apologize for what you did? Because you can’t, Ethan.”

  “You act like this was all me,” he fired back. “But it wasn’t. You were there, too.”

  His hit was a direct one, but this wasn’t about me. This was about him. This was about who he was and what he had done.

  “Do you seriously not see how fucked-up what you did was?” I asked, absolutely stunned at the possibility that he might believe that my consent invalidated everything else.

  “Don’t act like you didn’t like it,” he hissed, and I had to take a deep breath.

  A little over a month ago, Ethan and I had been having sex, and while he’d been inside me, he had slid his fingers inside my ass. He’d done it before, though we hadn’t had anal sex yet. But this time, while he’d been double penetrating me, he had started whispering outlandish possibilities in my ear.

  He had started talking about how if his fingers felt good in my ass while he was fucking me, imagine what another dick would feel like inside me at the same time. The fantasy had taken off like a rocket, and Ethan had started planting image, after dirty image, after dirty image in my head.

  He had talked about how mind-blowing it must feel for a woman if she had a tongue between her legs at the same time that she had a pair of lips wrapped around her breast. He had talked about what it must feel like to have multiple sensations assaulting a woman all at once.

  The fantasies had started out hesitant and questioning, but as I soaked him with what those fantasies had been doing to me, Ethan’s descriptions had quickly gone from moderate to filthy. And when he had called me a slut for getting so wet, I had exploded like never before.

  After that, he’d been over every night, for four days straight, getting filthier and filthier, and I had fallen in love with everything he’d been saying to me. And it hadn’t necessarily been the fantasy of a threesome so much as how he had started calling me a slut and whore. The sex
had turned defiling, and he had even started cumming on my face.

  A week after that, we’d been at his place, having sex, getting caught up in the safe fantasies he had created for us when…

  I’ll never forget it.

  I’d been riding him, his hands cradling my face, asking me if I trusted him. Of course, I had told him yes. We’d been dating for months; of course, I had trusted him.

  The second I had said the words, he had reached over, grabbed his phone off the nightstand, and had sent off a text. Baffled, it wasn’t a few seconds later, that Calvin Hackett and Sawyer Baker had walked into Ethan’s bedroom, completely naked.

  Panicking, Ethan had pulled me down on him, and had begun whispering all those dirty possibilities in my ear again. After what seemed like ages, I had broken down and consented, and Calvin and Sawyer had joined us in bed.

  And it had been the most erotic, intense, magnificent thing I had ever experienced.

  Like a pornographic ballet, they had pleasured me in ways I had never imagined. However, Ethan had been the only one to call me names. Calvin and Sawyer had taken care with what they had done to me, but Ethan had set the tone for the entire thing.

  After that, it was hard to have sex with Ethan without thinking of the other guys. It had felt lacking, and…orchestrated.

  However, that wasn’t what I had broken up with Ethan for. As reckless as what I had done was, I could own the fact that I had given them consent to use me like that. As a matter of fact, I had used the memories to fuel a lot of my solo sessions.

  The reason I had broken up with Ethan was because I had gone to surprise him with coffee for one of his early morning classes two weeks ago, and overheard him talking with both Calvin and Sawyer, discussing my prices with them. That first night had been a thousand each because I’d been an anal virgin, something that had gone to Sawyer. But since I wasn’t a virgin anywhere anymore, the guys felt like they deserved a discount now.

  Ethan had charged them for what had happened, and listening to them talk, Ethan had planned on charging a lot of guys for the pleasure. Ethan’s scholarships were no longer enough to get him by, so he’d found another alternative.