Damage Me (Crystal Gulf Book 2)

by Shana Vanterpool

  “What were you doing hanging around a drug dealer?” What was going on here? “Patty Hayes,” I demanded, using her full name the way she did mine when I was in trouble. “What were you doing around him?”

  “What do you think?” Mom finally relented. She sat up, squared her shoulders, and accepted that I finally knew the truth. “I used to be an addict, Hill. I did meth with the town drug dealer and slept with him when his wife wasn’t home. I fell for his bullshit and his dope. But all of that stopped when I found out I was pregnant with you. I stopped. I left that world behind,” she said, but she hesitated slightly, and I knew she was about to lie. “I didn’t go back but one time,” she continued, pausing to glance at Bach, “and then I never went back again.”

  I was confused. There was so much there, and yet the holes were flagrant. “I don’t understand. You stopped sleeping with him when you found out you were pregnant? Right?” Her silence belied her previous statement. “How old was I when he went to jail?”

  Bach cleared his throat when she remained quiet. “He went to jail when I was seven. So that would have made you around four.”

  My jaw dropped. “Mom!” I didn’t usually judge my mother. She struggled to raise me; all that I had was because of her. But staying with an abusive drug addict while he was married with a kid, was a side of her I had never met. That wasn’t just one wrong. That was too many wrongs to count. “He hit you?” I had to check this. Bach nodded, one quick, painful shake of his head. “Bad?” He knew what I meant. Did he spank him or did he ruin him? Another nod, and when his eyes filled with pain, I knew his father destroyed him. Your father too. I felt sick to my stomach. “And you knew? You knew he was all of those things, and you still stayed with him?”

  Her eyes were strong, they were her, but when she looked away I wondered how well I truly knew my mother. I’ve listened to her rules, followed them far more than I broke them. I did what I had to do to make it easier on her. I trusted her. She’s all I had. But this felt different. These lies were not just memories. They’ve been the truth, and I’ve been fed lies. “I wanted him. You listened to me cry for him when I was a kid. I asked about him. I thought about him all the time. And you let me? You let me want a monster?”

  “Sweets,” Bach said, defending her. “You don’t understand. My dad did bad things. Bad things. She did the right thing. Trust me. She saved you from all of that. Have you ever had black eyes as a kid?”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you ever gone years, decades, almost an entire life without hearing I love you?”

  My eyes blurred.

  “Have you ever bled, shook, burned?” He flinched, but held my gaze, his pain damaging me.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “That’s because she saved you. She gave you everything I didn’t have growing up. You should thank her.”

  “I am thankful. But did you ever miss him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you ever yearn from right here.” I patted my chest. “For a monster, thinking he was someone else?”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but thought better, because in his eyes there was no love for our father, which meant he wasn’t just a monster, he was the king of Zane’s. I had lived my life wanting a demon, and my mother had let me. Let me crave darkness when all she had to do was admit she wasn’t perfect and let me decide what was worth what. Instead, she withheld truths and the lies I just so happened to cling to were disastrous.

  After what I went through, knowing I had a man like Zane in me all along, in my blood, was something I refused to accept.

  I didn’t have eyes like my father all this time.

  I had the eyes of a monster.

  Chapter Six

  Dylan

  I smelled.

  Every time I moved I got a whiff. Body odor and sweat smeared all over me. If I sat still, I could ignore it. When I moved the smell of me sent a wave of stink around me like a fog. My leg burned, throbbing and teeming with infection. My heart burned in my chest. My gray area had kept me company for almost a week. I sat in the same spot and rotted. My stomach had given up days ago at any hopes of food. If I wanted some, I’d have to reach the second or top shelf in the cupboards, and that wasn’t happening.

  When I slept, I picked up where my reality left off. I was on the ground bleeding out, wondering how Harley would take losing someone else to the army.

  Maybe I should have thought about that more before I left. Maybe I had other options now that I wasn’t stuck in the lie I created. But when that recruiter walked into the tattoo shop I happened to be in, it felt more like a gift rather than a warning. He’d had answers to the questions I’d been asking myself. How could I take care of my daughter without a job? I was on my own most of my life, selling, stealing, and doing what I had to do to take care of myself. That way of thinking didn’t apply to a kid. They needed everything I didn’t have.

  What I had wasn’t even suitable for me.

  I grabbed at my hair and pulled, trying to regain some sense of reality. Pain could do that. I knew. It was all I felt. My days bled into one another, each more gray, more painful, and more entrapping.

  It was worse than the hospital. At least in there I had a nurse every few hours. I had a TV. The remote was in the glass cabinet. In order to get it, I’d have to kneel down. The buttons were on the back of the television. I couldn’t reach them balancing on one leg.

  I was certain about one thing. If I had to sit here by myself another second, I was going to snap clean through. My negative emotions had turned into bitter disgust for my entire being. I couldn’t help picturing Harley with Bach in all types of positions. She was so sweet about sex with me. How could a woman like that want to be with a guy like Bach? We weren’t gentle. We were rough. We took. Although being with Harley did made you want things you didn’t know you could have.

  I pictured her long smooth body. Legs that held her up like a gift. Her hair fell around her shoulders and face. The sound of her voice as she moaned my name. The feeling of slipping inside of her for the first time, of claiming her sweet pussy as mine. I wasn’t surprised when my dick began to harden, filling with blood so quickly my balls ached. I leaned my head back and kept going. The smell and feel of her beneath me as I thrusted into her, her long legs wrapped around my waist, holding me there, keeping me in place as her pussy took my pounding.

  I reached into my shorts and freed myself. Harley was the tightest girl I’d ever been with. I stroked my cock from base to tip, recalling how much she was mine when we made love. And we made love. There was no sex or screwing like there had been with all the other girls I fooled around with. With them, there was no emotion. With Harley, that’s all there was. Tears streamed down my face as I came. I groaned, and it had nothing to do with pleasure. Because all of that was gone. The pleasure, the love, and the future I lied to create—I lost it all to Bach fucking Bachmen.

  “Bastard!” I growled, spewing my hurt all over my living room.

  My jizz was all over me. I stared down at the mess I created in disgust. I wiped it off my hand onto my shorts and then gave up. Who was there to please? Who was left in this world for me?

  At that precise moment my doorbell rang.

  I glared at it. “Go away!”

  My desire for a houseguest was evident in my growl, but whoever it was did not give up. They knocked softly, this timid knock that annoyed the shit out of me. I stared down at my semen and then at my reflection in the TV. I was slumped in on myself. My hair was a mess. My beard had grown in. My eyes were lethal. And pussy ass tears slid down my cheeks.

  “Dylan? It’s me.” The tone of their voice was delicate and shy, barely heard through the door.

  But it sucked the air out of me. It was the sweetest thing I’d heard in too long. My heart sprinted. My blood pumped. For the first time in weeks, I wanted to get up and let someone in.

  “Shit.” I felt like I was covered in jizz and tears. “Give me a minute,” I called, g
rabbing my crutches.

  Getting to my feet felt harder every day. The pain took my breath away until I was gasping for air as I went to my room. I managed to get my shorts off. My dick had thankfully unhardened, hanging limply in my boxers. I ignored the emblazed flesh of my wounds and shimmed a pair of shorts out of my drawer. Leaning against the wall, I bent, getting them over my left leg. I stepped into them with my right, and then slid them up until I was covered.

  At least ten minutes had passed when I finally got to the door. I unlocked it and rested against the wall as I opened it.

  Hillary was standing there. Her eyes were wounded, but thankfully her bruise had started to heal and fade. She looked so small in her oversized yellow sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Her hair was in a messy ponytail and she clutched her car keys in her hand, as if they were the only things keeping her in place.

  It took me a second to realize some things. One: she was looking at me the same way I was looking at her, and unfortunately even in her baggy clothes she was cute. I was the furthest from cute I’d ever been. The second thing I realized was that I didn’t give a shit about being cute. I wasn’t cute. Right now I wasn’t anything.

  “What are you doing here?” My words came out harsher than I intended. I hadn’t used my voice in days. I cleared it and met her eyes. I could barely stand them. They were so Bach it stabbed at the knife he plunged in my back. But at the same time they were so good, I couldn’t not look into them.

  She looked down, pulling my attention to her flip-flop clad feet. Her toes were painted a bright blue. The paint was chipped on her big toes. “I don’t know. I kind of ended up here.” She raised her head, giving me a glimpse of what she was feeling. “If you want me to leave I can.”

  Bach probably put her up to this. I looked over the railing to find that the lawn below was empty save for a small dark blue car. As I considered her motives, rejection-filled her eyes, and she nodded slowly, backing away.

  “I’ll go.” She took a deep breath as she turned for the stairs.

  I watched her, the way her jeans took her curves and hid her body. “Wait.” I didn’t change my shorts for me. “I don’t want you to leave. I was surprised to see you; that’s all.” I kicked the door open further. “You want to come in?”

  Cool air smelling thickly of the Gulf blew across my face. I inhaled, letting the salty smell erase the smell of me.

  “If you’re not busy,” she said, looking at me as if she were doing something wrong.

  Her response amused me. “What would I be busy doing?”

  “I don’t know. Eating lunch. It’s lunch time.”

  I almost cracked a smile. No, actually I was jacking off and crying about my ex. “Don’t have much of an appetite these days.” I pushed away from the wall when she stepped inside and kicked the door closed. Having a guest alerted me to a few things. The smell, the darkness, and the quietness. “Excuse the mess. My mansion’s being renovated.”

  A soft giggle sounded from her. “That’s a relief.”

  My body stilled at the sound. It was sugar, honey, dripping with sweetness all over me. I wanted to bathe in it, to feel something that good if only for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure I’d ever made a girl giggle before. Scream from an orgasm, sure, but giggle? I’d even made them laugh, but laughing wasn’t the same thing. Laughing came from the belly. A giggle came from the heart.

  I reached up and scratched my neck. I didn’t have time to think too hard about heart shaped giggles. My body weight was torture. I dragged myself to the couch and settled down gratefully, closing my eyes as I tried to think about anything else other than the ache. The couch depressed as she settled down as well.

  Close by, I noticed unhappily. I cracked my eyes to find hers watching me. They roamed over my beard and clothes, my garbage.

  “I know I look like shit. You don’t have to stare.”

  She brought her legs on the couch so that her knee pressed into my left thigh. “You don’t either.”

  “Then what do I look like?” Something about her touching me made me uneasy. She wasn’t falling apart right now. The last time we touched I hadn’t had another option. I moved my leg over.

  “I was just wondering if you’d been alone all this time.”

  “You worried about me?” I couldn’t help finding that aggravating. Before she could open her mouth, I raised my hand. “Don’t bother. I don’t need you to worry about me.”

  Her mouth opened slightly at my outburst and then she closed it, removing her stare from my face. “Fine, Dylan. I won’t worry about you. I’ve been worrying about everyone else for so long anyways. And no one’s worrying about me now.” Her bottom lip trembled. She bit down to stop it.

  For the most part, I rarely apologized. I meant most of the shit I said, so why take it back? It wasn’t as if my subsequent answer would be any less pleasing. However, Hillary wasn’t like everyone else, and I could still remember the look in her eyes when she came out of Bach’s room.

  “Yes,” I finally answered. “I have been alone.”

  She ducked her head between her legs. “I’m sorry I came here. I wanted to get away from my mom and Bach, and this is the only place I could think of. Did you know my dad, Dylan?”

  Why was my place the first place she thought of? Or maybe it wasn’t first. Maybe it was last and the other options weren’t options anymore. “I grew up next door, so yeah, I knew him. Why?”

  “I’m going to ask you something, and I want the truth.” She turned around and eyed me with determination and something else, something that looked like painful resolve.

  “Okay …”

  “Did my dad beat Bach?”

  “Tyler?” I laughed humorlessly, because that was a flagrant understatement. Tyler used to terrify me. “Tyler beat the shit out of him.”

  She closed her eyes in misery. “So then it’s true?”

  “What’s true?”

  “That the man I’ve missed my entire life was a monster?”

  “Hillary.” May as well get it out. “Tyler Bachmen made monsters cringe.”

  She fell on her back and then curled up on her side on the couch, accepting my words.

  I rarely missed my father. He wasn’t as bad as Tyler, but that wasn’t saying much. Mitch Meyer made it hard to even envision love. But I contemplated the possibility of not having him, of wanting him, and then finding out that all of the time I spent wanting him there was nothing to want to begin with. I wondered if Hillary’s mom kept her in the dark on purpose, if her mom knew that there was a fragile line between wanting someone who was the worst thing for you and yearning for someone you didn’t know was bad.

  All of a sudden her feet curled up against my leg. “I didn’t know. Mom never talked about him. I had no idea I was the daughter of a drug dealing, drug addict abuser. I was his bastard child he didn’t want.” Her voice drifted from sadness to acceptance. “Did you know she used to sleep with him until I was like four? That isn’t a small mistake, Dylan. That’s doing the wrong thing over and over again. And she rode me so hard. She made sure I did everything like a perfect little princess.” Outrage curled around the acceptance, turning her words dark. “I did everything she asked of me always. I’m even going to school for a career I can’t stand for her. And all this time she knew the truth.”

  I assumed I was a pin cushion she could take her shit out on, so I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to keep going, forbidding my hand from doing what it wanted. Her feet looked soft and little, tucked against me like she needed the contact. I wouldn’t touch them.

  “I used to watch kids with their dads and wonder what it would feel like to have one too. I love my Mom, but she’s not … I don’t know … I had her. I wasn’t missing her. She was an addict too. Can you believe that? A woman who stressed that I do not, under any circumstances, touch an illegal substance, was addicted to meth!” She sat up and growled at the air. “I can’t believe her!”

  This was a serious situation. I understood t
hat, even respected it. But she was the most unthreatening little thing I’d ever met. Her rage was amusing. I struggled to keep my lips down. She was all flushed cheeks and blond hair, this adorable compact woman raging away on my couch while I listened.

  “And Bach,” she hissed. “He’s so aggravating. He keeps pushing me away. I finally have a part of my dad, and he won’t even let me have it for his insane reasons. And Piper,” she continued. “She’s a coward. She doesn’t want to face what happened, so she’s trying to threaten me. She said everyone at school doesn’t believe me. That I asked for it.” Her anger dissipated into sadness. “The bad part is I think she’s right. I did what I wasn’t supposed to do, and that’s what I got.”

  I was lost watching her, genuinely entertained for the first time in weeks. But I had to stop her. That was the most bullshit thing I’d ever heard. “You went to a party with your friends, Hillary. It isn’t that big of a deal. How could you have asked for that?”

  “I wore those clothes.”

  “So you wore a short skirt. I’m sure half the women there were dressed the same way.” I’d been to Jona’s parties before. Skirts were mundane in that house.

  “Exactly. I’m not like them.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that.

  “I went upstairs with him,” she continued, giving me reasons to blame herself. “I drank the beer. I let him get me into that room. I just wanted to go home, Dylan.” She looked at me, her eyes shining. “I went upstairs because I thought Jona was up there and he’d help me. I didn’t want that. I mean I’m a freaking virgin. Why would I want to go upstairs with a guy? With Zane.” The more she talked, the worse she got. Her tone heightened and her body shrunk in on itself. “I can’t stop thinking about him. He won’t leave me alone.”

  I should have expected her response. But I wasn’t used to her yet. One second she was next to me crying and the next she was on my lap with her arms wrapped around my shoulders.