I felt Adam’s stare but still couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I mean, I can’t imagine what he was thinking, to hear the girl he’d just said he wanted had been so in love with someone else… to hear her tell him about all the best times we had.
I cleared my throat and kept talking. Now that I had started, it was like I couldn’t stop. “I finally got to go to a dance. He took me to my senior prom. He missed the prom at his high school so he could bring me to mine. After the after party, we ate Taco Bell at one in the morning, and I wore his baseball hat in the car.”
It hurt to remember these things. It was like mourning someone who died. Someone who just wasn’t there anymore, someone you genuinely thought would be there forever.
“I was a virgin when we met,” I told him. “And I stayed a virgin for about six months after we started dating. We made out constantly. It got pretty heated sometimes, but he never pushed me into anything I wasn’t ready for. When I finally asked him…” I flicked my gaze up. “When I told him I was ready, he used protection. He always treated me like I was important.”
“This is fucking hard to hear, Rox,” Adam said, his voice gravelly.
“It’s hard to say,” I admitted. “It’s hard to feel.”
“The thought of you with him, it makes me crazy. I hear what you’re saying—hell, I even understand—but then I look at you and I see the marks on your neck… and goddamn it, Roxie, the side of your face is still red. He hit you, didn’t he?”
I chewed my lower lip and nodded.
Adam let loose a string of curses and pulled his hand out of mine. He jumped off the couch and paced to the window and stood with his back to me, staring out over the waves. By this time, the sun was going down, sinking behind the water, and the sky was dusky, the room growing dim.
“Maybe I should go,” I said, getting up from the couch.
“No,” he said but didn’t turn around. “Finish.”
I hesitated for a long time, but then I started talking again. “Things were good for a while after we started sleeping together. He treated me really good. But it started to change.”
“Change how?” Adam asked, still not looking at me.
“Craig’s friends liked to party. Everyone knew it. Hell, most everyone in that town liked to party. It was the only way to blow off steam. When he wasn’t with me, he was with them a lot. Some of his friends didn’t like me because he spent a lot of time with me. I think they were jealous.”
I stood up from the couch and paced to the other side of the room, careful to give Adam space. “Craig started drinking. A lot. He started using drugs. I don’t know what kind. I never asked. When we’d go out with friends as a group, he’d drink beforehand. He’d scrutinize what I was wearing. Sometimes he’d throw a fit and tell me I was dressed too provocatively. Sometimes when we were out, he’d yell at other guys he said were checking me out. When we played pool, he’d stand behind me when I bent over the table so no one else could check out my ass.”
Adam grunted. I didn’t know what that meant and I didn’t ask.
“We started fighting. He grew distant. He’d come around smelling like a brewery, and he’d say the most awful things to me. I’d get angry and hurt, but then he’d sober up and apologize. He’d take me in his arms and tell me how sorry he was, that he loved me, and that he needed to get the hell away from his friends and all their influence.
“I was an idiot,” I said, knowing it was true. “I loved him so much that I wanted to forgive him. I thought everything would go back to the way it was.”
“It didn’t,” Adam said.
“No. It never did,” I echoed. “We spent maybe one good year together. The rest of these years have been nothing but pain and heartache.”
“Rox,” Adam said, the word etched in pain.
“I threatened to break up with him, more times than I can count. But by then, he’d owned a piece of me, a piece I thought I needed. I’d distanced myself from some of my friends. I didn’t see them nearly as much, and I didn’t confide in anyone about our fighting and his drinking because I was terribly ashamed. Ashamed that I could be with someone who treated me so horribly. And also, if I’m being totally honest, I wanted to protect him. I loved him, even though I shouldn’t have. I still loved him. I didn’t want anyone to think badly of him.”
I wish I’d known then what I knew now.
“I thought the old him was still in there, but now I know he’d lost himself in the bottle and in whatever drugs he was taking. One night he came to me, told me how messed up he knew he was and how badly he wanted to change. He asked me to move away with him, for us to get out of that town and start a new life. We had already graduated, and I figured I could transfer the college credits I already had to wherever we went. I thought this would be the solution to all our problems. So we moved here, to Myrtle Beach. I was supposed to go to college. He was going to get a job. Things were supposed to be good.”
“He couldn’t get out of the bottle, could he?” Adam muttered.
“No. Things were better for about a month. Then he fell in with a party crowd. He started using, drinking, and cheating on me. I was so confused and hurt. All this time, I’d thought my love for him would be enough, but it never was. And now I was here, completely isolated with no one to turn to. I packed my stuff one night and put it in the car. That the was the night he started hitting me.”
Adam slapped a hand on the window and pressed his fingers into the glass until I could see his knuckles turn white. I decided to hurry up and finish, details be damned.
“College kind of fell to the side, and I got a job at the Mad Hatter. It seemed like we always needed money, that Craig always owed someone something. Stripping paid good.”
“He was fucking whoring you out.”
“No,” I said. “He actually hated the stripping, he was too possessive to even appreciate the money. He told me I was trash and a whore. He used it as an excuse to cheat on me more. He said if I could get naked for other men, then he could sleep with other women.”
I took a deep breath. “We were off and on for like the last year. We spent six months apart. I thought we were over, I was starting to breathe again, but then he pulled me back in. There’s no excuse for it. I was stupid and naïve. But I’m not anymore. I broke it off for good right before I moved in with Harlow. I hadn’t seen him since that night in the bar, but then he started coming around again.”
“Do you still love him?” The question ripped from Adam’s throat like it hurt to ask. His shoulders were tense, and I had yet to see his face since he moved away from me.
I thought about the question, letting the silence linger because I wanted Adam to hear the real answer. I didn’t want to just give him a swift denial. I wanted him to know.
“A piece of me will always belong to Craig,” I replied. “He was my first love, and I’ll never be able to forget that.”
Adam leaned his head against the glass.
“But that piece, it’s a very small part of my heart, and I don’t love him anymore. I stopped loving him a long time ago. I realized the only thing I missed was the way things used to be back when I was seventeen. I could never love someone who hurts me the way he does.”
Silence fell around us like a heavy covering of wet snow in the middle of a winter storm. And now he knew. Adam knew the ugly truth of how I stayed with a man who hurt me. He knew how I let it go on and never told a soul. I spared him the ugly details of the holes in the wall from when Craig would go into a fit of rage and punch everything in sight. I didn’t tell him how I used to lie in bed at night and cry because I knew Craig was out somewhere sleeping with another woman. I didn’t tell him how the smell of alcohol made me panicky, how I was frightened of drunk men. I didn’t tell him how ashamed I was and always would be of myself.
The room was dark now. The only light in the room was from the glare of the moon off the ebony waves of the sea. I could make out the shapes of furniture in the room and the solid figure
Adam made standing in front of the window, but nothing else.
The longer the silence went on, the sicker I began to feel inside. The pain was incredibly hard to bear. I couldn’t really blame Adam for his reaction. I told myself this was how it would be. In a way that only made it hurt worse. I knew it would be this way, yet I was still here pouring it all out for him to reject.
When would I ever learn that opening up to anyone was a terrible idea?
When my chest grew so tight it was hard to breathe, I knew I had to leave. I could go down to the gate and have the guard call me a cab. I just hoped this little confession of mine didn’t cost me my job. I still needed it.
My bag was lying on the floor beside the sofa, and I crept over and picked it up. I glanced at Adam one last time, feeling my heart constrict, and then walked toward the door.
It was the pain of that moment that taught me something. All those nights years ago when I would lie in bed and cry because I was so afraid I’d never love anyone like I had Craig… I was wrong.
This pain I was feeling, the hurt that threatened to break me in two… I knew it. It was like an old coat I couldn’t get rid of. I’d felt it when Craig and my relationship went down the crapper. And every time he showed up and hurt me, I felt it again.
But it wasn’t Craig that made me feel this way tonight.
It was Adam.
It was the sting of rejection. It was the hope I’d held inside that he might be able to understand and not see me differently.
I thought he might be able to love me anyway.
He didn’t.
But that hadn’t stopped me for falling for him.
So now here I was, once again in love with someone who didn’t love me in return.
20
Adam
I stared at the waves, not really seeing them as she spoke. Roxie had something in common with them. Her life for the past several years had been consistently filled with highs and lows.
And her lows were really low.
I couldn’t look at her. I was afraid she might see. I was a man, a self-admitted alpha male. I owned a sports car, a motorcycle, and a strip club. There wasn’t much in this life I couldn’t handle. I’d been through a serious sports injury that changed my life, four divorces, and building a business.
This was different.
I didn’t know how to handle the shitty treatment Roxie had endured. I didn’t know how to keep the rage that was bubbling up within me from spilling out. I understood the vulnerability I saw hidden in the depths of her eyes. I understood why it was rare that I ever saw her drink.
I was angry with myself for giving her a job as a stripper, a job for which she was ridiculed and treated like shit at home. A job she took to pay the bills of a deadbeat she somehow felt responsible for.
I knew strippers had bad reps. Hell, I even understood why. It was one of the reasons I didn’t date my dancers. Ever. The jealousy meter that was deep down inside me would have blown up at the thought of my woman showing her stuff to other men. Hell, Roxie wasn’t even mine and sometimes it was damn hard to watch her strip.
Even still. Strippers were just people. Just women who were doing what they needed to do to pay the bills. I had one putting herself through med school, another supporting her kid because her deadbeat boyfriend walked out on her. Stripping not only paid well, but she spent all day with her kid, then worked while he was in bed. Who the hell was I to judge what someone else did to pay the bills?
In my club, the strippers were shown respect. Period. If I saw anything different, the offender was tossed on his ass with a one-way ticket to never come back.
It fucking killed me that Roxie had been living with such a clump nugget.
It fucking killed me that I had never known.
Sure, I knew he wasn’t the best guy. I’d heard rumors of her getting into arguments with him on the phone backstage. But I brushed it off, looked the other way. Roxie was always smiling, always running her mouth… She always had a smile for me.
It was all a cover-up.
Why hadn’t I seen past it?
That night I spent on her couch was the first I heard he abused her. I was horrified, but they were already over. He was gone. The one time he showed his face, I beat his ass… I wished I’d killed him.
But I knew now.
And I was never—never—going to stand by and watch her get dragged back into that life again.
But I was still left with the question I just didn’t know the answer to.
How?
How was I going to handle the anger I felt? The rage, the regret? How was I going to see that vulnerable look in her eyes and not remember exactly where it came from?
I heard a soft sound behind me, pulling me out of my all-encompassing thoughts. I heard the telltale rattling of all the shit in that sack she carried around.
She was leaving.
How long had I stood here in silence?
How long had she waited for me to say something… anything?
I spun and raced across the room as Roxie turned the handle on the front door. She was pulling the door open when I made it to her side. I reached around her and flattened my palm on the wood, pushing it until it latched. She didn’t turn around; her head remained bowed.
I slid my palm down, aware of her watching, and turned the lock. The click of it sliding into place reverberated throughout the quiet room.
“You’re not going anywhere, sweetheart,” I rumbled in her ear.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered. The intensity in the air around us was thick, so thick I could cut it with a knife.
“Do what?” As I spoke, I slid the white bag off her shoulder and dropped it on the floor.
“I can’t get hurt by you, Adam,” she whispered. “Just let me go.”
“Never.”
I laid my hand on her shoulder and slowly spun her around. She looked up at me through shimmering tears.
Placing my hands beneath her arms, I lifted, sliding her up the door until we were face to face, eye to eye. Her legs came up to wrap around my waist, and I flattened my palms on either side of her.
“I’m not ever letting you go,” I whispered, staring straight into her eyes. “I love you.”
A single tear trickled out and trailed down the curve of her cheek. She squeezed her eyes shut, like it was something she didn’t want to hear.
But she was going to hear me.
The question that haunted me through our entire conversation just found its answer. The way to live with the anger, the hurt, and the sickness of knowing what she went through was to channel it. I would channel all those feelings into the love I felt for her, the love that had been growing since the day we met.
I couldn’t make up for what he did to her. I couldn’t ever take away the scars and pain she would always have.
But I could make sure her future was better than her past.
I could give her the love she wanted all those years ago and never got.
I could love Roxie like that. Like she was the only woman in the entire world.
It would be easy.
Because she is. Roxie was the only woman in my entire universe.
“Look at me,” I said softly. When her eyes focused on mine, I told her again. “I love you,” I whispered. “I’ve loved you for a long time. I’m so sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”
“Adam,” she whispered, her voice quivering.
I shook my head. “I know they’re just words, honey. I know you’ve heard them before. But will you give me a chance to prove them? To show you just how much I mean them?”
She brought her hand up and cupped my face, and I pressed my cheek into her trembling palm. “I was leaving,” she said.
I chuckled. “I locked the door. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Adam,” she whispered again. My name on her lips was beautiful.
“Tell me you’ll be mine, Rox.”
She hesitated. I saw the doubt in her face;
I saw the war behind her eyes. She wanted to say yes, but she was afraid of what it would cost her.
“Don’t answer me,” I told her. “I only want you to give me an answer when you know for sure.”
Her chest expanded when she breathed in, and her breasts pushed against me. My groin tightened. I wanted inside her so badly my vision was starting to blur.
“Stay the night with me. In my bed. In my arms,” I prompted. I prayed to God this answer was more definitive. If I saw any doubt on her face for this one, I’d probably have to ice my balls.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes?” I asked, wanting to make sure I heard her right.
She nodded and gave me a shy smile.
I groaned and crushed our mouths together.
Before I could let myself get carried away, I pulled back and pinned her with another stare. “I’m not talking about just sleep.”
A slow smile curved her lips. “I know.”
I kind of felt like a choir began signing in perfect harmony when she said those words.
I kissed her again, this time delving my tongue into her mouth and swirling it with hers. We melded together like two ice cubes melting over a flame. My dick was so hard I thought the zipper on my pants might burst, and I was momentarily thankful her legs were around my waist because if she felt how desperately I wanted her, she might be alarmed.
Roxie slid her hands around my neck and pulled me just a little bit closer. My chest rumbled with satisfaction, and I kissed her deeper. One of my hands spanned her ribcage, and I could feel the heat of her skin even through her clothes.
I couldn’t even remember the number of times I imagined what it would be like to be with her like this. It was like a fantasy come to life.
I stepped back, pulling her away from the door and walking through my dark apartment. Thankfully, I knew the place well and was able to navigate even as we kissed. The bedroom door was pulled around, and I kicked it open. The curtains on the wall-to-wall window were still open and the moonlight filtered in, casting a silver glow over the room. I sat Roxie on the end of the bed and moved away to slide open one of the windows. The ocean breeze filtered in, bringing with it the scent of the salty sea. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore filled the room with a rhythm that could only be found in nature.
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