Tramp (Hush Book 1)

by Mary Elizabeth

  I can’t wait to press my fingers into the bruises and relive how they got there in the first place.

  I’ll ask for more until I can play the bruises on my skin like a piano.

  Grab me harder. Kiss me harder. Fuck me harder.

  Let my clients see what’s been done to my body and realize that, though they touch me and despite how much money or gifts they throw at me, they’ll never get close enough to mark me the same way.

  There isn’t a lot I can give Talent that he doesn’t already have, but he can have this small part of me.

  “If you did run away, it would only have been a head start,” Talent says. The playful smirk on his lips turns provocative, and I let out a slow breath as the pressure between my legs sprawls. “I’ll chase you, Lydia. I’ll always find you, and if I can’t, I know people who can.”

  Romance is for the kids who didn’t grow up watching their mom dance under a red light at a strip club. It’s not for those of us whose only example of passion was determined by how many dollar bills were thrown on stage. When you lost your virginity to a predatory bouncer, and when your mother’s boyfriend licked his lips whenever he laid eyes on you, or when your only example of sex until now was deliberate and paid in full—romance isn’t applicable.

  I won’t know what to do with roses and sweet nothings. But tell me you’re going to tie me to a bed to keep me from running away … well, now I understand.

  “Don’t underestimate my ability to disappear, Talent,” I say only half-teasingly. “I’ve managed to outrun more than a lawyer in my life.”

  A shadow darkens Talent’s eyes, and he pulls me and the sheets closer to roll on top of me. His weight intensifies the simmering need under my skin, and I dig my fingertips into his forearms to keep from turning to ash and ember. He shoves the sheet away and palms my pussy, dropping his forehead to mine.

  “Are you so willing to leave when I can make you feel like this?” he asks, circling his fingers over my clit.

  I’m hot enough to melt.

  Wet enough to overflow.

  Desperate enough for relief to let this go unchecked.

  Almost.

  Flicking Talent’s bottom lip with my tongue, I tease him with a kiss until he submits and bends into me. I capture Talent’s lip where his smirk meets his cheeks and bite down while waiting for the taste of copper to touch my palate.

  And then I bite harder.

  He groans in pain, but his dick hardens against my thigh.

  I release his mouth and wipe a trickle of blood from my lip, licking it off the top of my hand. Before Talent assesses the damage to his beautiful mouth, I push him onto his back and straddle his waist. His cock slips between my folds, and I circle my hips to feel every inch slide against me.

  “If I wanted to disappear,” I say, dragging my nails down his chest. “You wouldn’t have had the chance to tie me to the bed, Talent. I can leave this room right now and you’d never see me again if I didn’t want you to.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” He grabs my hips and tries to coax me over his erection, but I resist. “Lydia, you don’t have a clue—”

  I take his cock in my hand and use my arousal to work him up and down at an agonizing pace. Playing with him excites me, so instead of easing him inside my body or reassuring the poor prince that I won’t be leaving until he sends me away, I press my chest against his and lick the small wound at the corner of his mouth. Then we kiss with the taste of blood in our mouths.

  “Don’t,” Talent whispers against my kiss. “Don’t go anywhere without me.”

  Searching his expression for a trace of deceit, I only find faith.

  And I’m a believer.

  “Okay,” I say. My heart double beats in agreement, and I kiss Talent as softly as I know how.

  Guiding him inside of me feels like arriving home after a long time away. He fills me all the way up, and I can feel every part of him, every ripple, every vein. My body stretches and moves to adjust to his size, and slowly, to draw out the joy of him sliding out of me and back in, I move my hips forward and back.

  He blinks slowly, and his long lashes cast shadows across the highest points of his cheeks. Thick eyebrows furrow, forming creases between his dark and deep stare. Talent presses his lips together before they part and don’t really close again. It makes me want to latch on to the cut I inflicted at the corner of his mouth and revel in his essence, because it’s so fucking pure.

  And I’m not surprised to realize I don’t want this to end. Instead of the practiced lines that scroll through my head when I’m with a client, my mind is wholly and only concentrated on the way Talent lights me up from the inside out, and the outside back in. He palms my breasts, my wrists, my hips.

  He whispers, “Fuck.”

  And he whispers, “Baby.”

  I want to breathe back, “I don’t know what this is, but don’t ever take it away.”

  But I wouldn’t dare.

  Tie us both to the bed so we can never leave. The world outside this dark bedroom in the fourteenth-floor penthouse in the Grand Opal luxury apartments is unsafe. There’s not a place for a prince and a tramp to live in harmony.

  I drop my head back and cry out, puncturing his stomach with my fingernails.

  There’s no telling what’s going to happen when we return to our normal lives. We have so much stacked against us, and we might not survive the test of time and the judgment we’ll face from others and ourselves. Do we keep our relationship a secret? Or do we put everything on the line and face the inevitable?

  We’re tangled in disaster.

  Talent sits up and wraps his arms around me. He kisses from my chest, up my neck, to my mouth. The change in position gives him a farther reach, and I feel like I’m going to tear in half. Gladly.

  I don’t know the answers.

  I don’t know how to be Lydia Montgomery beyond Cara Smith.

  I don’t know how to be someone Talent deserves, and I don’t know why he has chosen me.

  But as my body detonates and comes undone in a fiery explosion, obliterating every indecision and fear in its path, I don’t care. I want it.

  I want him in the face of uncertainty.

  In inevitability.

  And most of all, I want him when the lights are out.

  Cricket died on a Tuesday.

  The last time I saw her alive was two days prior on Sunday afternoon. I wish I could make up a false memory where we spent one last unforgettable day together before her predictable death, but that’s not how it happened. Our last conversation was volatile because I stopped looking up to her blindly and started to resent her for my life. Our relationship never mended after the night I needed money for the dollar movie theater and barged in on her fucking a stranger in the closet.

  In the months between that night and when she died, Mom abandoned any semblance of herself and resigned to her addiction, and I navigated life the best I could as a sixteen-year-old girl with an uninvolved, half-dead mother. I grew apart from Cricket, and it was clear she and I were unalike. I attended school regularly for the first time, so I didn’t have to spend my days at the club or at the house avoiding Marty, but also because I enjoyed my education. I’d had sex to see what the big deal was, but it didn’t interest me. I considered drugs, but I lived with a real-life after-school special. Watching her deteriorate scared me straight.

  As far as I was concerned, if I survived long enough, I’d bide my time until my eighteenth birthday. Once I was a legal adult, I’d make decisions for myself and take control of my life. Graduating from high school was my first priority. As long as I completed my education, a world of opportunities would open up for me. Earning a diploma and making it out of high school without a baby would put me strides ahead of Cricket. I didn’t have to follow her path because she didn’t care to set me up for a better life.

  “Can I have money for the field trip?”

  Mom and Marty sat in mismatching recliners in
front of the television. He was fat where she was skin and bones. His recliner reclined back, but Cricket’s leaned too far right.

  “Where are you going, baby? Somewhere fun?” Mom had asked. “Maybe I can chaperone.”

  I didn’t want to be completely disgusted by the sound of her voice, but the reaction was instantaneous. “I don’t know. Some art museum.”

  “Aren’t the schools supposed to pay for things like that?” Marty asked.

  “It’s optional, but I’d like to go.” I hated to talk around Marty because he stared at my mouth, but I wanted to go on the field trip more than I despised him.

  “Well, how much is it?” Cricket had asked. At that point, she didn’t try to hide the track marks on her arms. Her eyes were sunken in, and her clothes hung off her body like curtains.

  “Forty dollars. It covers the cost of admission and lunch.”

  “Is it cheaper if I make you a sack lunch?”

  Reminding Cricket that she’d never made me a sack lunch in her entire motherly career would have been futile. Paired with the fact that there was never food in the house, I didn’t bother. It would have only started a fight, and I’d never had the chance to go on a real field trip before now. I was willing to say or not say anything in order to attend.

  “It’s forty dollars, Mom. I need it by the end of the day on Tuesday, or I won’t be able to go.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money on me, Lydia,” Mom’s voice wavered on the fine edge between composed and irrational.

  As much as it pained me, I turned to Marty and asked, “Do you have it?”

  He winked and asked, “What will you give me for it?”

  Mom didn’t have the courtesy to look appalled, and it was all I could do not to stab him through the fucking heart with my school pencil.

  “Cricket, I want to go on the school field trip,” I said with just enough false bravado. Tears brimmed on my eyelids, wetting my lashes. “I need forty dollars by the end of the school day on Tuesday. I forged your signature on the permission slip, so don’t worry about that. The only thing I need is the money. This is important.”

  I’d set myself up for disappointment believing I’d wake up to the field trip money Tuesday morning. I imagined walking into the school office to hand over the permission slip and fee like the kids with responsible parents.

  What happened instead was I went into the office and begged for more time.

  “My mom accidentally took the money to work with her,” I lied, flattening out the crumpled permission slip on the counter. “She works at a doctor’s office downtown. I can be there and back in an hour after school.”

  I ditched the last hour of school, hopped on a city bus, and arrived at the club to collect the field trip money. I planned on grabbing it from the stage, stealing it from the bar, or asking Marcel as a last resort. I was going on the damn field trip like a normal high schooler.

  But nothing on field-trip-money Tuesday went as planned.

  When I stepped into the strip club, it took my eyes a second to adjust from the natural sunlight outside to the artificial red light used inside. I didn’t notice right away that the music wasn’t playing or that the stage was empty. My only objective was to find Cricket and get back to school before the office employees left for the day. If I didn’t make it back in time, I was not allowed to go to the museum the next day. That was unacceptable.

  Marcel grabbed me by the hood of my sweater before I made it to the dressing room.

  “What the fuck?” I shrieked, reaching back to pry his fingers from me.

  “You can’t go back there, Lydia,” he said. He dragged me to the other side of the club by my sweater, unmoved by my struggle to fight him off.

  I knew my life was fucked-up, but I didn’t know it had reached dead-mom-all-alone-in-the-world level fucked-up. So when Marcel had dragged me across the dirty floor, my mind immediately thought he was going to assault me. I kicked and hit and screamed, but he didn’t relent.

  When he’d pulled me as far from the dressing room as he could, he spun me around and held me by the top of my arms. He shook me hard enough to make my teeth clatter. Marcel shook me until my insides shifted.

  “Listen to me, Lydia.” Spit flew from his mouth to my face. His eyes were crazed, moving from my eyes, to my nose, to my mouth, to the ground. “Cricket’s gone.”

  The fight drained from me like the little whirl of water that forms when you pull the plug from a bathtub, but I didn’t understand right away. I thought he’d meant she’d left so I couldn’t get the field trip money from her. I was going to chase that bitch down.

  I asked, “Where is she?”

  He averted his eyes before he said, “She’s dead, Lydia. Cricket is dead. Overdose. About an hour ago.”

  I scoffed and asked, “Are you out of your mind? Where’d she go?”

  My body felt it right away, even if it took my mind years to catch up. As soon as Marcel said Cricket is dead my arms and legs grew hefty, my posture wasn’t as straight, and a sinkhole opened in my chest and took everything on the surface down with it—including the sensation of my beating heart.

  “They took her by ambulance.” Marcel shook me again. “But it was too late. She’s gone, and they’re looking for you.”

  “Who’s looking for me?” I asked as color lost tone before my eyes. My life suddenly lacked richness, and everything was gray scale and vague. There was no dimension, value, shape, or space left, leaving behind a two-dimensional realm I’d roam and live until the afternoon I would meet the second Ridge son nearly ten years later.

  “Child protective services. They asked about Cricket’s family and someone told the cops she has a daughter.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Lydia, run. You don’t want to get caught in the system,” he said. He pushed me toward the exit doors. “Run, and don’t ever come back.”

  I stumbled a few steps from Marcel, wondering why if someone had just died, there weren’t more people investigating or why customers still drank shitty cocktails and servers kept wiping down tables. I held my palm to my forehead, and I wanted to ask Marcel if he was sure it was Cricket who died—if anyone died at all—but my eye caught that of the club owner.

  “Hey, you,” the club owner called out to me from his office door behind the stage. “Come here, sweetheart.”

  “Goddammit, Lydia. Get the fuck out of here.” Marcel’s large body collided with mine, and he practically lifted me off my feet to shove me toward the exit. “I’m sorry, okay. I’m sorry, but I’m doing you a favor.”

  I tripped on the curb outside and fell to my hands and knees, but I hadn’t felt it when the skin tore and scraped away when I hit the pavement. I didn’t feel anything at all. I stared at my fingers sprawled against the dirty parking lot, curtained by my long hair. I breathed in and out, hoping to pause time for just a minute, just to let me catch up.

  “Lydia, stop,” the club owner burst out of the club doors.

  I looked over my shoulder, stumbled to my feet, and ran before he could grab me. I ran as fast and as far from the strip club as I could for what would be the last time, pushing through people on the street while my backpack bounced on my back.

  Marty was in the kitchen when I sprang through the rickety screen door, drenched in sweat and numb.

  He watched me run past him to my room. He asked, “Where the fuck is the fire?”

  Secure in my bedroom, I slid the dresser in front of the door and dropped my school bag to the floor, unsure of what to do, what to bring, where to go. I started by filling a duffel bag with some clothes and a toothbrush. The bag wasn’t big enough to fit more than a couple changes of clothes, but maybe I could come by later and grab the rest.

  Marty pounded on the door. “You broke the fuckin’ screen door, girl.”

  Mom didn’t do a lot of things right by me, but when I turned fifteen last year, she gave me a folder with my birth certificate and social security card.

  “I though
t I lost them a few times. You better hang on to these now that you’re old enough,” she’d said.

  “Who’s going to fix the door, Lydia?” He hammered harder and the door broke open, slamming against the dresser. It shook me harder than Marcel did when he told me Cricket’s dead. “This is my house. You are your fucking mother—”

  “Mom’s dead, Marty.” I opened the top drawer of my nightstand to grab the envelope with the only proof that I am who I am.

  Lydia Montgomery. Daughter of Cricket Montgomery. Father unknown.

  My hands flew up to cover my mouth and my vision blurred behind a wall of tears I couldn’t hold back.

  On top of the envelope inside the drawer were two twenty-dollar bills and a note in Cricket’s handwriting:

  Have a good time, baby.

  Love,

  Mom.

  The pounding on the door stopped, and the air left Marty’s lungs in a gasp like he was hit in the gut. “Why would you say something like that?”

  I grabbed the envelope and the money and shoved them into my bag. I zipped it closed and threw it over my shoulder. There was no way Marty would let me go if I tried to leave through the door, so I opened the window and took one more look around the only room that had ever been only mine.

  A breath.

  A pause.

  And I jumped.

  The fall didn’t stop until tonight.

  I chase the salty breeze flowing through the apartment to find Talent leaning against the stone balcony outside. He’s shirtless, dressed in a pair of sweats and barefoot with one ankle crossed over the other. The half-moon bathes him in as much light as it can, mostly-shadowed, calling on the stars to help shine a spotlight on his loveliness.

  Nature’s glow is draped over his shoulders like a blanket, sharpening the silhouette of his body against the bleak ocean background. Positioned with his back toward me, his head is down and the muscles in his back subtly move as he switches crossed ankles. Tightening the shirt I stole from his closet around my body, I linger in the living room when I realize he’s speaking on the phone.