by Alexis Anne
I shuddered thinking about how her world fell apart in the course of single night. Rags to riches to handcuffs.
“He twisted her up, convinced her that he was her everything. Locked her up when she rebelled.”
Darcy’s hand tightened on my leg but I didn’t think he was conscious of what he was doing—just reacting. I touched his hand and he immediately relaxed it.
“Sorry. I just…it makes me angry to think of anyone treating someone that way, let alone the person they married. I mean, why go through all that? She wasn’t rich, she wasn’t powerful, what was it he wanted?”
“Her,” I said simply. I never knew my mother, but I knew my father all too well. It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together. “She was gorgeous, Darcy. The most beautiful woman in the world.”
He kissed my thigh. “I can believe that. I bet you look just like her.”
I blushed a little because in many ways I favored Mother, not Father. Being even remotely compared to her was a compliment. “From people who knew her, who were willing to share stories, according to them she was the sweetest, most honest woman. Father wanted that. He wanted to devour and command a woman like her. It fed his needs. He has issues.”
“No fuck. Any man who locks up women has issues.”
And yet there were so many women in abusive relationships, powerless to leave. I was one of them. For all my money, for all my intelligence, I still couldn’t make a move without my father knowing. Any step out of line would put me back in that locked room in my father’s house, or worse, back home to the country estate. He had enough power with his hands in all the right pockets to keep that a secret until the day he died.
“She tried to escape several times over the years. Most of them before Michael was born. Father tried to keep her pregnant to eliminate that problem.” I didn’t like to dwell on the reality that Michael, Theo, and I were most likely the product of rape. “It was my birth that changed everything. It had already been a long pregnancy fraught with issues. Her blood pressure spiked and the private doctor demanded Father allow for her to be moved to the hospital. She delivered me and the moment she could stand she slipped away. It was the one and only time Father didn’t have her under guard. He thought she was too weak.”
“And you really never saw her again.”
I shook my head. “I have never met my mother.” And there was a giant, mother-sized hole in my soul that I never could seem to fill.
“Nik…she loved you.”
I smiled down at him sadly. “How can you possibly know that, Darcy?”
“How could she not? You are impossible not to love.”
His words were sweet. “I know she was in an impossibly abusive situation. I know she was desperate. But I don’t think I’ll ever get over the idea she left me behind.”
His eyelids lowered. “I can see your point. I’ve never forgiven Mum for crapping out on me.” Then he rolled off the bed and grabbed a cigarette. It bounced on his lip as he spoke while searching for his lighter. “She’d punch a kid right in the nose for looking at me the wrong way but she couldn’t pull herself together to stay alive for me. It’s all fucked up. We’re all fucked up. We make fucked up decisions to save ourselves and forget there are people standing right beside us that are worth fighting through the shit for.” He cupped his hand over the lighter out of habit as he lit the cigarette.
He blew a fresh stream of smoke through his lips, staring at me, driving his point home: fight through the shit, Nik. Fight through it for me.
What would I do to Darcy if I repeated his mother’s mistakes? Would I break him? Would he let the world crush him or would he just become so hardened that nothing could penetrate into his heart ever again?
The thought of a Darcy Higgins without light in his eyes and an easy smile on his lips terrified me.
I needed to be better. I needed to be better for him.
“What about you? What happened to your dad?”
He sighed loudly and took another drag from the cigarette, taking his time. “He was a boxer…and muscle for a man like your father. He knocked my mum up and they planned to get married.”
It was interesting to see the way Darcy fidgeted while talking about his parents. There was a nervous anxiety that only seemed to appear when it came to this, and a loneliness in his eyes I wanted to extinguish.
“The way she talked about him, I’d think he never gave two shits about her, but I know that’s not true.”
“How do know that?”
He handed me the cigarette and I took a short drag. I wasn’t much of a smoker but liked to have a bit when Darcy did.
“Friends in the neighborhood. Mum’s best friend—I called her Aunt Sally—she’d watch me after school. One day she was drunk and just started babbling about my dad. How much he loved my mum and how she wished a guy would love her like that.”
“Wait.” I threw up my hand. “The woman watching you was day drunk?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t live in a nice neighborhood, Nik. We all dealt with our demons with what we had. Sometimes that meant getting high,” he watched me carefully as he spoke, trying to gauge how I reacted to conversations that treaded so close to my own story, “other times it meant getting pissed with lunch. She was a good woman, just sad.”
“So your dad was a boxer by day and muscle by night, he knocked up your mother and then…?”
“Wrong place, wrong time. The knives came out and he got nicked in the jugular. There was nothing they could do. I was born a week later.”
“It broke your mother’s heart.”
He nodded. “I think she was so heartbroken she had to hate him. The anger was what got her through the day. Some people find a way through the grief and move on as best they can.” He shook his head, frowning. “But she drowned in it.”
“How old were you?”
He half-smiled. “Fourteen. I give her points for making it that long. Living fourteen years with a broken heart couldn’t have been easy.”
Fourteen. I climbed out of bed and went to him, placing my hand on his cheek. It was warm and soft and just a little bit scruffy, just like him. “I’m so impressed with what you’ve done with your life.”
He looked away as if he were embarrassed. “I was always good at school. All I did was keep going and meet your brother.”
“Don’t do that,” I whispered, guiding his face back toward me.
“Don’t do what?”
“You like to give Theo all the credit and take none for yourself.”
His eyebrows lifted as his eyes locked with mine. “He’s the genius. I’m the plucky sidekick.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You’re my hero.”
On his own since fourteen and never really loved at all, how was it possible this man had so much love to give me? How did he even know what to do?
“Nik…don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” I repeated the question back at him.
He searched my eyes. “Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m fucking Superman. Like I’m the hero. Like I’ve done something special.” The sadness was back in his eyes.
“You have,” I murmured, cupping his face with both my hands. “You said it yourself. You have the power and you’ve done great things with it. You’ve helped build me up, you’ve given me hope, you’ve saved my life, Darcy. You convinced me it might be possible to love someone without any strings attached. You’re my hero and it’s time you started to believe in yourself.”
A shudder raced through him. “I don’t know much and believe in even less, but I believe in you, Nicki. For now that’s going to have to be enough.”
12
In retrospect I can see where I went wrong with Darcy. After our night of confessions about crappy parents and heroes and believing in each other, I’d become obsessed with the idea of being what he needed. So obsessed that I forgot about myself entirely. I should have known that we were doomed. We each ha
d one parent we’d never met, and the other didn’t know how to function. What example did we have to follow? All either of us knew was using, abusing, and scratching to survive.
The weeks ticked by and we continued in blissfully happy ignorance that we were driving at top speed toward an impossibly high cliff.
“What do you want for dinner?” he asked over the phone. “I’ll grab it on the way in.”
Food was the last thing on my mind as I stared at my reflection in the mirror attempting to get the look just right. I wanted to be perfect.
“What are you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m thinking Chinese, but I didn’t think that was your favorite, so if you want something different, just say so.”
“Chinese is fine.” I cared a lot more about whether he was happy tonight than whether the food was to my liking. Although, now that I thought about it, we did have Chinese three times in the last week.
But if it made Darcy happy…
I slid on the black lacy garter belt I’d been saving for tonight.
“Theo and I will be at the flat by six. We’ll see you then, love.”
My heart skipped a beat. “See you then, babe.” I tossed the phone onto my bed and grabbed the black stockings, gliding them up my legs and attaching them to the belt. After a morning of painting I’d had lunch with Jenni to go over the final numbers from my show. They wanted me back in six months with my darker work.
Also very interesting to note, Dominic was coming in as I was going out. It appeared she’d finally agreed to give him a chance—at least if the smile on his face was any indication. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to rock the boat before they had a chance to test the waters.
I’d spent the rest of my day showering, plucking, and changing into three different outfits because I wanted to blow Darcy’s mind. If the idea of slowly removing my stockings didn’t do it for him, then the garter belt most certainly would. I strutted from my flat to theirs, my chin high and a confidence inside me that was as foreign as it was delightful.
“Nicki!” Theo yelled, arms out the moment I opened the door. I loved these enthusiastic greetings.
“How was work?” I slipped my key into my coat pocket before shrugging it off.
“I’m becoming a bloody workaholic but who needs a life?”
“Me,” Darcy murmured from the counter. His eyes drank me in one inch at a time from black stilettos to low-cut dress. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing, his shoulders bunching as he shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, a sure sign he was hard and trying to look casual.
My ego grew three sizes.
“Hey Darcy.”
“Hey darlin’.”
“I’m going to puke,” Theo gagged. “Let’s eat so you two can go do whatever it is you do and I can bury myself in work while you do it.”
I ignored my brother, choosing instead to focus on the look my boyfriend was giving me. He was going to consume me. My neurons zapped and zinged, releasing all those feel-good endorphins my body craved.
“Food,” Theo yelled. “Stop looking at each other like that!”
Darcy grinned and bounced his eyebrows, then tilted his head towards the counter. “Eat.”
I swallowed, loving his command. Theo doled out the usual, knowing who liked what since we ate the same food from the same place so frequently.
“I’ve got something for you, sister dear.” He tossed a shiny new passport onto the counter.
“It’s ready?” I lunged for the booklet, forgetting all about food. “It’s perfect!”
“Better be,” Theo huffed. “He took long enough. It better be a fucking exact copy.”
I flipped through the pages, stopping at my photograph. It was so strange to see myself with a different name stamped out beside me. “Holy shit. This is really happening.”
“Bank accounts squared away, house bought and paid, passport ready. All we need is to sneak you out from under Father’s nose. The faster the better.”
Darcy moved in behind me, hooking his chin over my shoulder to look at the document. “Told you babe. This is real.”
I was actually starting to believe it might happen.
“I don’t think I can eat.”
His fingers tightened on my hips. “Fantastic. Good night, Theo.”
He rolled his eyes. “Have fun you two. And Nik? Pack a bag. I want you ready to roll the minute I give the signal.”
I’d known this was coming but I was so convinced it was a long shot I hadn’t really stopped to consider what I’d take with me. Most of it would stay behind. Anything that might identify me would be left here. I needed some clothes, shoes, and a sketchpad. Everything else was disposable. I would start over fresh in a new life with new things.
Holy crap. This was happening.
I was so caught up in the news that I’d totally forgotten what I’d done for Darcy until he froze. I walked right into his back, grabbing onto him to steady myself. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t move or speak so I stepped around him. There, on an easel beside the bed was my painting. The one of us in bed. The one he’d wished he could paint.
I finished it last night.
“Did you do this?” he whispered.
I walked over beside it. “Yes.”
He blinked. “It’s perfect. It’s exactly the way I pictured it.”
Another boon to my ego. I was officially addicted to praise from Darcy. “I wanted you to have it so that no matter what happens you’ll be able to remember us the way we are right now.”
Then I slowly unzipped the side of my dress, letting it pool to the floor, and stepped out.
Darcy kicked his bedroom door closed. “Holy fuck, woman.”
Garter belts always scrambled men’s brains. “Do you like what you see?”
He nodded, eyes locked on me. “Do not take a single thing off.”
“Well then, it’s a good thing I didn’t bother with the knickers.”
He laughed and groaned at the same time. “Easier access. And fuck. Are you waxed?” His eyebrow crooked up.
I shrugged. “I heard it heightened the experience and drove men wild.”
“You’ve definitely turned me into a beast.”
“Come here and show me.”
He stalked me like prey, one step at a time. First he unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it aside. Then he kicked out of his shoes and undid his zip. With the next step he was in front of me naked, licking the exposed parts of my breasts. His breath hitched. “I hope you’re ready for me because I can’t wait.” Then he reached around behind me and grabbed a condom off the nightstand.
“Let me,” I breathed the words, desperate for more of his praise. He wordlessly handed me the condom and watched as I made a show of tearing it open, kneeling in front of him and sucking his cock deep into my mouth.
I’d quickly learned that Darcy liked it deep. I hated it, but did it anyway. What was a little gagging if it made him lose his mind? I grasped the condom with one hand and his sac with the other as I shook my head side to side, forcing the head of his cock into the very back of my throat.
He let out a deep, animalistic moan. “Fuck, Nicki. You’re insatiable.” His fingers made fists in my hair, guiding my mouth precisely where he wanted. I tried my hardest to enjoy the experience but when he started to pump into my mouth I couldn’t take anymore. I pulled back, running my hand up his length.
“Let’s get you sheathed so you can fuck me hard.” I wasn’t entirely sure why I said that. Darcy liked sex a million different ways. Slow, hard, long, short, oral, anal, hands, breasts—he honestly didn’t have much of a preference as long as it was sex with me.
But in my experience guys liked it hard and fast, and they liked hearing it just as much. So that was what I said, wanting more than anything to constantly be exactly what he wanted.
He tossed me on the bed. “You want it hard? Again?” He sounded uncertain.
I nodded slowly, trying desperately to look seductive
and needy. “I want you to show me how much you like this outfit.”
He blinked and an entirely new look came over his eyes. Confusion and uncertainty warred as he lowered his body onto mine. “A lot is about to change. How are you feeling?”
Feeling? This was no time for feelings. “I’m perfectly fine, Darcy. All I’m concerned with is making sure we have a good time.”
“You know we can have a good time watching a show or talking, right? We don’t always have to have sex.”
“You don’t want to have sex?”
“I didn’t say that.” He kissed the side of my cheek. “I always want to have sex with you, but I want to do everything with you. I’m just getting this feeling—”
I wiggled underneath him. “What feeling is that?”
“I’m serious, Nicki. I feel like you’re trying to be whatever it is you think I want instead of just being here with me.”
He cut entirely too close to the truth and out of defense I got angry instead of happy. I should be happy. I had an amazing boyfriend who cared about me and my emotional health. Instead I felt naked. My insecurities had been paraded out and a spotlight shone down on them by the one man I wanted to see me as different.
“I like sex, Darcy. I thought you liked sex. Can we please just have the sex?”
His eye twitched. “Fine.” Then he reached a hand between us. “Fuck, Nik. You’re not even wet. I’ll tear you to pieces.”
And before I could protest, he was hauling me back on my feet. “You want to close me out? Fine. You want to seduce the fuck out of me? We’ve been there, babe, and we both know how this routine ends. You ask me to fuck and I’ll fuck you senseless, but on my terms, not these. But what I really want more than anything else is for you to let me in.” He tapped on my temple.
I heard what he said and a small part of me believed every word. I knew Darcy, knew his heart and soul, knew how much he loved me, and because of all that he wanted a real well rounded relationship with me. But I didn’t know how to be that girl.
Not yet.
I didn’t have the training.
Instead all my old demons kicked in. The more I loved Darcy the more they screamed to the surface. He meant so much to me and his love stripped me bare. Every day I was more vulnerable than the last. It was terrifying.