He watches me fall apart, holding my gaze, daring me to look away or close my eyes.
Suddenly, I feel vulnerable, possessed and undone by his stare.
I moan and come harder than I have ever done before as my body jerks with each pulse of pleasure. He holds me down, forcing me to take it, to take the pleasure only he can dole out. Noah understands the way my body works, and he loves prolonging my orgasms each time he fucks me.
Then it’s his turn.
“Ah shit!” he grits out, chasing my orgasm with his own. He grabs my hips and I’m pretty sure it’s going to leave a bruise, but fuck, I love it.
He screws me deeper, harder, faster, hitting the end of me with every thrust. I can feel him growing harder and thicker inside me. And just like that, I come again, but this time I do it while watching him go over the edge.
His eyes are wild with his need, losing their focus on me. I can feel his control slipping, as the savage I always knew was just underneath the gorgeous exterior shows his beautiful face.
“Kimberly!”
He’s a man exposed in the throes of orgasm, and for a moment, it feels like everything is going to be just fine.
He comes with a growl, the sound of male ecstasy, but it’s the look on his face that steals my breath away.
His features seem to soften. The rage seems to melt, the anguish and biting agony that this day brings seems to thaw and for just an instant there’s an unexpected vulnerability that rocks through me.
He shakes as the orgasm tears through his body, the shockwaves moving into me.
But just when I think he’s done, he starts all over again.
He starts out slow, careful until his pace picks up, becoming brutal and fast and soon, I’m purring, ready to fall over.
“Come for me,” he groans in my ear and there I go.
“Fuck!” I scream.
I can’t help but cup his face in the palm of my hand, then lean over to brush my lips across his, wanting him to know that he’s not alone in this. His hot breath blows over my face.
“Fuck, Kimmy,” he breathes.
He wraps his arms around me and crushes me to his chest and this is the part that has me falling over a cliff for him. The part where he holds me close, still deep inside, his cum slipping out as we catch our breath.
Raw and real. That what we’ve always been.
For a second, I listen to his heartbeat. I listen to him catch his breath. I feel him playing with my hair and still, I feel stripped down for some reason.
That was incredible, but I just can’t shake this feeling. As soon as I catch my breath, I get up, grab my hoodie and then pull down my skirt as the wind picks up.
“I’m sure Emmett keeps baby wipes somewhere in the car.”
I nod and make my way to the front of the car. Guessing correctly, I open the one of the compartments and alas, there are baby wipes, mints, a box of tissues and freaking bottles of water.
“Emmett is a saint.”
“He’s crazy.” I hear from behind me.
Noah reaches past me, grabs the baby wipes, then he turns me around to face him. With a care that unnerves me, he hikes up my left leg, and starts cleaning himself off all while holding my gaze.
“Noah…”
“Shh.”
I bite my bottom lip, watching him as he cleans me up. He always does this. Always.
But before I can allow myself to feel the bubbles of his care, I have to ask.
“Now that you got what you wanted, what was that, Noah?” I whisper, my breath catching.
I want him to tell me that was forgiveness. I want him to tell me that he no longer sees me as a villain, a liar or someone who would betray him, because Jesus, he’s never fucked me like he just did.
But that’s not what he says.
“Hell Day… you and me… this is the last time we ever do this.”
And there it is, the other shoe. I bite down the unexpected sting of tears.
“Okay,” I mutter, feeling proud of myself when my voice comes out strong and sure.
Ignoring him, I start looking around for my joggers, keeping the humiliation at bay.
“Okay?” He steps back, watching me with a guarded look on his face. “That’s all you have to say?”
“It’s not like you and I beat about the bush with this shit,” I say impassively, grabbing the only unruined bottle of alcohol left. Vodka! I unscrew the cap and take a swig. “You came in and wrecked my life, fucked me, and now you want me to what? Fall on my knees and beg you to pity fuck me on the worst/best day of my life every fucking year as a cover to your own misery and guilt?”
“Nah, you’re not the begging type, are you, Kimmy?” he says softly, grabbing his jeans. Then he searches for something in the pockets. “You don’t beg. You do whatever you want just to get ahead, by any means necessary. Isn’t that fucking right?”
That stings. It stings more than it should. But then again, as far as my soul is concerned, Noah always does more that he should.
“Ahh, so that’s what this is? You hate me. You resent me… but still you can’t help but want me.” I scoff, watching him light up a joint. “You’re pathetic.”
“I might be pathetic, but you should’ve seen the way you looked when you came for me,” he purrs in my ear, then blows smoke in my face.
“As compared to the way you groaned and then roared my name when I clenched down on your cock, Blue Fairy?” I whisper, my voice sultry and low.
“You know how your cunt gripped my cock?”
With desperation and longing…
“Yeah, well you might as well keep that memory because it’s NEVER going to happen, ever again!”
“So we’re on the same fucking page.”
Same page? What the fuck does that even mean…
“You came back to a town you said you were done with, looked for me, screwed me in the back of Emmett’s car—”
“You ruined mine.”
“—like I’m a joke to you? Do you think I’m your sex doll?”
“A sex doll? Don’t be ridiculous,” he smirks but it’s cold, bitter, hurtful and his sign that he’s going in for the kill. “A sex doll doesn’t lie.”
The message is clear and straight forward. See, knowing someone like I know Noah has its incredible positives, but the negatives… they’re catastrophic. The type that aim for your heart with incendiary missiles.
“That’s true,” I whisper, unable to stop the tears from welling up in my eyes. “And since we’re comparing me to a powerless, brainless, inanimate object that you can just use and toss aside, I guess we can also say sex dolls don’t have the power to fight back every asshole that puts it down and decides to abuse it. Just like me.”
Powerless and useless.
With that, I quickly rush to the driver’s side of the car, the keys are still in, and without hesitation, I drive away. Leaving him half naked, drunk and alone. As he always is.
Chapter 5
KIM
Past: Ten years ago
“You know, you look just like your whore of a mother.”
My stomach—which has been growling angrily for three days now—lurches as soon as the fat, disgusting man says the words that I’ve heard over and over since I was a little girl.
I notice the hungry gleam in his eyes as he looks at me. I stand shivering in the middle of the sorta-kinda living room, which is really where I sleep, making me the first point of contact to all sorts of vultures that come through the front door of the trailer as they make their way to the only ‘bedroom’ which was my mother’s work room.
“She’s not here,” I whisper.
“Oh, I know,” the man says with a leer on his red, dirty face, the wide gap between his dirty, chipped teeth showing. “She hasn’t been home for days, has she?”
I don’t say a word.
He knows Luci, my mother is on one of her disappearing stunts. He’s always watching, but lately, since my thirteenth birthday, I feel like he’s
been watching me even more than before.
“Say, are you lonely?” he questions, stepping even closer. “You know you don’t have to stay in this hellhole all by yourself, you can come to the big house with me, Big Earl.”
Bile rises up my throat as I take a small, tiny, barely visible step back.
Big Earl is the fat, disgusting landlord of the St. Peter’s Trailer Park where my mother and I’ve been living for over a year now.
We’ve had to move all over the country. At first because of my mother but now, it’s all my fault.
I’ve had bad vibes about this place, the landlord and the people who live here since we arrived in the middle of the night. It was deadass winter, the snow sticking to the ground, but the chill from that night has nothing on what I’m feeling right now because this, Big Earl’s sudden appearance in the trailer when he knows my mother isn’t home, is definitely premeditated.
“It’s sponsored by a church, butterfly, so it’s charitable and full of people who want to do good,” mom said with her teeth chattering, but wouldn’t dare look me in the eye. “We’ll be safe here.”
She lied.
I’ve never been safe since we got here and she, well, she changed too.
That night was the last night she ever called me butterfly.
“I also just got two Big Macs and on a whim, I bought you a strawberry milkshake and some McNuggets,” Big Earl continues and right on cue, my stomach growls.
He laughs, thinking he’s definitely got the upper hand by dangling food in my face.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” he murmurs, stepping forward. “I know Luci doesn’t feed you and I know you’ve had to take extreme measures recently that got you into a bit of trouble.”
I grow still.
I know exactly what he’s talking about. Last week, the security guards at Dollar Tree caught me stealing cans of soup, packets of ramen noodles, toilet paper AND a whole assortment of pads and tampons.
I was terrified of the gooey, red substance leaking in between my legs, let alone the sudden bursts of pain that made me feel faint.
A quick Google search at the city library’s computer told me I was menstruating, but I had no one to help me.
I was hungry, bleeding and feeling faint, and just as I went to leave the store, trying to be discreet—it wasn’t my first time stealing food from a store—I tripped over my own feet; and just as you’d expect when all the negative, bad karma in the energy conspires against you at every turn, the old backpack flew open as everything spilled out on the floor.
“I can give you a nice, hot meal. You don’t have to steal,” Big Earl says, getting even closer.
Suddenly, shame blooms through my chest.
The first time Luci was gone and left me alone, I was five years old. There was no food in the house. The neighbors turned their noses upside down at me. They hated my mother and I because all the money their husbands made all somehow found its way into Luci’s pocket. Which then found its way to the nearest coke dealer and then the cycle repeated over and over again.
It’s the neighborhood kids who told me all this.
And it’s on their stupid faces that I perfected the art of punching suckers—which is something I think I have to do now. But unlike fighting kids that shout nasty words about my mother and me, I’d need to apply the trifecta I used on men like Big Earl when they cornered me like this, telling me that I look like my mother—which, according to my mother, is the reason we’ve been moving around a lot.
As if I’m the one who leaves my thirteen-year-old little girl alone in a place where the same men that treat her like an inflatable sex toy, have hungry, dangerous eyes when they look at me.
The key ring in his hand is jiggling. I guess that’s how he got in because I’m pretty sure I locked the door when I got back from the creek that’s a good thirty minutes away by foot. I spend all my time there. It makes the helplessness and fear subside.
“Thank you for the offer but I already ate.” I do my best to keep my voice strong, but the closer he gets, the bigger he becomes. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”
“Leave? But you and I are just about to get to know each other.”
I can see his excitement. I can almost anticipate what he’s about to do. My heart starts beating hard and fast. I take a few more steps back, my hand reaching for something, anything, that I can use as a weapon.
“My mother will be home any minute now.”
“I doubt it. Not after the way she left in a freaking limo with a big smile on her face.” A limo? “I’m sure she’s forgotten all about you by now.”
That’s been true for a while now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll show him that.
“Maybe you’re right, but still. I’ll let her know that you stopped by.”
Broke in is more like it, but I hold my tongue.
“Come now, sugar plum,” Big Earl says. “You know girls your age are already getting married and pleasing their husbands.”
“That’s illegal,” I hiss but he just laughs.
“Hmm, but you know, if I flash some bills in front of your mother, she’ll give you to me. But then again, you look just like your loose change mother.”
I shiver, terror making it difficult to keep breathing in and out without showing how shaken I am.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been told that I look like my mother.
I learned the meaning of the word ‘whore’ when I was around five or six. I’m aware of what sly men and mean women see when they look at me.
They say everything about me, from the shape of my nose, the way my lips purse in displeasure, the way I tilt my head back, it’s all just like Luci.
Some girls desperately want to look like the women who birthed them into this world. And why not? All life starts with a woman.
But I hate it.
I hate being compared or likened to my mother in any way. Partly because everyone who told me this either strolled out of her bedroom at odd hours of the night, reeking of cheap beer and drugs the police officer from our last town said I was too young to know anything about.
“Come on, I’m sure you’ve seen your mother at work,” he says, stepping closer. “You know what to do.”
I get the message loud and clear.
He—like every other man that comes here—wants me to behave like she does.
Loose, pliable with no self-respect in sight whatsoever.
Out of my mind and out of touch with reality like she always is.
But most of all, they want me to replicate the acts that my mother commits when they come to her at odd hours of the night.
It doesn’t matter that I am too young or that I am scared of their itchy, dirty fingers that reached for me where I lay on the sofa, trying to sleep on an empty stomach. All they see is my mother.
“Please, leave.”
“No, that’s not how you speak to the man who’s been providing a roof over your head for free these past three months.”
He steps closer. I step back.
See, by the time I was unlucky enough to get to my eighth birthday, I’d learned how to stab a man’s eyes with my tiny fingers.
At eight and a half, I knew how to effectively give them a swift and powerful knee to the groin right before bashing their big heads in with an old, but heavy frying pan that would knock them out if I swung the pan correctly.
It happened a few times, always at night, always when my mother was passed out and unable to tell them off.
It was the actual reason why we moved recently. I bashed a man’s head so hard, I heard he was in a coma for a few weeks.
I was twelve.
“You made a deal with my mother, not with me.”
“You’re damn right I made a deal with your mother. Now, it’s high time I get my due.”
He stares pointedly at me, with a hand rubbing between his legs.
Oh God.
“Are you going to give me my due?�
� our newish landlord leers at me, his fat, dirty body blocking the way to the door.
“What?” I croak.
“The rent,” the man says, getting comfortable by rocking on his feet. He looks at me like I’m helpless and he’s going to conquer me.
“I don’t have any money and mama is not here.”
“Stealing and lying. Kids these days. Well, like mother, like daughter I guess.”
In that moment, he launches at me.
Startled at his sudden and quick movements, I yelp and grab behind me for the pan, but my palms only grab air.
No!
“Come here, you little slut,” he leers. “I’ve been eyeing you for a while.”
I know. I’ve seen him watching me when I walk back home from school. I’ve felt his disgusting eyes on me; it makes my skin crawl but now…
“Come here!”
No, where is the pan?
His fingers grip my flimsy dress. The one I found in the lost and found bin at school, but I pull it back with all my strength, making him stumble.
“Oh, you want a play a game, huh?” the man laughs. “You think I don’t know that you want me too?”
“No! Don’t touch me!”
“Your mother likes this. I know you’ll like it too.”
Frantic and full of fear, I look around the living room for the pan, but I can’t see it. So, I revert to my usual but this time, I do it in reverse.
With all my weight, I turn and knee him in the groin, then when he doubles over in a shout, I stab his eyes with my fingers, pushing deeper until he screams like a little girl.
“Aahh!” His face is red with anger and maybe pain. “Fuck! You little bitch!”
He has one hand in between his legs and another over his eyes. I use that chance to run toward the small kitchenette.
Yes! The iron cast frying pan is there.
I immediately reach for the handle of the pan and just as I turn around to go back, I’m slammed into the shelf from behind.
Pain, sudden and intense blooms in my back but I don’t make a sound. No way I’ll go down now.
Instead, I grip the pan in a balanced way and with all my might, all my fear, all my anger, I start swinging.
Petty Rage: Westbrook Blues Book 4 Page 8