Preppy was silent as he paced the room, tugging at his hair. A vein pulsed in his neck. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d gained a substantial amount of weight since I’d last seen him. Mostly muscle. His biceps flexed under the fabric of his white button down. This was no longer skinny-lean Preppy. He might have been lean but when his arms lifted over his head and he let out a deep sigh I couldn’t help ogling his ab muscles outlined by his shirt.
That’s also when I realized that for the exception of a missing bow-tie he was wearing typical Preppy attire. Suspenders, khakis, boots. His hair had grown into the style I remembered from years ago, long on the top, shaved on the sides.
My insides clenched but my mind raced along with my heart. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What do you want?” I screamed, literally pulling at the roots of my hair and charging him across the mattress until I was on my knees on the bed eye to eye with the man who’d broken my heart on more than one occasion. It was a good thing my dad was out. “You have to tell me what you want!”
He stood his ground and shouted back. “I want YOU!”
“Then let me the fuck in!” I yelled through gritted teeth, shoving against his chest. “Tell me what happened to you and let me the fuck in!”
Preppy growled. “He fucking tortured me!” he screamed, his face turning red with his anger, a vein pulsed in his throat. I gasped and sat back on my feet, watching as his walls finally crumbled. “Is that what you want to fucking hear? Do you want to know about all the times he beat me with a bat, waited for my injuries to start to heal, before doing it all over again on top of the bruises? Do you want to hear how sliced me with a sharp knife until my skin was shredded?” His voice grew lower, darker. “Or maybe you want to hear about how he sent one of his biker bitches down to fuck me in the ass in an attempt to fucking break me? You want to know how he sounded when he laughed as he came on my back? Or how he kicked me in my spine when he was done and I blacked out when my head hit the fucking wall because I couldn’t even hold myself up.” Preppy looked to the sky and then back to me. “I couldn’t hold myself up never mind fight him off even though I tried. I fucking tried!”
“Preppy...”
“No, I don’t need or want your fucking pity.” He quieted sinking to his knees on the carpet and I slid down from the bed onto mine, craning my neck so I could look into his eyes. “I have nightmares all the time. You know what’s the only thing that makes them go away?” He placed his hand over mine. “You. You silence the world when it’s too fucking loud. You make me feel less broken.”
“You’re not broken!” I said, grabbing his hands in mine and away from his face. He opened his eyes. “You’re not broken.”
“I’ll always be a bit broken,” he said, staring at me with glassy eyes.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. I released his hands and stood up abruptly. I pulled open my desk drawer and retrieved the proof I needed. I unfolded the wrinkled piece of paper and stalked back over to him shoving it into his hands. “A broken man didn’t write these words.”
“You got my letter,” Preppy said, turning the page in his hands, the ink smudged with the millions of tears I’d cried reading his words a thousand times over and over again. A small smile appeared on his face. “You lied to me, Doc,” he said, sounding both amused and pissed off.
“I did. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know if you still felt the same and I didn’t want to make assumptions when you were in a shitty place.”
His voice softened to a whisper. “Do you want to hear about how the only fucking reason I survived that place was by thinking of you every single fucking day and night. I even meditated like Mirna showed me and tried to go somewhere in my mind, anywhere that wasn’t there. I spent hours in my head having fake conversations with my friends. With you. I don’t remember much, just wanting to get away. I’m alive because of you.”
“No, you’re alive because you’re YOU. Because you battled with the reaper and you won. Because you’re Samuel fucking Clearwater and you make your own rules.” I laughed and choked on a sob. Preppy smiled. “That place you went to in your mind? It was home. It was to your family. To me. I heard you. We all did. Me. King. Bear. Ray. Even Thia.”
“You really believe that?” Preppy asked, raising a brow and brushing a hair from my face.
“Yeah. As crazy as it sounds, yeah, I think I do.”
Preppy leaned in close, pulling my lips within an inch of his. “You always were a little fucking crazy,” he breathed. He leaned down to kiss me and I pulled away. I stood up and walked to the other side of the room.
“You made me think you were dead again. I can’t live in a constant state of fear that you’re going to be hurt or worse. I just can’t. You broke me and I can’t.”
“You’re the one who taught me that. If you’re hurting, you don’t have to stay hurting. I’ll take your hurt for you. I’ll take it all for you. I’d go back down in that fucking hole all over again if it meant getting to see you just one last fucking time. I’m a selfish fucking man and when it comes to you I’m the most selfish man of them all, because I want you regardless of the fact that I’m no good for you.”
“I don’t...” I started, but stopped when I realized I had no clue what I was going to say.
His eyes spoke volumes of how he was feeling. Sad, but determined, rimmed in red, but wide open and clear. “And if this is all coming to an end before it even has a chance of beginning again then there’s no fucking risk in telling you what I have to tell you now. What I have to say to you before it swallows me fucking whole.”
I shook my head, both fearing and anticipating what was coming next. But nothing could’ve prepared me for those three little words that trampled over me like a herd of fucking cattle.
“I love you.”
I shook my head again, not to disagree, but to shake the words from my brain. Words he couldn’t have really said. It was either my imagination or lies. They had to be. Either way, my heart couldn’t take much more. The barely held together seams of the last mending had started unraveling the second I saw him in that bed. ALIVE. And with those three little words that held so much power I felt them reach down my throat into my chest and start snipping away at the fraying threads stitch by stitch. “No. No, you can’t just love me.” I heard myself choke out. “You just think you do because now I belong to someone else,” I rationalized. “And you want what you can’t have.”
“Fuck that," he said, anger lacing his words. His eyebrows pointed inward causing lines on his forehead to appear. "You think I just decided NOW that I loved you?”
“Well, maybe I don’t love you.”
“Doc, this wasn’t a revelation 'cause you showed up with Justin Bieber's stunt double and I thought you were engaged. I love you because I fucking love you. I’ve loved you since way back before I fucked it all up, you know, the first time. I thought if I pretended to be happy that I’d be happy but it took months of sitting in the dirt being tortured every single fucking day to realize that the real torture was not telling you how I fucking felt from that very first day.”
“You...”
“I loved you when I carried your broken body to Mirna’s that first time. I think I even loved you from the second I saw you up on that water tower. You were so broken...and so fucking beautiful.”
“When you saved me,” I said, unable to yet find my voice it came out as a whisper.
Preppy shook his head. “No, when you saved ME.” I gasped and placed my hand over my chest where I was sure I was about to pass out from the pain. Tears welled up in my eyes and rolled in warm drips down my cheeks to my chin. Preppy reached out and wiped the tear from my chin with his thumb. He then placed his own hand over his chest like he was feeling the same kind of unraveling I was. “And before you say anything else. Before you tell me that I can’t really love you, or to fuck off, or that you don’t feel the same way, I have to tell you first, that I don’t like being lied to.”
&nb
sp; “Who lied to you?” I asked, trying to look anywhere but into his eyes, but it was impossible. I was locked into his determined gaze.
“You did, Doc. You fucking lied to me,” he growled.
“When?”
“Twice actually. First, when you told me you didn’t love me.” Preppy took a step forward, and I instinctively took a step back. He chuckled low and deep. “Because you and I both know it’s bullshit.”
“And the second time?” I tried to swallow down the lump forming in my throat that was threatening my airway, causing me to breathe erratically. My chest heaved up and and down with the need to catch my breath.
He smiled wickedly. “Then when you said I couldn’t have you.”
“Why...why all this? Why now?” I asked.
“Because, Doc. When I was still in that fucking hole I made a promise to myself that I was going to find you. Find us again. What I didn’t realize was that before I could do that, I had to find me first and there wasn’t anything you or anyone else could do to push that along.”
“Did you find you?”
“Fuck yeah, I did.”
“Therapy?”
“Something like that.”
“Now come home. We’ve got something else we got to take care of. Together.”
“What’s that?” I asked, my heart still fluttering like a schoolgirl.
He reached in his back pocket and handed me a stack of papers. “We found him. We found Bo. He’s been living with me at the house for a while. Doc, I don’t want him to have the same life as me. I see me in him and I think we can still save him. Just got to get his useless mama to sign these.”
Application for Adoption of Minor Child was the heading.
I leapt into his arms and nodded. Tears spilled down my face. “So what do you say, Doc?” He asked. “You wanna be my baby mama?”
I scrunched up my face like I had to think about it. “Are you going to keep me this time?”
Preppy smiled from ear to ear. “Yeah, Doc. And I’m never fucking letting you go,” Preppy said. He reached behind him and took off his shirt in that way that only men can do. I gasped when he leaned over to the nightstand and flicked on the lamp.
“Wow,” I said. When I noticed Preppy’s muscles under his shirt it was nothing compared to seeing them tight and perfect without his shirt. And although his ridiculous body had me foaming at the mouth that wasn’t what I was staring at. The wound on his side. The one from the gunshot. The one that healed wonky and left a criss crossing of scars across his torso had been tattooed over by a large intricate colorful piece that had me in tears all over again. Red lips. Glasses. Pencil skirt. Even the bow tie heels Mirna had given me. “It’s me,” I gasped.
“So you gonna answer me or just lay there drooling?” he asked with a wink. “You coming home?”
“Yes. I’m coming home,” I said and the warmth on Preppy’s face was enough to melt away and fears or doubts I might have had.
“Good, now we can get to the part where we fuck,” he said, and his mouth came down over mine.
“Wait, where are we going to live? Mirna’s house already sold. I sent the keys down months ago,” I said.
“More fucking, less talking,” Preppy said, tossing me onto the bed.
Who was I to argue?
He didn’t waste any time, hooking my booty shorts and panties and dragging them off my legs, tossing them to the side. Without hesitation he pushed my thighs apart and dove in. The second his tongue made contact with my clit I moaned long low and LOUD.
“I missed this beautiful pussy,” he said against me, the vibrations of his words mixed with the circular tongue motion was bringing me closer and closer to the edge.
I was about to come, I could feel it right there, just a few more long strokes of Preppy’s talented tongue and I... heard my dad come in from his bowling league game. “Andrea?” He called out, but Preppy didn’t stop. Not only did he not stop he pushed a long thick finger into my ass and I squealed. He reached up and covered my breast with his hand, pinching hard on my nipple. “Are you home? Bowling sucked. We lost to that group of women in their eighties again. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be last again this year.”
“Answer the man,” Preppy said against my folds. He pulled out his finger only to push it back in.
“I’m here dad. I’m just...really tired so I’m just going to go to bed early,” I shouted back. Preppy thrust his tongue inside me and I arched my back.
“Yeah, I’m beat too, see you in the morning,” he said, I heard his door close and the second it clicked Preppy increased his efforts, relentlessly fucking my pussy with his tongue and my ass with his finger until I grabbed a pillow, smashed it over my own face, and screamed out my orgasm into goose down.
It was Preppy who eventually took the pillow off my face. “Thought you were suffocating under there,” he laughed.
“You’re such a shit,” I said.
He settled between my legs and pushed his entire massive length inside of me in one quick thrust. I was about to scream out again but he put two fingers in my mouth. “Bite down on me if you need to, but don’t make a sound, Doc,” Preppy said wickedly.
At first he built a slow rhythm again reaching behind me and pushing a finger into my ass which heightened everything his cock was doing in my pussy. He was making it impossible not to scream so I did what he said and I bit down on his hand. “That’s it, bite me. Show me how much you want to scream.”
I bit down harder and he responded by thrusting even harder. I was so wound up that when he bent down and bit my nipple I was already coming, the pleasure so great I was lost to anything but me and Preppy and the greatest fucking orgasm.
Preppy pulled out, coming in long hot streams of white over my neck and tits, claiming me, marking me, making me his.
Keeping me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DRE
It was a good thing I was wearing a seatbelt because if I hadn’t been strapped down in the back seat I would’ve hit my head on the exposed metal roof of Billy’s van at least a dozen times as we navigated down the pothole infested street.
I put my arm across Bo’s shoulders and held him tighter to me. His own seatbelt might have been buckled but they were made for people of a certain size, not age. Bo might have been six years old but his belt was doing jack to actually keep him safe.
“He needs a booster seat,” I pointed out, trying to distract myself from anything other than where we were headed or the task at hand. For that moment it was transportation safety.
Preppy was in the passenger seat. He turned around and eyed the loose belt around Bo’s waist. “On it,” he said, pulling out his phone and quickly tapping on the keys. “Ray says she has an extra.”
Bo took that moment to smile up at me. I could feel his nervousness radiating off of him almost as much as I could feel my own. I saw it in the way his eyes shifted from object to object in the van like he was trying to find something to focus on yet when he smiled up at me it was if he were trying to comfort me, instead of the other way around.
Which was good, because I needed it.
My guts were twisting over and over again. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat as I wrung out my sweaty hands on my lap. The uneasy feeling only getting worse as we turned from the bumpy road into an even bumpier one past the rusted sign falling from the post that told us we were entering the trailer park.
From the back seat I could see Preppy’s entire body go completely stiff as we rolled past one dilapidated trailer after another.
Junk was piled high in front of almost every site. A middle aged couple stood in the middle of the road between a section of four trailers parked at angled facing one another. They didn’t budge when they saw us coming so Billy turned the wheel and maneuvered around them. The man was shirtless, wearing nothing but light colored jeans that were folded open at the fly as he chugged from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. He flicked us off as we passed. The woman, who was w
earing a stained lavender tank top and a pair of cotton underwear, scowled although I wasn’t sure if it was meant for us or the man she was arguing with. When we’d passed them by I continued to watch out the back window. The man had turned his back on the woman and that’s when she leapt onto him, wrapping her arms and legs around him tightly and screaming in a high pitch tone that made me grateful the windows were rolled up. The bottle fell from the man’s hand and rolled across the street as he stumbled for balance, it was the last I saw of them before we rounded the corner and they disappeared from view.
Bo was looking out the window as well although he seemed unfazed by the couple. It was when we turned that he reached for my hand and squeezed tightly, his little fingernails pressing down hard into the skin of my palm. He leaned against me and snuggled his face into my arm as he weren’t cutting off my circulation where our hands were joined.
He could squeeze as hard as he wanted. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to pull away.
Not then.
Not ever.
I had silently questioned why Billy was tagging along with us until we pulled up to our destination, a dimly lit trailer in the back of the park, and it dawned on me that Billy must have been there to keep an eye on Bo because there was no fucking way he was going to come inside with us. I wasn’t going to ever let him back inside that thing.
Ever.