Like…love.
Selene was capable of love, and I admired her for that. Love required courage, and she had that in spades. She was definitely braver than I was.
A pain in my chest made the hand on my left pec tremble. It felt like someone had just punched me right in the heart, as if to shake it loose.
Fuck.
Why was I so mixed up?
Hadn’t I gotten just what I wanted?
Hadn’t I driven her away by showing her what kind of twisted son of a bitch I really was? I wanted her to go back to Detroit, and I wanted her to take something of me with her, but I never wanted to see her eyes so empty.
I had let her down, and there was no way to fix it.
I also strongly suspected that her wreck had been no accident, and I was afraid that piece of shit Player was involved somehow. I was determined to put a name and a face to him, though I still didn’t know exactly how to do that or even where to start.
“Let me try to make you feel better.” Jennifer’s hands meandered from my sides to my groin. I hadn’t even noticed her getting out of the bed and coming over to me.
Her nipples poked into my back, and she mouthed greedy kisses on my shoulder. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach because of my height.
Any man would have been excited by that delicate contact, but not if he’d just been fucking for about an hour without ejaculating. And definitely not if he was in the kind of terrible mood I was in.
I was frustrated, tense, worried, and still hard. Jen moaned when she encircled it with her palm, admiring my dimensions.
But I knew that not even her considerable prowess could solve my problem.
Yes, my fucking problem. I had to admit it to myself by then. Women worshipped me, and I knew how to get them hot, how to keep them satisfied, and how to draw out a clinch. I had a powerful body that often brought a little pain to mix with the pleasure, but none of that made me a superhero or unbeatable.
I was just a regular man, one who was suffering from an increasingly tangible, obvious disorder.
“Don’t touch me!” I snapped, violently throwing her hands off me. “You can’t touch me when I don’t consent. Jesus!” I raised my voice and Jennifer stumbled back. She was afraid that I was going to hurt her; I could tell from the way she lifted her arms protectively.
She’d been afraid of me ever since that time I caught her attacking Selene. I’d grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against a wall. I didn’t want to hurt her, just scare her and I succeeded.
I only hit women in bed, usually when they were on all fours in front of me, never in other circumstances.
What was it about me that I could arouse both want and terror? What kind of creature was I turning into? What was I becoming?
Every day, I felt less and less like a man and more and more like a monster.
I couldn’t even face my own reflection in the mirror because, whenever I did, the Boy kept urging me to go find his Tinkerbell. But I was never going to listen to him.
I tried to stay calm and empty my head of thoughts. Then, I breathed in the fruity perfume that Jennifer had left on me, mingled with the smells of sweat and sex that we both shared. I felt the urgent need to scrub myself clean even though I had, as always, already taken several showers that day.
My obsession with being clean was especially intense right after a sexual encounter, despite the condoms, the limited kissing, and my refusal to give oral sex. My skin was frequently irritated from my overuse of soaps and shower gels, but I couldn’t stop. Kim lived in my head, and sex was the only way I knew to chase her away.
“I need to shower,” I told Jennifer in a calmer tone. My mood swung wildly from fury to calm, making me particularly unstable and confusing to be around.
No one in my vicinity was safe when I was going through that kind of thing. So I walked away from her before I did something I might have regretted. After all, Jennifer didn’t have anything to do with my issues, and I didn’t want to dump on her all the things that were fucking with my head.
Blondie looked at me like I was crazy, but she didn’t say anything else, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I stayed in there for about an hour before coming out smelling like bath gel, giving off an overwhelming fragrance of musk.
I went to the bed and picked my boxers and black jeans up off the floor, quickly pulling them on. At first I had no idea where my sweatshirt had gotten to, but then I spotted it in Jennifer’s hands. She was still mostly naked, with just a red thong barely covering her tight ass.
She’d done everything she was supposed to do after a fuck session with me: opened the windows, pulled the sheets off the bed, and tidied up the room. And now she was staring at my chest with a dopey look on her pretty little face.
“Give me back my sweatshirt.” I snatched it from her hands in my usual rough way, not even giving her a chance to obey, and threw it on the bed. I wasn’t going to put it back on because I needed clean clothes, but that didn’t mean she could wear it either.
