It’s so much money, I can’t really grasp it.
I sigh as I let my head hang forward. I’m tired. Lately, I haven’t been sleeping more than a few hours at a time. When I do finally drop into a doze, the alarm blares me awake almost immediately.
I also haven’t had a proper discussion with my dad. He’s avoided me and I’ve let him. I haven’t phoned his sponsor, haven’t tackled him to make sure he gets help. It’s felt hardenough to keep myself alive, let alone worry about someone else, but from what Lachlan said today, he’s still lost in his addiction.
If that’s true, in a few weeks’ time none of this will matter. We’ll be on the move again, trying our best to outrun trouble, though we both know the trouble is hard baked inside one of us.
The lights at the corner nearest me change. I see the bus coming towards me, the route number glowing from its overhead display.
With a sudden burst of energy, I sprint across the road, reaching the shelter opposite just as the original bus trundles past. When I check the timetable on my phone, I see my new driver is another ten minutes away.
Ten minutes to regret my decision. Sounds about right.
I sit in the shelter and stare along the road as the dusk deepens into full night. A girl cursed to follow through on even the stupidest of her ideas.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LOCK
I thinkKari’s never going to leave my room. She drones on and on about the dance and the arrangements, talking about organising another fitted dress like I’ve forgotten what happened to the last one I wasted money on.
Well, not wasted. Slicing it off George was a treat well worth the price tag. But wasted on Kari since she never wore the bloody thing.
I know what she’s doing. She’s here to check-in and make sure whatever happened with George is over and done with. Check that the humiliation I ladled out today wasn’t some strange kind of foreplay.
A pity that it wasn’t.
If I ever get my room back to myself tonight, I intend to take a trip down that particular memory lane and see how much mileage I can get from George’s supplication.
Not the way I broke her down, that left me feeling illafterwards, not a reaction my father would be happy to know about. Not when he’s spent so much time and effort turning my emotions to dull granite.
I might have started with a slight twist to my character, a liking—especially with sexual proclivities—for things that others find borderline, the subtle dance between the twin ecstasies of pleasure and pain.
Exposure to my father has deepened that, let it flow into a thousand other parts of my psyche. Even as I flinch in horror from many features of his world, of his business, others align with my natural inclinations.
Of all the changes I’ve undergone in the past eighteen months, that’s the one that terrifies me the most. That’s he’s not unravelling me, changing me, but simply bringing out the parts of me that were always there. The rotten core my mother’s love shielded from the world for my first sixteen years.
Bad to the bone.
Right now, when I spend too much time with him, I revert to posturing, trying to placate his need to see his reflection staring back when he looks at me. The longer it goes on, the more it feels like the ill-fitting duties and expectations I started with are transforming into something made-to-measure. A second skin.
My mother is no help. She loved the monster long before he decided to marry her. I wish I knew what she sees in him but that might be worse. That might mould me into his image even more.
Finally, Kari gives me a goodbye kiss on the cheek—why? No one’s watching—and leaves me alone with my thoughts. They immediately travel back to George, to the melancholy of knowing the attraction is one-sided. My unrequited lust.
I picture her on her knees, mouth wide open, waiting. Eyessteady on mine as I spit into her mouth, taking it without protest, barely a flinch before swallowing on command.
Fuck me, she was glorious.
If we’d had the room to ourselves, I would have done so much more. I lie back on the bed, unbuttoning my jeans, picturing how her eyes would grow wide, how drool would spill down her chin as she took me inside her mouth, gagging as I hit against the back of her throat, choking on my cock, desperate to please me.
There’s a knock on my door.
Goddamn it. Eighteen months of chumming around with Kari mightn’t have cemented a loving relationship but it sure fed her information on how to push every one of my buttons.
I wrench the door open, an ample stock of curse words loaded and ready to go, then freeze, confused.
George stands in the hallway, hand raised to repeat her knock.
