I suck down a breath, and feel guilt tearing through my chest.
Laiken gave me an earth-shattering truth only she and my sister knew, and that should have been enough. Her words in my notebook should have been enough. Only, I had to go and selfishly pick at the last of her sutures when I asked her to give them a voice, even after she’d told me she couldn’t do that.
I’d taken something from her today. And I had no right to ask her to cut a vein after she’d already pressed the blade.
My stomach muscles tense, sweat sliding across the nape of my neck.
Laiken had tried her best to swallow her guttural whimpers when she’d left me and the tunnel behind. And as I’d listened to them fade, I sat there, unmoving, frozen in time.
It was at that moment I was reminded that I would always be Laiken Campbell’s demise; why I had removed myself from her life.
I had no right pushing my way back into it yesterday, even if my heart was in the right place, and all I wanted was to make sure she’d be safe.
I should have taken Harlen with me.
He should have been the one to enter the diner.
He should have been the one that held her, the one to drive her back to her grandmother’s, the one that watched over her as he had for years.
I fucked up thinking she’d be safer with me than without me.
Music pounds.
My hand flexes, then coils around Ally’s throat, her cunt wrapped around my cock.
“Animal I Have Become” by Three Days Grace vibrates through the red brick wall of the clubhouse as I slam my hips into her again, and again, and again.
“Oh god, Chase, you fuck me so?—”
I pinch my fingers into her throat, silencing her, feeling the cartilage shift beneath my grip. I don’t want to hear how good I’m making her feel when I’m making the only girl I actually give a fuck about feel the complete opposite.
“Shut the fuck up,” I growl.
And at the deliverance of my demand, her pussy tightens around me, her searing walls squeezing my cock into a fucking vise, and I screw my eyes closed wishing it could just beher.
Laiken Campbell.
The girl I never got to call mine.
The one I need to let go of.
The one I can’t.
My forehead slams down on the brick wall at the thought, and I’m breathing over the slim shoulder of the girl I’ve used countless times for a meaningless fuck as I finish. I let my hand slip from around her throat, dropping her to her ass.
Ally stumbles carelessly to her feet, reaching toward her throat, brushing her long blonde hair back from her shoulders and touching the tips of her fingers to the same place my hand had just departed.
I suck in a sharp, shaky breath, throw the condom into the bin at my side, tucking myself back into my jeans and screwing my eyes when Ally tries to grab for my face.
Ally has been dancing at the club for a while now, and when she’s not on one of the makeshift chrome poles shaking her ass in one of the boys' faces, she’s on my dick.
I slam my open palm down on the rough brick, biting my bottom lip behind my top teeth, giving her my cheek.
Ally takes the hint, though she flirts with it, her hand slowly traces the length of my throat.
“Don’t,” I rasp my warning.
“Asshole,” she whispers, but the playfulness in her tone tells me she doesn’t quite mean it. She knows what the fuck this is, that she means nothing to me.
