Author: Anne Malcom
Category: Young Adult
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/29617_18
He pulled his hand away. Something about his voice was different. There was something in it I’d never heard before. Fear. Unease. He was uncomfortable telling this story. He was scared to share this with me.
I wanted to touch him. Very, very badly. Wanted to initiate physical contact that would communicate to him that I was here for him. That it didn’t matter what he shared, I would still want him. But I kept my lips pursed and my hand fisted on the table.
“I trusted the wrong people,” he said. “I was desperate for a family. For love. So I fell in to a crowd that looked like they offered those things. Just as freely as the drugs. I didn’t like the drugs. Didn’t like being out of control. Didn’t like how vulnerable they made me feel. That had been a vow I’d made for myself when I left. That I’d never be vulnerable again. Tricked myself in to thinking I could walk out of that house a victim and enter the world as a victor.”
He took another drink, and I gulped in air, unaware I had been holding my breath the entire time he was speaking.
“Everything?” he asked me.
It seemed like he was trying to give me an escape hatch, a way out of the conversation that was only going to get worse. But I didn’t want to escape him.
“Everything,” I echoed, my voice small. Although I was resolute in my decision that I needed to know all of him, I feared I wouldn’t be able to handle it. But wasn’t that what bravery was? Feeling the fear and doing it anyway? And wasn’t the bravest thing you could do love someone?
“They—the street rats who I thought were family—fed me enough drugs to be able to sell me, and I was too fucked up to fight. They turned me into their whore. For a time.” He drained his drink. “Then someone pulled me out. Whether he saw something in me, was feeling charitable or was just looking for someone disposable, it didn’t matter. He got me off the drugs long enough to see straight. Gave me the discipline I needed to kill every last one of the cretins who thought they owned me. Thought they could sell me.”
I no longer tasted whisky on my tongue. I tasted bile. The innards of my stomach trying to rid themselves of the air I’d just swallowed. Not because Jay was telling me about the people he’d murdered, but because I wished I could’ve done it myself.
In all of my imaginings about what could’ve made Jay ... Jay, nothing like this had ever entered my mind. He was so strong, so unyielding, the prospect that anyone had ever taken advantage of him—especially like that—was barely believable.
But it was impossible not to believe it. The truth was venom in the air.
“Duncan Heller ran a stable of girls and a big part of the gun trade in the city,” Jay continued. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “He used me as his rabid dog. After what had happened, I was ready and willing to hurt everyone he told me to. Without remorse, without reason and without mercy.”
He drained his drink, stood up and walked to refill his glass.
“I was happy to do that, for a time,” he added with his back to me. “But then I got hungry for more. To be the man with all of the control. To be the one giving orders, not taking them.”
Instead of sitting back down with me, Jay walked toward the open doors, standing in the doorway.
I got up and followed him outside where he was leaning against the porch railing. I ached to come up behind him, circle his body with my arms, press my breasts against his back, give him something. But the air around him was too thick, too impenetrable. He had to go somewhere inside himself to tell this story, somewhere away from me. In order to know him, I had to understand that his cruelty had a purpose. His coldness was a shield.
Instead of touching him, I stood beside him and waited.
“Though I was impatient, I waited,” he said to the night. “Watched Duncan work, saw where his weaknesses were. I made connections with his competitors. With people in his employ who were dissatisfied with how they were treated. There were many. A lesson I learned, in our business, you employed killers and thieves. Killers and thieves were ready to kill and steal from whoever paid them more or scared them the most.”
Jay’s form seemed darker than the night that surrounded it, despite the fact that wasn’t possible. I hung on his every word, though I began to shiver with the breeze.
Jay noticed it. He grasped my wrist and pulled me inside, closing the door behind us. He sat me back down at the table, snatching the blanket hanging off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around me, then he sat back down.