Beyond Pain (21 page)

Nothing else mattered.

Six woke up sore, a little hung over, and still floating.

Bren was a solid mass of warmth around and over her, though his breathing lost the easy rhythm of slumber as soon as Six began to stretch.

After a lifetime of jerking away every time a board so much as creaked within a dozen yards of her, the previous night's blissful, uninterrupted sleep was a slightly guilty pleasure. "Did I keep you up all night?"

"Keep me up by sleeping?" He stifled a yawn. "How would that work?"

She squirmed onto her back and studied his sleepy eyes and disheveled hair, unprepared for the jolt of innocent affection that made her heart wobble. "You always seem to wake up whenever I so much as twitch a toe."

"Mmm. Maybe I'm getting used to it."

God, she could get drunk on that, on being so far beneath Brendan Donnelly's skin that his instincts simply accepted her presence. "Good." She gave in to the temptation to touch him, tracing her fingertip along one eyebrow and down to the shell of his ear.

He turned his head until her fingers brushed his cheek. "What about you?"

"I'm getting used to lots of things." Like his naked skin against hers, and this warm, relaxed feeling that shifted to delicious tingles when she remembered the previous night. She scraped her nails lightly over his cheek and smiled teasingly. "Like coming more than once. I'm getting used to that."

A ghost of a smile curved his lips, but then vanished. "No regrets?"

"No." She let her own smile fade as she flattened her fingers to cup his cheek. "It was...intense. Maybe a little confusing. I wish I knew why some things get me off when they feel..." If there was a word to sum up the feeling, she didn't know it. Something to explain how it felt to be pinned by him, his hand over her mouth, adrenaline and pleasure spinning her into a dizzy mess, all while an angry, guilty part of her protested that it shouldn't feel good.

"When they feel like they should be wrong?" he prompted.

Sudden tears stung her eyes, and she squeezed them shut as words bubbled up in a rush. "I should be more broken, right? That's how the other girls act sometimes. Like I should be afraid of fucking or hate it or something, because Trent and some of the others fucked around with me. And I wonder who they are, and where they grew up that they thought they'd go through life without people using their bodies in ways they didn't want. As long as you survive it, what the fuck does it matter? It's a
body
."

He drew her closer with a soothing noise. "They're looking at it the way they would, but that doesn't make them right. They don't get to decide for you what the worst shit was. That's yours."

It should have helped, but another fear lurked beneath it. A deeper one, one she barely dared admit to herself, much less to anyone else. Even trying made her voice come out in an uncertain whisper. "But what if they
are
right? What if I'm so broken that I only think I like some things
because
someone did them to me?"

Instead of denying the words outright, he shifted and sat up, with her still in his arms. "I know how that goes. Everyone assumes that's why I like pain--because I got hurt so much that my mind twisted it into something good out of self-defense. But they're way off the mark."

Sitting like this was another thing she was getting used to. She liked leaning into his chest, burying her face against his throat, surrounding herself with the warmth and scent of his skin. "So why do you like it?"

He exhaled. "I told you Cooper got me off the streets. What I didn't tell you is that I went back to them. I mean, Coop's place was home, but I didn't stay there a lot. I ran with a pretty rough crowd."

"Street kids usually are," she agreed. "I know I was."

"So was Chey." His expression turned thoughtful, almost nostalgic. "Her brother was a friend of mine. He kicked my ass when he found out I'd been messing around with his sister."

He fell silent again, and she almost wanted to give him an out. A chance to laugh it away as a joke instead of baring his past to her, especially when there was so much she still hadn't told him. "So he got you into pain? Or she did?"

Bren poked her in the side. "Chey was hardcore. Into a bunch of shit I don't mess with anymore--barbs, branding, even blades. It's hard to explain, except...I'd never met anyone who only got off on inflicting
welcome
pain. Most of the assholes you run into who like hurting people aren't exactly looking for willing partners."

It was a distinction that had never mattered to her before, because she hadn't imagined it was possible. "How did she know? How did
you
?"

He shook his head. "I don't even remember. But when it happened, it was like I knew I'd needed it all along."

No one had broken or twisted him. He wanted what he wanted and didn't seem to feel guilty about getting it. "The shit with Trent, it wasn't black and white. Obvious. It's not like we went to bed happy one night, and I woke up with him beating on me. I'm not sure when it got bad, only that by the time I realized it was, it felt like it had been bad forever."

"And then you fought back."

"That gun you found in the warehouse. It was his." The memory was still crystal clear, after all this time. The scent of fresh ink on his paperwork. The rough grain of the wood under her cheek. "He liked to fuck me over his desk. He wasn't all that into it
or
me, didn't even just need to get off. And every time got meaner, like he wanted to see how far I'd let him go. So I finally told him I didn't feel like it..."

He'd thrown her over the desk anyway, hard enough to bruise her face. Not that she hadn't ended up bruised before, but it had been the first time she'd said
no
, and some stupid part of her had thought it would matter to him. That he'd only been roughing her up before because she'd been letting him, not because he didn't give a shit whether she wanted it or not.

"I went for the gun," she continued, before Bren could interrupt, before he could try to comfort her. Comfort would feel like pity, and she'd never make it through these words. "I told him no and he still tried to fuck me, so I went for the gun. I was gonna blow his balls off."

Bren swallowed hard, but he waited, silent and watchful.

She took a careful breath and focused on a spot just beneath his left eye. A small scar, a reminder that he had plenty of his own bad memories and wouldn't judge her for hers. "The fact that he beat me half conscious and fucked me anyway wasn't the part that really hurt. Until that moment, I was still so goddamn deluded I thought he loved me."

Bren closed his eyes, but his hand found her cheek anyway. "Trent is dead. He can't hurt anyone anymore."

Trent was dead, all right. At her hands. Her knuckles had been split and sore for weeks, and she'd cherished every throb of discomfort as a reminder that she was finally safe. "I shouldn't be making you listen to any of this. It doesn't matter."

"No, look at me." He slid his hand around to cup the back of her neck. "He can't hurt you anymore, but he hurt you plenty already. That doesn't go away just because he did."

"I know." She swallowed around the lump in her throat and got the last words out. "The twisted part is that everything that happened after that? It hurt. God, it hurt. But it's easy to shrug off, because I know none of it was my fault. I said no. I fought back. Hell, I killed some of them. None of that's on me."

"Neither is what he did before."

"I didn't try to stop him."

"Do you think that makes it okay? That it means he got to be as big an asshole as he wanted?"

He said it like the idea was silly,
absurd
, but he'd lived on the streets, too. He knew the answer. "It doesn't matter if it's okay. People'll take as much as you let them get away with."

"Yeah, they do. Doesn't make it right." His jaw clenched. "What would you say to someone else? To Trix, or Noelle? Would you look them in the eye and say it was their fault, that they should have fought harder?"

The bottom of her stomach dropped out as she imagined sweet-faced Noelle trapped in a room with Wilson Trent. Or God--Trix, who'd let a member of Dallas's gang hit her and hadn't muttered a word of protest, because she'd believed she wasn't worth defending.

He would have eaten either one of them alive, hurt them and twisted them and made them think it was their fault from start to finish. They weren't broken and mean inside like Six. They were people who cared.

"It's not the same," she said weakly, even with her rationalizations crumbling beneath her feet. "I knew better. After the farms, and the--" Panic tightened her chest, and she stumbled past the final secret, the one she didn't ever think about. "The streets," she said instead. "After all that, I
knew better
."

"Knew better than to trust someone." It wasn't a question.

Put that way, it was so stark. It made her sound broken, feel it too, because it was nothing but truth. "I know better than to trust you," she whispered, bracing herself for him to pull away. "I know better, only I can't stop. And that scares me a little, but not as much as not wanting to stop."

"You don't have to stop," he offered quietly.

She choked on a hysterical laugh and buried her face against his shoulder. "Thank you."

Bren wrapped his arms more tightly around her. "I don't know if I can help.
Really
help, I mean. But you can talk to Lex."

Lex seemed so fucking tough that it was hard to imagine her like this, hurt and scared and clinging to a man. Then again, maybe that was reason enough to ask. Weeping on Bren was easy and safe, but the pity in Elvis's eyes was a fresh wound. If she ever saw that reflected back at her from Bren...

She turned her face to the warm, bare skin of his shoulder. "You just keep telling me I'm not a pervy freak, okay? I'll figure the rest out."

"You got it."

He had bruises on his throat again, bruises she'd put there with her teeth. She traced a fingertip over the edge of one. "You never told me what happened with that girl. The first one."

He breathed out a soft laugh. "Nothing tragic. Chey wasn't just a sadist, she was one hell of a dominant lover. I got tired of fighting to be on top, and we parted ways."

"Did last night count as you being on top?"

His voice dropped to a growl. "Would you have said no to anything I told you to do?"

She struggled to hold back a smile as something giddy rose, wiping away her lingering pain. She loved being able to put that rough edge in his voice with a few simple words, like she had the power to drive unflappable Bren crazy. "Only if you told me to do something that didn't seem fun."

His lips brushed her ear. "Liar."

Her heart beat a little harder, and her breaths came faster. She wasn't the only one with power, and now her voice held the same rawness. "I'm never going to be a submissive person. But if what you wanna do is be in charge of getting me off a million times a night, I'm not about to argue."

His hand drifted down between her shoulder blades, strong and unyielding. "You won't just let me, will you? You'll love every second of it."

"Probably." She touched the bruise again. "But I want more. I want to be what you need, too. All of it."

He tipped her face up to his. "Six."

She tensed. "I'm not going to let you be in charge of getting me off if getting
you
off isn't important, too."

"I need you to be you," he said firmly. "Beyond that, you'll have to trust me."

"I do, but I want..." She couldn't think of an easy way to explain, so she let the words come, awkward and jumbled, and trusted him to sort them out. "I want to understand. The pain and how much of it I like and how much of it
you
like and how it's so different for everyone."

"There's only one way to know that." He stroked a path from her chin across her jaw. "You try it."

"With you?"

He hesitated. "Ace offered. It could be good for you to see it outside of sex."

After watching some of the things the O'Kanes liked to get up to, she wasn't sure watching Ace beat Bren into a state of emotional release could be anything but sexual--for her, anyway. "Is it that easy to separate them?"

"Nothing easy about it. But Ace and I have done it before."

It was her turn to meet his gaze. "Can we try?"

He pulled her hand to his mouth before answering. "Maybe I should ask if
you
want it to be about the sex or the pain...or both."

That led right back to the thought of Ace and Bren and tension-laced touches. Her cheeks heated. "Lex is a bad influence on me."

The corner of his mouth kicked up, and he nodded, as if she'd answered the question. "I'll talk to him."

"You don't mind putting on a show for me?"

His eyes lit at her teasing. "No. But what about you?"

He still had one hand on her back, splayed across her scars. There'd been nothing sexual about the beatings that had left them, not for her. But getting whaled on in the cage last night had riled her up, and she got off harder when Bren added an edge of pain to her pleasure.

"I trust you," she ventured, pressing her thumb to his lips. "I don't want to try anything too rough. Just a taste. We have time, right? Time to go slow."

"Yeah." His fingertips traced one raised ridge of flesh, and he nipped at her thumb. "Real slow."

Oh,
God
.