Fragile Truths (34 page)

“Do you mind?” I posed to Daniel, although I knew I was wasting my breath. “We’re kinda busy here.”

“Mmmm,” he murmured as he walked around the chair and came to stand before me. There was an expression in his eyes that I hadn’t witnessed before. It confused me, brought up the many emotions I had concerning this bloody man, and shook them all about, mixing them up inside me until I was light-headed with his stare. “Is it a party?” he sneered. “You know how I love a party.”

My cheeks flushed as Adam snapped his eyes back to me, “Zoe?”

I swallowed and smiled as easily as I could. “Could you just give me a while with Daniel? I’ll come round to yours later,” I asked. “To talk,” I added hoping I didn’t give him the wrong impression.

He narrowed his eyes and flicked glances between Daniel and me, “I’m not sure, love.”

“She asked you to leave,” Daniel butted in angrily. “I suggest you heed her fucking demand.”

“It wasn’t a demand, it was a request,” I hissed at Daniel, glaring at him in frustration but he shrugged.

“Sounded like a demand to me, darlin’.”

“Zoe?” Adam questioned again, ignoring Daniel’s childish behaviour.

I nodded, “Please.”

He sighed heavily but relented and gave me a nod before he stood. “Ring me and I
will
be waiting for you.”

“I’ll be there.” I promised.

Daniel snorted but refrained from speaking as he eyed Adam walk from the room. As soon as the door closed he rounded on me, his fury blazing in his eyes as his jaw twitched in random places. “Who the fuck is he?”

My mouth opened then closed as I fought the perplexity over his behaviour. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Zo. Who the fuck is that gormless twat? You looked rather…
close
.”

What – the – fuck!

“Excuse me?” I repeated stupidly. My mouth wasn’t acknowledging the words my brain were currently telling it to express as I watched his fury radiate in waves around him.

“He’s… look Daniel…”

“Will you stop with the fucking Daniel. My name is Romeo!”

I pursed my lips and returned his scowl, “I am not calling you something that depicts how many fucking women you have been inside.”

A wicked smirk curled his lips and he took a step into me, numbing me frozen as he trailed his finger slowly across my jaw. “You don’t seem to mind when my cock’s buried deep inside you, Ink. In fact you’re usually screaming something like ‘oh fuck, deeper baby, harder, fuck me harder baby.”

“Fuck you!”

“Exactly what I was saying,” he mocked with a grin. “I just wanna know who he is, Zo. It’s not a difficult question really.”

“I’m pregnant!”

I gulped and stepped back as his face paled and his eyes widened on me. He didn’t appear to be breathing as a shiver shook his body and his fists clenched and unclenched. “What?”

I shrugged, “I’m pregnant.” I lowered my eyes, not wanting to see the hatred and disappointment in his, smiling at the sight of his heavy black boots, also scuffed but very different from Adam’s footwear.

“I thought that’s what you said.” He ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled as he slumped into the chair. His head dropped as he stared at nothing in particular in the carpet. He was silent, his mind working out different scenarios before he looked back up at me and sighed. “Okay, I’ll… we’ll… we’ll be okay. I can take time off tours, I’m sure the others will be fine…” he muttered as he smiled at me. His smile broke my heart and I fought to keep my soul inside my body when it wanted to sink through my arse and dissolve into the carpet. “In fact, I know they’ll be fine, especially now…”

“It’s not yours.”

A silence so intense filled the room, swallowing the air with huge gulps as my soul decided it was better off in the carpet fibres. I watched as goose bumps exploded across the ink on his arms, many of the designs my handiwork. He rolled his lips and nodded, “Adam’s I presume?”

My legs wobbled with the hurt on his face so I took the empty chair and nodded to him. He nodded again then looked back to the floor but not before I saw him squeeze his eyes closed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I answered honestly.

“So…” He lifted his head and fixed me with his eyes, the ache and disgust rabid in the sharp blueness. “So you and Adam, are you…?”

“Not really, just an occasional thing. A bit like us…”

He shot out of his chair and I blinked as his body penned me under him when he gripped the arms of my chair. “Fuck that, Zo. We were…”

“We were what?” I scoffed when he stalled. “Boyfriend and girlfriend? Lovers? In any sort of relationship?”

He chewed on his lip but removed his eyes and his hands from me, “We were…”

“We were exactly what you wanted us to be, Daniel. Nothing! That’s what you told me. You told me you didn’t do relationships, you just
fucked
. And that is precisely all you’ve been willing to give me for two fucking years.”

Anger exploded in and over me, its potency flinging me from my chair to defend myself and my actions to a man I was so in love with but who only wanted to
fuck
occasionally. I had given up, moved slowly onto someone who could and would love me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel the same. After losing Shane, love didn’t even come into the equation any more. I wasn’t bitter over his death, we’d had our time and we’d enjoyed every damn second of it and regret wasn’t in my heart, only loneliness and I knew Adam could rid me of that awful consuming emotion.

The pregnancy was somewhat of a different path in my life, that’s all, but hopefully, finally, my heart could embrace someone who would love me in return.

“How long have you been seeing him?” he asked eventually, his voice soft but still heated.

“Around three or four months.”

His eyes widened then narrowed hatefully, “You... you been fucking him whilst you’ve been fucking me?”

“Whoa,” I stormed and shook my head in astonishment. “How many women have you fucked in the last four months, Daniel? You’ve been nowhere near for over three months.”

He stilled, his body stiffening with realisation before he closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he blew out as he opened his eyes and gazed at me. “Just… cheers, darlin’.”

He turned and I watched as he walked slowly away.

He took my heart with him that day but not only that, he took something else – my ability to love. I felt it pull from me with every step he took across the room, tearing from inside me and lifelessly following him as if a pet unwilling to let its master go.

I only saw him on occasion after that, maybe two or three times before the birth of my beautiful boy, Jakob Shane. He was strictly professional, just a small polite smile and a friendly hello and each time it fractured my soul a little more.

I never stopped loving him but Jakob filled my heart with all the love I needed. I wasn’t empty anymore; I had my friends, my boy and the occasional romance and that was all I needed.

I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t need Daniel, or Romeo as I now stubbornly referred to him as. He wasn’t my Daniel anymore; he was just Romeo, the lead guitarist for Room 103 and that was just the way it had to be.

Coming soon from D H Sidebottom

The Decimation of Mae Swift

Prologue

The Devil visited me three times in my life, albeit, my short life. Not in the physical sense you must understand, but very much literally.

He was persistent, if not resolute and tenacious. His ruthless greed to annihilate me was utterly disturbed. I am sure if he had hierarchy, the man at the top would have dragged his arse into Hell prison just for his unscrupulous methods.

I was just fifteen when I first became aware of what he was capable of. This initial taste of him set the playing field for how my life was to be
lived
– for want of a better word.

He mocked me at this point, showed me mercilessly how he played the game, and how he liked to cheat at said game. He ridiculed and taunted until six months later, he won and took something of so much importance from me that I would never be the same again.

His second visit was, in my eyes, so much more cruel and heartless. I know we’re talking about the devil here, and yes, you have a right to say he had no heart, but even then, even when I was so utterly broken, I begged to differ and hoped – no prayed, that somewhere deep in the caverns of his black and tortured soul there was something that beat and confused his emotions once in a while.

But the third visit was somewhat different than the other two. He tried, and at first succeeded, to bring me to my knees once and for all but then something happened. God finally intervened and altered Satan’s intention; he sent hope and morphed the Devil’s minion into an Angel, hoping to break and shatter the anguish and suffering. He gave the ability for me to feel pleasure in pain, order in the chaos and light in the darkness.

But in giving me a reprieve, he also gave me something that would finally and ultimately obliterate me. He gave me the capability to love, therefore giving me the ability to be destroyed.

And Satan made sure that I was destroyed. Cruelly, viciously and sadistically.

I am Mae Swift, and this is the story of my decimation.

A teaser from

Ker Dukey's New Novel

My Soul Keeper

Coming 30th April 2014

 Shamar

Not seeing Simone all week left my craving for her unsatisfied and vibrating my blood with anticipation for when I could feed it again. New charges have kept me busy and the temptation to touch her when she was reaching out to me in her bedroom after the party nearly consumed and broke me. Distance was what I needed but now I need to see her again. I waited long enough; I have proven to myself that I’m strong and not a fool to human weakness.

Sensing her soul I appear close to her. She’s in a shop so I go to the coffee stool positioned opposite and order a drink. The girl serving me blushes when she hands me my change. I can sense her attraction to me; it radiates off her in waves and has her embarrassed because of it. I smile with a wink at her and drop the change into the tip jar. I hear her intake of breath and laugh quietly to myself as I turn and almost spill my cup onto Simone’s chest.

“Oh my go…,” she gasps and her eyes twinkle with recognition. A smile falls over her face, stilling my heartbeat. “We meet again.” Her soft musical voice flows.

“I’m sorry I nearly scalded your…” I look down at her impressive chest and back to her face, which is tinted with the pink flush from my gaze.

“Body,” I offer with a shake of my head, which earns me a giggle. It nearly floors me. Pulling a stray hair from her mouth, she watches my movements. Parting her lips, her tongue darts out to moisten them; I caress her bottom lip with the pad of my thumb, taking the hair with it across to her cheek. There’s an electrical storm erupting inside my body. Her eyes are glazed; everything around us has fallen into silence, we are the only two who exist in this moment.

 My thumb retraces its journey to her mouth and with a simple press of her lips she kisses it. My whole body crackles and tingles. She’s turned on and it magnifies my own arousal. Leaning forward without thought of consequence, I touch my lips to hers. Her body melts into mine; the taste of her red lips is like the sweetest forbidden fruit. The warmth of her tongue slips into my mouth and I meet it with my own: grasping her face deepening the kiss. Her supple body moulds further into mine, her breasts pushing against my chest, our hips pushing into each other’s. The whole world falls away and I feel like Heaven has claimed me and this is it; she is my Heaven.

“Holy shit!” a voice shouts out, ringing in my ears.

Simone pulls away, breathless, her pouty red lips still slightly open and swollen from my kiss. Her eyes roam my face with bewilderment. “That was…”

“Amazing,” I finish her sentence.

Her friend grabs her shoulders and turns her from my gaze. It breaks the spell. I notice we have gathered an audience as were standing in the middle of the mall making out like we were in a private room. She looks around and drops her face to the floor, embarrassed.  Lifting her chin, I whisper, “Never look down Simone, only up.” I bring my lips to her forehead before walking away once again.

~****~