The Filthy Series: The Complete Dark Erotic Serial Novel (24 page)

I clenched my hands in my lap. My thumb moving back and forth, back and forth, over the other. The incessant beeping was the only the thing that grounded me. That kept me from floating off into hell. It was
her
sound. The machine that let me know she was alive and real. That it was really Faye lying in the hospital bed before me.

She was unrecognizable now. The woman I’d held against me while we danced to a slow country song. She’d been vibrant and full of life, more so than I’d ever seen her before. There had been a light in her eyes. I’d seen it the moment I walked out of my bedroom before the party. She’d been standing there in my living room a form fitting dress hugging her lithe body. She’d filled out more while she was at the psychiatric hospital. Her body had become more curvy, fuller in all the right ways. It was why I had avoided her since the moment she came home. I couldn’t trust myself around her.

I wanted her.

There was no denying it. But she was hurt, damaged, and I knew my lust, my craving for her would only destroy her more. It would only set her farther back. I didn’t want to be that person. The one that pushed her back over the edge. So I stayed away. I worked late. I didn’t speak to her, because I knew if I did she would be able to see it. The blatant desire in my eyes. There was no hiding it, I don’t know if I had ever been able to hide it, but I definitely couldn’t now. But it wasn’t just lust. It was something more. I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want Sarah to know. All I wanted was to make everything better. I wanted to pull Faye into my arms and fix her with my love.

Love?

I’m a fucked up man.

I glanced up at Faye. Her chest moved slowly, up and down with her breaths. Her face was bruised and swollen beyond belief. I clenched my fists tighter and let out a shaky breath. My father had done this.

My father.

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to punch something. Destroy something.
Him.

A moaning sound jerked me out of my turmoil, bringing me to my feet. Faye stirred, moving her head back and forth slowly, blinking her swollen eyes. One of them wouldn’t even open, the other barely.

“Faye, it’s me Rhett. I’m here with you. Just me.”

“Rhett?” She winced, touching her cheek. It was broken, the doctor said, but for the moment it didn’t appear to need surgical repair. Another evaluation would be done once the swelling subsided. I grabbed a cup of water and held it to her lips.

I had been here before. Four months ago I held a cup just like this to Faye’s lips, only her lips were puffier this time, swollen, cracked.

I set the cup down and wrapped my fingers around her hand. It made me feel better. It was selfish really. She probably didn’t want me to touch her, but the feel of her skin on mine was reassuring. It helped me, my anger, the rage that boiled just beneath my skin.

“I’m alive?” she asked with a clenched jaw. She squeezed my hand. “It’s really you?”

“Yes.” I nodded. I wanted to say more, but the bruises on her face made the words catch in my throat. I knew how bad they were, I’d been looking at them for the last five hours at the hospital, but now that she was awake and moving, they seemed so much worse, so much more real.

“I’m sorry.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, running her free hand tentatively over her face feeling all the injuries. She had stiches above one eyebrow and in the corner of her mouth.

“You have no reason to be sorry.”

“It was you who found us.”

She wasn’t asking, but I answered her anyway. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” She closed her working eye as if she was embarrassed.

“What?” I shook my head back and forth, trying to understand. “No. Don’t say that. Fuck.” I ran a hand through my hair. The image popped back into my head. The one I’d been trying to forget since the moment I saw it. My dad on top of her, his fists wailing down on her face while he was inside her, pumping his dick into her bleeding, broken body, while he told her how much he loved her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them.

“About Taylor and I?”

I opened my mouth to tell her she didn’t have to talk about it, but instead I said, “Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes.” She squeezed my hand harder.

“No.” I shook my head. “Was it really for all those years, since you were nine?” Part of me wanted her to deny it. To tell me it wasn’t true. That the things I saw weren’t real, but something sick and twisted my mind had conjured, that this was all some sort of horrid dream.

“He…how did you know that?”

A vice-like grip fastened on my heart. “He told me.” I tried not to think about it. The images that truth conjured. Of Faye’s small nine-year old body with my father’s on top of her, violating her, ruining her.

“No.” I pulled away from her. I couldn’t look at her anymore. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stare at the broken woman in front of me knowing that I could have changed everything for her. I could have saved her, but I was too fucking blind and stupid to see it.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” Her words were garbled and laced with pain.

I whirled back around, taking her hand again. “I believe you. I’m just sorry that I let that sick fuck do this to you. It’s why you ran away, isn’t it? Because of the things he did?”

She stared up at me. The dark brown of her iris barely visible through her swelling flesh. “He killed my baby.”

I recoiled at her words, like a slap. “But…”

“He stopped using protection after he found out I propositioned you to have sex with me. He…”

“His baby,” I said.

“My baby!” she hurled the words at me before letting out a moan of pain and touching her hand to her cheek. The tears came then, leaking down her face.

“Faye, I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry.” I pulled her fingers into mine, intertwining them. “Don’t cry, please. I shouldn’t have brought all this up. I shouldn’t have said anything about this stuff.” I meant the words, but I needed to know more. I needed to know the details, every sick and twisted part. I didn’t want them, but rather, needed them. I deserved to know them. To listen to the horrors she lived through. It was the only way I could fix this. And I would fix it. It didn’t matter what I had to do. I would find a way.

The door opened to her room and nurse walked in. “Excuse me, sir, but we’re going to have to ask you to leave. Ms. Turner needs her rest.”

“I’m not leaving.”

She looked at me with wide eyes and I wondered what she saw when she looked at me—at us. There was blood on my white dress shirt. Faye’s blood from when I had clutched her to me. They’d had to pry me away from her in that bathroom, but even then I was still right there next to her when they loaded her in the ambulance. I never left her side. There was blood on my face too. I remembered smearing it there. My dad’s blood from when I had punched him over and over. But it wasn’t enough. Did the nurse see all of that when she looked at us? Could she feel my hate? My love? Could she see it in the blood, in Faye’s swollen face? Were we an open book with blood-splattered pages?

“I want him to stay, please.”

The nurse eyed us. “Are you sur—”

“Yes, please. Please don’t make him leave.” Her voice shook on the end and she squeezed my hand.

She didn’t know that I wasn’t leaving, no matter what they said. Not even the devil himself could have moved me out of that room. I wouldn’t leave her.

Never again.

TWO

The world was spinning, twisting, turning, rolling me until I was upside down. Until I was there. In the room. My bedroom. The one I grew up in. The one where Taylor fucked me every day for years. I couldn’t remember how I got there. I didn’t remember the drive over, who’s car I rode in. None of it came to mind. But it was real. My things, my full-size bed with my blue and white comforter. My lamp, the posters on the wall of some stupid boy band I used to like it. It was all there.

Dread ripped through me when I heard the footsteps coming down the hall. I didn’t want to see Taylor. Not right now or ever. I hurried into the bathroom and locked the door. I let out a small sigh of relief when my gaze landed on my blue toothbrush. It didn’t make sense, it was just a little piece of plastic with bristles. It didn’t do anything. It couldn’t save me, but seeing the simple object calmed me.

I glanced up at the mirror. A deafening scream rent the air and it took me several moments to realize the sound had come from me. From the monster in the mirror. Her face was swollen, bloated unrecognizable. The eyes were practically swollen shut and blood leaked from the side of my face. I reached up and ran my hand across my cheek but it felt fine, smooth beneath my fingertips.

It’s not really me.

But then the mirror started melting, the reflective glass burning away, dripping down on the sink until the woman on the other side was nothing but a runny mess.

“Faye baby.” The words were a whisper in my ear. Taylor’s words. I jerked around, looking behind me, but no one was there. Just the wall, the plain white wall. “You’re mine.” The heat of his breath on my earlobe made me shudder as I whirled around again.

“You can’t do this!” I shouted as I stumbled back. But I tripped over something and my ass slammed into the tile. I looked down at my shoes. The pretty silver shoes I wore to Rhett’s work party. But they weren’t silver anymore. They were brown, stained with blood.

Blood?

My eyes traced upward tracking the dark stain, it spread up my legs like a virus. Not bright red blood, but old blood, dark brown, like mud. It covered me. My legs, my hands, my dress. Everything. It was so thick it threatened suffocation and I pushed backward with my hands, trying to escape it, but I couldn’t. It was everywhere, everything. It was all over me. In me.

He was in me. Suddenly he was there. I don’t know how he got there. He just appeared. My head was pressed against a wall. My world a haze of that muddy-brown. The blood. My blood. All the blood I’d bled for Taylor. That’s what it was. I knew that now as he moved inside me.

I watched the ceiling, the uneven of tiles of what was certainly hell and screamed. “Not again!” But isn’t that what I said the last time when he took me on that bathroom floor? “No! Not again!” I sobbed. But he didn’t stop moving.

“Faye.” It was just one word. Just my name, but it changed everything. Suddenly Taylor was gone. The blood was gone and I was alone. “Faye, wake up. It’s just a nightmare.”

I blinked my eyes and he was there. Rhett. Not Taylor. I was in his spare bedroom. Not in my old room at Taylor’s house.

“Taylor’s not here?” I asked as I pushed myself up glancing around.
What if he’s here?

“No. No.” He pressed his hand to my cheek gently, the cheek that wasn’t broken. “You’re here. You’re safe. He’s in jail, remember?”

I nodded slowly, letting out a deep gust of air. Realizing that it was really and truly just a nightmare. That the things that happened in the bathroom at that party three days ago were real and Taylor was really locked away, for now at least.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded numbly, rubbing my fingers across my broken cheek. It throbbed now, probably from my yelling. I eyed Rhett, taking him in. He was only wearing boxers, his chest bare. The Old English lettering of the word Josh stood out on his muscular chest.

He ran a hand over his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and the hair was a little bit darker blond than the strands on his head.

“Go ahead and ask.”

His gaze snapped up to meet mine. “Ask what?”

“Ask me what it was about.” I don’t know why I said this. I didn’t know if it was because someone knew, finally someone knew. And I could talk about it after all this time.

I expected him to look at me with horror and confusion. To jerk away from the bed and leave me alone. But he didn’t. He didn’t move a muscle from where he sat on the side of my bed. His green gaze burned into mine with such intensity it was almost overwhelming. It was as if he needed to know, as if something inside him was burning for it.

“I was in my room. My old room. The one at his house. His footsteps came down the hall. Taylor’s.” Saying his name felt good. He wasn’t Lover anymore. Perhaps he never had been.

Rhett sat stiffly, his eyes never leaving mine.

“I hid in the bathroom. I locked the door. But I saw my face.” I ran my hand over my lumpy swollen flesh. The doctor had told me I would be okay, that my face, my cheek, everything should heal back to normal aside from the scar on my eyebrow and in the corner of my mouth where I had stitches. Those scars would remain forever.

Rhett squeezed his hands in his lap, one thumb swiping the top of the other mechanically.

“But he got in anyway. And I was covered in blood. All the blood he’d ever made me bleed.”

“He hit you, before the other night?” He didn’t sound surprised.

“Not like that. The other night was different. He hurt me in different ways before that. More secretive ways.” I should have been bothered. I shouldn’t have wanted to tell Rhett these things, he out of all people should have been the one person I didn’t want to tell, but for some reason I needed him to hear it as much as he seemed to need me to say it. “With his knife. He would cut me. My belly.” I leaned back and lifted my shirt, revealing my smooth flesh. There was no evidence of the superficial cuts he’d made. My skin bore no scar of the hundreds of times he’d taken a knife to my body.