“I was not going to take advantage of you that night,” he adamantly protested.
“I know.” That was the problem. He’d told me I wasn’t ready, and I’d thought I was. “But I wanted you to.”
He gave his same argument from back then. “You were still seventeen.”
“I was one month shy of my birthday.” Four weeks didn’t matter. “I knew what I wanted. You wouldn’t have been taking advantage of me.” I’d wanted nothing more than to give him my virginity.
“Your grandmother wouldn’t have seen it like that.”
“She was old-fashioned and ailing, and she wouldn’t have had to know,” I uselessly protested, because all of this conversation was too little too late, and the same thing we’d argued about back then.
“I made her a promise,” he reminded me.
Sighing despite myself, I repeated what he’d said to me back then, what I knew he would say now. “And you never break a promise.”
“Not intentionally.”
I couldn’t not say the words. “You broke your promise when you left me.”
“You tried to fuck my brother.”
Recoiling as if he had struck me, I let ten years of holding in an ugly admission roll off my tongue. “I wanted to believe he was you.”
As if expecting my reply, as if he had been waiting all these years to ask me, he didn’t hesitate with his next question. “Because he had no qualms about statutory rape or because he actually wasn’t me?”
His astute question only twisting the knife, I whispered the truth. “He wasn’t choosing the Marines over me.”
“I was choosing an honest future that would support you.”
My damp hands rubbed down my thighs as my poor upbringing vainly tried to smooth the expensive, wrinkled fabric of my dress. I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t understand that back then. I knew he’d wanted to take care of me, and I’d respected that, but it didn’t make my feelings any less real, even if they were selfish.
And I was too embarrassed back then to tell him food was hard to come by on my grandmother’s meager resources. I didn’t let on that I was always hungry and I’d been worried what would happen once he enlisted, let alone deployed.
I also never told him food had been even harder to come by growing up in Trinidad. I was too ashamed to admit my mother worked the streets to first put alcohol in her bloodstream and second, a very distant second, secure food for herself, then her daughter. It wasn’t until her fifth arrest for prostitution in a brothel that was raided that it was discovered she was sick. And even then, it wasn’t a question of finding a relative to take in her fourteen-year-old daughter. A country with too many stories like mine and not enough resources to help, I’d merely been a statistic until I found a letter in an old shoebox with a return address in the United States.
I wrote to a grandmother I’d never met and asked to come live with her. Sending the letter, I’d had visions of fancy houses with cupboards full of food and driveways full of cars. In reality, the woman who sent me a plane ticket did so only out of obligation, and it’d cost her. A fact she never let me forget in the short time we had together.
But none of that changed the events that led us here.
“I know you were trying to secure a future for us.” I knew he’d always wanted to be a Marine, and I didn’t want to say anything to make him feel anything other than proud of that. “That’s the exact same reason why I’d signed that contract.” I looked up into his impossibly complex eyes. “I was trying to create a future for us too, one where you wouldn’t have to deploy.” Casting my gaze away from his, I gave him the truth of my ten-year-old insecurities. “And I needed a safety net in case you didn’t come home from war.”
Staring at her on her knees, I didn’t want to absorb any blame.
I didn’t want to admit I hadn’t taken her virginity because I was protecting her.
That promise I’d made to her grandmother wasn’t for her.
It was for me.
I’d been stalling.
I knew who I was back then as sure as I knew it now. If I’d taken her virginity that night, I would’ve stripped her innocence and broken her with my demands. She would’ve been left reeling when I deployed the next day, and I wouldn’t have been able to guarantee she’d be waiting for me when I came home. I’d selfishly wanted to make her my wife before I introduced her to my dominance.
I didn’t psychoanalyze why the fuck I needed to dominate. I just did. But I’d been losing the power exchange with her, even back then. The second that video went viral, I’d lost control—of her, of the situation, and of my future. Joining the Marines was the best decision I’d ever made, but it also took away my control. Which had only made my need for her worse.
Logically it was easy to understand why she’d wanted Vance to be me, but I wasn’t a forgiving man.
“Life is war.” I’d fought for every damn thing in it. Except maybe I hadn’t fought hard enough for her. Her eyes, her curves, her smooth skin, the submissive pose, I wanted to fuck her so bad right now I could taste the dominance coursing through my veins.
But I didn’t deserve her.
Maybe I never had, and fate had made the hard decision I’d refused to.
“Life is a gift,” she corrected as she regally knelt at my feet and mocked my entire fucking existence.
But even that didn’t stop me from wanting to wrap my hand in her hair and pull until her head was back, her neck was exposed, and she was breathless just from that single touch. I wanted to push her to the edge and dominate the fuck out of her.
With my mouth, my hands.
Then I wanted to fuck her harder than any sparring session with my brother she’d ever experienced. I wanted to show her she didn’t need him or that bullshit he fed her disguised as control. He was sparring with her because he wanted it. He wasn’t giving her what she really needed.
But I could.
I could give my Songbird everything.
Except right now I needed to ask her about Abernathy and what she and Vance knew, if Amherst was a liability anymore. I also needed to check in with Luna and Harm. I needed to do my damn job.
But I fucking stood here.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered.
“Like what?” It wasn’t a question. It was a test.
Quieter, lower, her voice dipped to submissive. “Like you want me.” She dropped her gaze. “Like you want to touch me.”
Shoving my hands in my pockets so I didn’t wrap them around her throat, I leaned down and let my breath touch her ear. “I don’t want to touch you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
Coating my tone in deceptive seduction, I gave her reality. “I want to break you.” Then I wanted to put her back together with my own brand of dominance.
The wind howled outside, and she shivered. “I’m already broken.”
It wasn’t the rawness in her voice that surprised me or the way she said broken that made me want to feed my cock into her mouth. It was her actual admission. I never knew if she saw it all those years ago. If she saw my need like I saw hers. If she knew why she’d been drawn to me. Or if she knew she was the gift between the two of us, the Songbird that’d brought music to my darkened soul.