Tenley chewed on her nails, staying safely on the opposite side of the counter. I couldn’t blame her. I was acting like a psycho.

I took a deep breath. “I’m not doing a very good job explaining myself.”

“Or answering my questions.”

“Look, this isn’t a topic I’ve had to discuss before. I’m not exactly comfortable with it.”

“Maybe not, but tonight might have been easier if I hadn’t been blindsided,” Tenley fired back.

I threw my hands up in the air. “What did you want me to say? ‘I fucked this stripper back in the day. She likes to make my life hell by not letting me forget it. I hope you’re cool with that. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, there might be several women at this party that I’ve fucked before, too, but no biggie, they were just one-timers.’ Excuse me if I wasn’t all that excited to share those lovely details with you.”

Tenley looked shocked, and a little repulsed, which was the reason I didn’t want to tell her in the first place.

“Sienna is a stripper?”

“Was. Now she’s just a slut.”

She grimaced, like my words left a bad taste in her mouth.

“And you only had sex with her once?”

She looked so goddamn hopeful. It was like being stabbed in the chest with a rusty butter knife. I wanted to be able to answer in the affirmative. It would make things so much easier if I could say yes, but I’d omitted enough truths.

“Not exactly.”

She glared at me.

“I don’t usually do repeat offenses.”

“Excuse me?”

“That came out wrong.”

“You better hope it did,” she snapped. And this was why I wanted to be with her—for all of her naivete and her tragic past, she was still so full of fire.

“I was with Sienna more than once. We didn’t have a relationship, but she let me do raunchy shit with her and she didn’t mind tag-a-longs, so I kept it up for a while. Usually they were one-shot deals.” I cringed at how awful it sounded.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were they usually one-shot deals?”

“Because that was all it was.” I had no desire to explain any further.

“Elaborate, please.” She threw my words back at me.

I took a step closer, the urge to touch her almost debilitating. “After my parents died, I didn’t give a shit about anyone but myself. I didn’t want to connect with anyone, and I was fucked up on enough booze and drugs to make it easy to avoid falling into that trap. If I never went back for an encore, then I didn’t have to worry about someone wanting more than I had to give.”

“But you slept with Sienna more than once.”

I paused, caught up in memories from the past. I didn’t want to tell Tenley about the shit I did. I was snorting through my paychecks faster than I could cash them. Jamie, who was also working for Damen at the time, started talking about opening his own shop, but he didn’t have the money to go it alone. Even with Chris, they couldn’t manage it. There was all this money I couldn’t touch until I was twenty-one, and another chunk that would be freed up at twenty-five. My dad was a smart fucker in that respect. He set things up so that I wouldn’t piss it all away if something happened to them. He probably knew from the beginning how badly I would fuck things up when left to my own devices.

Nate and Jamie essentially saved my ass from becoming a brain-dead cokehead. I signed over temporary control of my finances to Nate so I could buy what eventually became Inked Armor. Jamie was the one who cut off the coke. Chris made sure I stayed clean. Nate ensured I didn’t piss away my money. But it came with a cost, because I couldn’t cope without vices. Sienna filled that role. Or rather, I filled her. Whenever. Wherever.

“Sienna and I fucked. That was it. And yes, it was more than once, but it wasn’t like either one of us was particularly attached. It wasn’t monogamous. She was up for pretty much anything. I was twenty and looking for ways to deal with my shit. I needed another outlet. It worked for a while, until I got bored and she got . . . whatever she got. Then she fucked Chris and we instituted the rule.” It was the only thing we brought with us from Art Addicts to Inked Armor.

“Chris had sex with her?” Tenley seemed disturbed by the idea.

“A couple of times.”

“And you were okay with that?”

“No. I wasn’t okay with it at all, but I couldn’t do anything about it after the fact.” I’d been furious with Chris. He was one of my closest friends. It had felt like a betrayal. I expected it from Sienna; that was how she worked, but never Chris.

“And that was it, then? You were done with her?”

“Not quite.”

I went back, again and again. For years. I went months without seeing her, and then she’d magically appear at Inked Armor asking for touch-ups or whatever bullshit excuse she could come up with. Other times I’d cave and end up at The Dollhouse looking for some kind of release from the endless fucking torture of living in my head.

She would be there, promising no boundaries, telling me it was okay that I was angry with her and she would make it up to me. And like a fucking idiot, I bought it. Every time. Desperate for the escape. It took me almost four years to finally get a clue and stop feeding into the bullshit. My uncle would probably have a field day with that if he could ever shrink-ify me. So far I had evaded his offers for therapy. I already knew I was fucked up. I didn’t need to pay someone to tell me that.

Tenley looked dumbfounded. “Why would you go back?”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

But that wasn’t it at all. Sienna was all I thought I deserved. She reaffirmed my inherent sense of worthlessness, because she suffered the same affliction.

“But it’s been more than a year since I’ve been with her,” I explained, wanting to be sure Tenley knew I was done with all that.

I understood now why I’d never tried to do anything like this before. Why I avoided getting close to anyone, or even giving a shit about them. Because I would have to explain my previous actions. And not just to Tenley, but to myself.

Tenley had lost nine people in a plane crash, and she wasn’t fucking every guy who looked at her. She was with me, and that led to a whole barrage of questions I didn’t want to ask. But she hadn’t gone off the deep end like I had. In fact, aside from a massive tattoo and a cupboard full of prescription pills she didn’t seem to take much anymore, she had picked up the pieces of her life and figured out a way to move on.

I didn’t want to believe that Cross or Sienna could be right—that eventually Tenley would wake up and see what a mess I’d made of her life. All my baggage, all my shit, all the ways I would corrupt her if given the chance. Now that she’d seen who I really was, how could she want me?

She lifted her eyes to mine and asked meekly, “Sienna and that other woman, were you with them both at the same time?”

I exhaled a heavy breath. Why the fuck did she have to ask that question? When I didn’t answer right away, she made a little sound. “Is that what you want from me?”

“What?”

“The . . . sharing. Is that what you want?” She looked utterly terrified.

“No! Absolutely not. If anyone but me touches you, I’ll cut off his dick and beat him to death with it.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “That’s not what I meant. Let me rephrase: I don’t want to share you with anyone. Ever.”

Her shoulders sagged. It sickened me that I’d made her think it could ever be a possibility.

“But what if I’m not enough?” Her eyes lifted, and that hollow stare scared me more than her words. It was as if someone had pulled her soul out of her body and left a shell behind. “It would be exactly what I deserve.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you’re enough. Don’t you get it? I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”

“What happens when you’re done with me?”

“I won’t be.”

“You can’t know that. You got bored with Sienna. What if you get bored with me? I can’t share you like that, and I don’t want to be shared.” Her lip curled in disgust. “I would hate myself if I allowed something like that to happen.”

There was so much more behind her admission than I could process. It confirmed in so many ways that Tenley and I were on the same page, maybe more than either of us realized.

“But it wouldn’t. I did that shit a long time ago. I haven’t done anything like that since her. That’s not what I want anymore.” When she remained silent, I took another step closer and reached out. She flinched away.

“Tenley, you’ve got to see that it’s not like that with you.”

Her fingers drifted over the edge of the counter. There was a mar in the Formica. A pit in the otherwise flawless surface. Her finger kept sliding over that divot, back and forth. “I think you should go,” she said, and her voice broke. Her head was down, her hair masking most of her face as droplets splashed on the counter in front of her. She was crying, and it was my fucking fault.

“Please—”

“I just need to be alone right now.”

“I don’t want to go. I want to fix this.”

“I don’t know that you can.”

29

TENLEY


I could feel Hayden’s eyes on me in the silence that followed. He took another step closer, his hand rising, and I felt the whisper of his fingers floating over my hair.

“I never wanted to hurt you.” The pain inside my chest echoed in his words.

His shoes barely made a sound as he headed for the door. Once he was gone, I let the sob that had been choking me free. Tears slid down my cheeks, blurring my vision. TK jumped up on the counter and into my lap. I folded myself around her, hugging her as I was consumed by the hollowness carved out in my chest. Karma had finally come to claim me. It was right. Just. I shouldn’t have the one person I wanted, because I’d been responsible for killing the one I hadn’t wanted enough.