This book contains graphic descriptions of sexual content, explicit violence, and past trauma. These scenes were written to create a more vivid, in-depth experience, but may be triggering for some readers.
Read at your own risk.
Dear Robyn
When I think about you, it hurts.
I like the pain.
Sometimes, I picture you bent over my bed with my pillow between your teeth while I spank your ass raw. Do you want that? Does it scare you how much the idea excites you?
It wouldn’t be all agony. There’d be pleasure. More pleasure than you’ve ever tasted in your life.
Do you deserve better? Do you crave more? I can give it to you.
I’ve been watching you, Robyn. My best friend’s little cousin. Shy, smart, beautiful.
Jarrod warned me to keep my distance, and for a long time, I listened. I care about him more than the others do. They don’t realize how deep the darkness can go.
I’ve kept to myself. I’ve watched you blossom and bloom.
Now I want to ruin you.
There’s no in-between, not in my world. With me, it’s all, or it’s nothing.
With you, it’s everything.
Here’s what I mean:
I need a wife, and you’re the only woman I’d ever dream of marrying.
The stakes are high, too high for me to worry about what you want.
I’ve known you long enough to realize you’ll never make the first move.
Jarrod might kill me for these letters.
I’m not sure I care.
Do you dream at night? Do you close your eyes and feel my lips on your throat?
I’m coming for you. I can’t wait.
Love,
C
1
Robyn
Ever since I was a little girl, winter was my favorite season. Skeletal trees. Ice on the windowpanes. The feeling of peeling off layers only to take a steamy hot shower. Something about the world going gray, dying off, disappearing. I had a morbid sense of beauty.
A crisp winter wind blew down off the treetops, and Cora pulled her jacket tighter. The fuzzy fake fur hood billowed like long grass, and she moved up close against my side. “Oh my god, I hate how cold it gets around here.”
“Aren’t you used to it by now?” I nudged her with my shoulder, grinning. I liked the cold. I liked the biting wind on my cheeks.
“I thought I was, at least until I started living with Jarrod.” Cora made a face. She’d been shacked up with my cousin for the last year. Their trailer was small and cozy, but not exactly warm. “Our place is like a big leaky tent. I swear, I can feel the freezing wind blow across our bed at night.”
“You probably can. When was the last time he did any work on that place?”
“He’s been trying to get things sorted recently, but you know how it is. Football season sucked up all his time. I swear, I felt like he was deployed overseas or something.” She rolled her eyes, grinning. “I’m happy it’s over.”
“I’m happy you’re happy.”
We wandered through the gaggles of other students, trudging over piles of snow. Winter break had seen a few inches drop a few days after Christmas.
It had been the most horrible holiday season of my life. My mother spent it in a depressed funk while my father spent it in prison. He’d wanted everyone to visit, but I’d refused. It was hard to go sit around a dingy visiting area surrounded by strangers just to spend time with a murderer.
Only Mom had made the trip, although I didn’t know why. She couldn’t possibly have thought Dad was worth the effort, not after having watched him abuse me and Jarrod for years and years.
Her slavish devotion to him made my skin boil. I spent more time with Cora and Jarrod than I did with her, which only made me feel even more guilty. She’d lost her husband, and the whole town was gossiping about how she was still married to an incarcerated killer. Her life was total hell, and she needed my support now more than ever.
I couldn’t find it in my heart to give it to her, not when she kept speaking to that bastard.
“It’s good to be back on campus at least,” I said quietly as we made our way toward the lecture halls.
Blackwoods College was a dream. It was an oasis south of Philadelphia, the ideal of the northern liberal arts college complete with ivy-covered brick buildings, Gothic architecture, several haunted house stories, insanely competitive student societies, and long, meandering paths through pristine, manicured lawns, trees, and shrubs. There was at least one hidden fountain, which the students lovingly called “the toking fountain” on account of the perpetual haze of weed smoke and the ever-present hemp ponchos and hacky sacks and drum circles. I stayed away from the toking fountain.
But when I was at Blackwoods, I could forget about my life for a while. I didn’t think about my mom sitting in front of the TV crying late into the night, or zoned-out and half-conscious and high on whatever pills her doctors prescribed, or the memories of my father beating me and Jarrod senseless. I didn’t have to look at the scars, or think about hiding the bruises, or do anything but go to class, hang out with Cora, and try to be happy.