With everything. I meant them with everything.
“You okay?” she finally said.
I nodded. Sort of.
“You sure? Because you kept saying ‘gone’ over and over again.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll play it your way for now. But you can talk to me, Bryce. Always.”
If only I could. How could I show this beautiful woman my deepest weaknesses? How could I tell her the horrid things that haunted me?
And how could I do this when, even as I was tormented, nothing had actually happened to me?
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe someday.”
“Better make it soon. I leave next week.”
Was she still determined to run away?
“Fine,” I said. “Go. But not before I show you exactly what you’re leaving.” I rose from the bed and knelt before her, spreading her legs. God, she was perfect. Even in the darkness, the glistening of her pink pussy was visible. Her thighs shone from her juices. I trailed my fingers over her smooth flesh…until I came to the jagged scar.
It was scabbed over, which meant it had recently bled.
“What’s this?” I asked.
She tensed and tried to close her legs, but I was between them. She squeezed my shoulders with her thighs.
“Marj?”
“Nothing. I scratched myself.”
“Over a scar?”
She scooted backward on the bed, away from me. “Yes.”
She was hiding something. Marjorie Steel, who I’d thought was an open book, had her own secrets. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in any kind of pain, but if she was? Then we had something in common.
Pain from something we had nothing to do with, through no fault of our own. Pain when neither of us had been abused as countless others had.
Pain.
Pain that seemed insurmountable sometimes. Pain that was, at its root, cloaked in self-absorption.
At least mine was.
Marjorie wasn’t even close to self-absorbed. She’d stayed on at the house to help Talon and Jade with the boys when their housekeeper left.
The boys. She’d stayed with the boys, and she took care of them. And I couldn’t take care of my own son.
Self-absorption versus selflessness had never been so clear.
And I’d never felt so low.
Marj had been determined to stay…until now.
Now she was going to Paris.