The General (Professionals 4)

He called me beautiful.

He called me sexy.

He told me I was too good for this town I was living in.

He told me it enough that I believed him, that I melted into his kisses, letting him run his hands over my too-young body.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he told me as his hand slid to tease the material between my thighs.

But he did it.

He toyed, learned all my curves, all my hidden bits.

After a few weeks, I followed him back to his hotel room where he had been staying – he said – for the sole reason of spending time with me.

He was staying a few towns away, in a nicer area that even had things like luxury hotels that sported sparkling chandeliers in their lobbies and the softest sheets I had ever felt in my life.

The door clicked behind me, and I knew that moment that I had left my childhood – and my innocence – on the other side of the door.

It was just minutes before my clothes were on the floor with his, and my back was on the sheets, body quaking with uncertainty.

“You need to relax,” he told me, voice almost reproachful as he ran his finger between my folds. “You’re not letting yourself get wet,” he added, making guilt course through me.

I was supposed to get wet when he touched me. I was supposed to respond to his touch. And I was disappointing him as he sat there doing everything he could to get me ready.

In the end, he had slid on a condom he swore was lubricated, spat on his hand to rub it over his rubber-coated, intimidating-looking – for a girl with no experience – cock, pressed my thighs open, and shoved into me.

The pain had been blinding, making me cry out, cry for it to stop.

“It will feel good in a minute,” he promised, voice rough as he just started thrusting into me. Fast, hard, making my insides feel raw, ripped, burning.

It never felt good.

And when it was over, I was bloody and aching. But he pulled me toward him, kissed my forehead, told me I was a good girl, that it would get better, that girls needed to get worn in.

I’d been young, idealistic. I felt like my body belonged to him now, that it didn’t matter that I had begged for it to stop, and it didn’t, that I was completely his, that when you gave yourself to a man, he was going to be your happily ever after. Even if his demands in bed were forceful, even if he was wholly unconcerned about not wanting to have him in my mouth, in my ass. Within a week of the first time, he had used me completely.

But he held me after, he told me how good I was, he promised me that he would get me out of this town as soon as I was old enough.

Then my birthday passed, and there was a ring on my finger, and he was telling me he was taking me home with him.

My mother had been angry, telling me I would be back in a few months, pregnant, used and cast aside, never to hear from him again.

My father had cried, telling me there was just something about Teddy that he didn’t like, something about him that he didn’t trust, begging me to give it a little more time, get to know him better.

But I was young and I thought I was in love.

I let him take me away.

He hadn’t lived in the mansion then, but a giant penthouse overlooking the Navesink River on the good side, though to my eyes both sides looked nice.

“Jen, it is the difference between banker’s salaries and CEOs,” he told me, rolling his eyes.

It was the first time he’d rolled his eyes at me, and I tried never to comment on his town since I was clearly ignorant, and I didn’t want to offend him.

He’d taken me to small boutique shops that plied me with champagne despite me not being of age, demanded I overhaul my entire wardrobe. When we got home, he threw everything I owned – even the things I had bought with my own money that were, in my mind, good – into the trash bin, telling me that I would never dress in castoffs or discount fast fashion ever again.

And while I felt red-cheeked in shame for having been seen as so beneath him, I was happy to be molded into a better version of myself. I felt like Cinderella when she went from scrubbing floors to dancing with the prince.

“What’s the matter?” I asked one afternoon as I pored over endless bridal catalogs.

“We have to have dinner with my father tonight,” he told me, reaching to pour himself a drink.

I wanted to say that it was three in the afternoon, too early to drink, but I didn’t feel like it was my place.