My lips start to curve upward, but she's not done. "Sociopaths have little to no remorse...no conscience, and Mr. Turner, I'll say it again, the fact you're struggling so mightily with this and the fact you're so weighed down by your father's sins shows your conscience is completely intact."
"Other things," she continues to recite. "Lack of insight. Inability to motivate. Lying. Poor judgment."
"Lack of ability to love," I throw out at her. "Impersonal sex. Trivializing intimacy."
She shakes her head so hard her hair flies. "No. That's not you. You love Etta. Van...sex is not impersonal between us. You might hold your emotions in reserve, but, baby, I've never had a more personal connection to someone the way I do with you when we're fucking."
My gaze drops to the floor. I expect she wanted to use something different there, like "making love," but she knows I'd scoff at that. It's amazing the uncanny insight she has into me. Simone knows how to handle me, and the only other person in my life who knows how to do that is Etta.
"Van," Simone murmurs, and I look back to her.
"Can I come over there with you?" she says with a nod of her head to my end of the couch.
I want to say no because I don't think I can handle her empathy right now, but instead I find my head bobbing up and down.
She leans over and places her beer on the floor. She pushes forward and crawls across the couch to me. In any other scenario, it would be sexy as fuck, but that look in her eyes tells me she's not coming to me to give me an orgasm.
She's coming to tell me something so important to her she wants to do it looking straight into my eyes.
When she reaches me, she turns and puts herself in my lap. I rest a hand on her thigh while her arms curve over my shoulders. Her face is inches from mine and I'm staring into her sweet, tender gaze.
"I understand your worries," she says softly. "But dig deep, Van. I don't think it's really why you close yourself off."
My eyelids drop, closing her from my sight for a moment so I can think. I conjure up my father, as he smirked at me from the other side of the Plexiglas, wanting me to believe we had more in common than not. I try to recall how I truly felt as I pushed up out of the chair and left him behind yelling obscenities.
And I remember...I felt done. The information he provided me didn't really add to my fears. If anything, my instinct said he was just getting his kicks from trying to inflict pain on someone in the only way his limited, dying body was able to.
Yes, I knew that deep down. I'm in no danger of being like him. The only danger to me is staying in the mold I put myself in.
My eyes open slowly and Simone is filling my vision, waiting patiently.
"Kids can be vicious," I start by saying, and she tilts her head slightly as she listens. "When I went back to school in the fall after he was convicted, the other kids had already labeled me. 'Little Arco,' 'killer,' 'rapist'...those were some of the more popular ones. I was horrified they'd think that about me. I tried to defend myself, but it's a weak claim that you're not like your father when you sat every day behind him at trial. My mom wanting to support my dad labeled me as a sympathizer to him, merely because she made me sit beside her."
"You heard things that no eight-year-old should ever hear," she murmurs.
"Yeah, I'm not even sure those kids really even know what it all meant," I tell her. "They were probably listening to their parents discuss it, or saw it on the news, and they found a way to bully me with it. I came home with a new bruise or split lip almost every day from the fights I'd get in just trying to defend my own name. But that wasn't the worst, because only a handful of kids did that. They were just assholes. The worst was being ignored or shunned because people didn't know what to say to me. I lost all my friends. No one wanted their kid to play with the boy whose dad was a killer and whose mom committed suicide. Etta tried to have a birthday party for me and not one child showed up. Teachers treated me with kid gloves. I was rarely called on in class because maybe they thought I didn't want to be in the spotlight. No one asked me how I was feeling outside of Etta, so I didn't know it was appropriate to be angry. I wasn't even blaming my parents at that point for my troubles. It was very confusing."
"And Etta decided to just let you start over again," Simone says.
"New name, new city, new school," I say with quiet reflection. "It was supposed to be a fresh start, but I kept hiding. I never shared with one person in my life who I was or what I went through. I think Etta and I got so caught up in running from the notoriety of it that I wasn't allowed to really confront it."
"But counseling?"
"Yeah...it was good. Fine. I was able to talk about some things, but maybe it wasn't enough. Or maybe I didn't talk about the right things with the right people. What if I'd just confided in a friend, and that friend validated that I was nothing like my father? I was so afraid of being labeled again, it just became easier to stay withdrawn."
"It lessened your risk of further pain," she concludes.
I nod, giving her thigh a squeeze. "Yes, I had some fears about the type of person I was, but my lack of connection to people isn't like Arco's on a cellular level. It's from the fallout of what he did."
Simone smiles at me, bringing her palms to my face. "There you go. What happened to you was a travesty, but you and Etta did the best you could."
Before I can say anything, she's putting her lips on mine, the sweetest kiss she's ever given me, and I feel it from the tip of my head down to my toes.
To my surprise, she deepens the kiss, her fingers going into my hair to pull me to her. I feel instant arousal, the heavy conversation melting away and my need for her becoming my sole focus. I break the kiss by picking her up, turning her in my lap so she straddles me. I can't help the groan that tears free when she grinds down onto my erection.
"Let's take this into the bedroom," she whispers in my ear.
Chapter 20
Simone
Van responds to my request by one powerful push off the couch. I cling to him but it's unnecessary, as his big hands go to my ass to support my weight.
I nuzzle his neck as he strides back to his bedroom, then I bite his ear. He pinches my ass in return and I smile. Despite the intimacy we just shared on the couch expressed through words, he's still my dominant man.
Van kicks his bedroom door shut as we enter, and then he drops me on the bed. No soft laying of my body upon the mattress, but I don't even get a chance to grin at him because he's covering me with his own.
His pelvis presses into mine and his arms go under my back. He holds me tight while he just kisses me slowly, but with absolute possession. He's in no hurry, and I know he's going to make me work for an orgasm. It's okay...I love his sweet tortures.
Time seems to freeze as we just do nothing but kiss. He doesn't even grind into me, even though his touch makes me so wild I do my own hip rotations trying to create friction.
I can feel his lips stretch into a smile against mine, and he mutters into my mouth, "Slow down there, Shiny. We'll get there."
"Not before I die of frustration," I grumble.
His laugh fills my mouth, and he starts kissing me all over again. I nearly cry in relief when finally he slips his hand under my shirt, caressing my ribs before palming a breast. My nipple hardens before he even pays any attention to it, but it's come to anticipate a lot where Van's concerned. He loves my breasts, spends an inordinate amount of time with them, and I know he'll get there eventually.
My hands go to the bottom of Van's T-shirt and I try to yank it up. He doesn't help me, though, keeping one hand securely attached to my breast and his body pressing me down.
This drives me a little nutso, so I bite his lip. He jerks back, licks his lower lip, and stares down at me with a twinkle in his eye. "Going to make you pay for that."
"Fine," I huff. "Can we just at least get naked?"
His response is to push up to straddle my body. He whips his shirt off and my mouth waters at his fabulous chest. Reaching my hands out, I pull playfully at the waistband of his gym shorts, which are tented from his erection. "Take these off too."
"Not yet," he says, then pulls me up to a sitting position with a hand behind my neck. Before I know it, my shirt is gone along with my bra, and then his hand is on my chest, pushing me back down.
He sits on top of me, staring at my breasts for a moment before he covers them with his hands. Squeezing, he murmurs, "I love your tits. Beautiful, just like you."
I moan as he pinches my nipples, causing my hips to buck. He ignores that, watching his hands work me for what seems like hours.
Just when I'm ready to scream in frustration, Van stuns the hell out of me by freeing his cock from his shorts instead. Moving up my body, he spreads his legs and rests his cock in the middle of my chest. His hands press into the mattress by my head and he orders me, "Squeeze your breasts around me."
"Oh God," I say, completely turned on by this, and my palms go to the sides of my boobs to do just as he asks. There are many downsides to having large tits, but this is not one of them.
Van groans as he pulls his cock back through the channel of my cleavage and pushes forward again. "Dreamed of fucking these tits," he groans. "Even before I first kissed you, I dreamed of it."
God, he looks so beautiful like that...looming over me, his cock buried in my breasts, and his face completely awash with pleasure.
But then he's gone and scrambling down my body. His feet hit the floor and he's finally getting naked before he's tearing the rest of my clothes off.
I expect him to dive for a condom, but once again he surprises me by just crawling back up my body and covering me with his warmth. As he stares down at me, I can feel my clit thumping against his cock as it nestles against me, and I feel feverish all over from the insane need I have for him.
Van's mouth comes to mine again, and he gives me another deep, hard kiss. But lazy all the same, meaning he wasn't stripping us naked because he just had to be inside of me. He did it because he knew his naked body would drive me even crazier.
I let my legs fall open and wiggle my hips. I rub my pussy on his cock, and I'm rewarded with a grunt of approval, but he just continues kissing me.