Play Me Right (Play Me 5)

“Ah-ha! His name is Sebastian. Now how did you meet him and is he good in bed and why are things complicated?”

I narrow my eyes at her as the truth dawns on me. “You were never upset. You were using your illness to make me feel guilty.”

She shrugs, looks at me guilelessly. “Hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it, I always say. Besides, I might as well get something good out of this disease. So spill. Now.”

And so I do. I don’t tell her everything, obviously—I can barely think about the kind of sex Sebastian and I have had, let alone try to vocalize it—but I talk about who he is and how we got together. How he hurt me by pushing and pushing at me until I felt like I had no control. Until I didn’t have any control.

And Lucy listens, she really listens. She interrupts every once in a while to ask a question, but mostly she just lets me talk. In a way, it’s such a relief. It’s only been a week since I met Sebastian, but it’s been the most intense week of my life and there’s a part of me that felt like I was locked in a pressure cooker, just waiting for the chance to blow. I haven’t talked about Sebastian at all since I met him, not to anybody except for Janet when she was warning me away from him and it feels good to just be able to tell someone about him.

About the way he touches me. The way he talks to me. The way he bought me groceries because I needed them and tries to protect me even when I don’t need it. It hurts to talk about him because it hurts—so much—to lose him before I ever really had him. But it does feel good, and so I concentrate on that instead.

When I’m done talking, when I’ve run out of things to say but am still filled with emotion—too much emotion—I settle back against the bed. And just wait.

It doesn’t take long. Lucy reaches over and slaps the back of my head, not hard enough to hurt but definitely hard enough to get my attention.

“Hey. I’m pouring out my heart here and you’re hitting me?”

“Because you deserve it!” She shakes her head at me. “Geez, I might not have had a boyfriend yet, but even I know you have to stop fucking long enough to actually communicate every once in a while.”

“Excuse me? We communicated.”

She snorts. “Whatever.”

“We did. We actually talked quite a bit.”

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell him about Dad? Or Carlo? Or what happened fourteen months ago?”

“No. But in my defense”—I duck away as she starts to hit me again—“he never asked.”

“And that’s his fault? Sorry, Aria. The whole ‘hey is your dad head of a Mafia crime syndicate and did he force you to become engaged to the future head of another Mafia family because he wanted to cement an alliance?’ is not exactly a standard dating question. And as for what happened after—no one would ever think to ask about that. Most people can’t even imagine something like that happening, let alone that they know someone it happened to.”

She’s right, I know she’s right. And yet it doesn’t matter. Not when he did what he did. “He wants to control me,” I blurt out, as she winds up to deliver more of her speech.

“Like Carlo?” she asks with narrowed eyes. “Because if that’s the case, then you’re better off without him. The jerk.”

“No, not like Carlo. And not like Dad.” I flush, twisting a loose string from her comforter around and around my finger. “I mean, it’s really just in the bedroom, but—”

“Whoa! Seriously! He’s into BDSM? Like Christian Grey—”

“No, not like Christian Grey! How do you even know who Christian Grey is, anyway?”

Once again she rolls her eyes at me. “Sixteen, not six. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. The question is am I going to remember long enough to tell Mom when I see her later?”

“Where do you think I got the book from?”

“And on that note, I’m done,” I tell her, pushing off the bed to begin a hunt for my shoes. “I really do need to get going.”

“Did he hurt you?” she asks after a second, and I know she’s watching my response carefully.

“Not the way you mean. He just…pushed me a little too hard. Scared me. Churned up all the old control issues I’ve got.”

“But he doesn’t know about your control issues. Or, at least, doesn’t know why you’ve got them. Right?”

“Right.”

“So why are you blaming him for them?”