Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
He was that.
"When the beatings no longer satisfied him, he shipped me off to Avon Mills."
"I'm almost afraid to ask what Avon Mills is."
"A school for 'troubled' kids from a certain tax bracket. A sort of hyper-militant survivalist institution where they strip everything you have away from you, strip you yourself down to the rafters. We were denied every sort of pleasure. No TV. No music. Only unseasoned food. We were forced to do military-style workouts for eight, ten hours a day. In the sweltering heat. In the snow. You cried, you puked, it didn't matter, you had to keep going. You slept on the floor or outside when they thought you misbehaved. They couldn't actually beat us, but they did everything in their power to make us suffer."
"How the hell did they get away with that?"
"Well, firstly, it wasn't in the US. Secondly, you'd be surprised how many places just like that actually do exist in the states."
"How long were you there?"
"Five years."
"Five years?" Wasp shrieked, pulling away, looking down at me, her brows pinched. "Nonstop? Like that was home?"
"That was home," I agreed, nodding. "I didn't leave for summers or for holidays like many of the others. Which always made it worse on me. A lot more one-on-one attention."
"So you, what? You aged out?"
"Just shy of my eighteenth birthday, my grandfather died, giving my grandmother control of most of the family assets. She gave my father an ultimatum. Get me out, or be written out of the will."
"Thank God for your grandma," Wasp grumbled, sadness gone, replaced with rage.
I jumped back and forth between those two emotions as well when I thought back on all those long, cold, lonely, years without a single amusement, without anything fun or light, without a break from the never-ending work, the back-breaking torture.
"Yeah," I agreed, nodding. "She is what you might think of when you think of a matriarch of an old money family. Strong, stern, often disapproving, but with a soft spot for her loved ones, even if her way of showing it at times is not affectionate.
"What happened after you got out?"
"I went to stay with my grandmother for a few months, trying to adjust to a life outside of that world that had been all I'd known for so long. And then she released my trust to me on my eighteenth birthday. It was supposed to be on my twenty-first, but she had it changed. Out of guilt, I would imagine, for not having found a way to step in sooner. But in many ways, she was as helpless as I was much of the time, stuck under my grandfather's thumb for her whole adult life."
"And when you got all that money..." Wasp started, lips curving up, knowing where this was going.
"I sought every form of entertainment I could find. I made a life out of fun and light and easy, all the things I had never known for myself. Sprinkle in a strong desire to find any way I could to embarrass my father, and you have an idea of the life I have lived since getting free of that toxic life."
"Is your father still alive?" she asked.
"No."
"Good. I know, that's cruel, but good. The bastard."
He was a bastard.
I had swallowed my pride to go to him on his deathbed, to try to make some sort of amends, get closure, whatever the hell it was that the shrinks told me was important.
He spent an hour telling me all the ways I had been a bitter disappointment to him, how I was an embarrassment to the family, that my ancestors were rolling around in their graves knowing that I would carry on the family legacy, that he wished he'd never even had a son.
I walked out, learning later he died an ugly death, gasping for air, unable to catch his breath until he eventually died after sixteen torturous hours.
I was going to hell for thinking it, but all I could think when I'd heard the news was: Good. Good. That was the end he deserved.
Then I went right back to my old ways.
"So that is why you have this light outer persona but that darker part that shows its face every now and again," Wasp mused. "For the record, the dark part is kinda sexy," she told me, eyes going molten.
"Yeah?" I asked, lunging forward to grab her at the hips, dragging her up on my lap, smiling at the squeal she let out, then the shuddering breath when she felt my cock press against her eager pussy. "What about the light side?" I asked, reaching up to trace the line of her bathing suit between her breasts.
"The light side is lots of fun. It's the best of both worlds," she declared, happy open.
But then something crossed her face, something that made her brows draw together, that made her eyes go guarded.