“Not if it’s going to lead there,” she says.
“You said you were lying about that,” I remind her. “On our honeymoon, you said you’d made that up.”
“I said I was lying about not having those feelings,” she corrects.
“So… You have sexual feelings, but you don’t want sex or even for me to go down on you?”
She shakes her head, mumbling into the water. “That’s even worse.”
It’s one thing if she likes to be forced, if it’s part of the game, the way I thought it was. My brothers dated a girl like that last year. But she’s saying she doesn’t want it at all. I don’t know what to say, what to think of that. I knew she was scared of sex, but this is different. How can a girl not like her pussy licked? I mean, if she hates me, I get her not wantingmeto touch her, but I can’t deny that having my dick sucked feels good. It’s biology. I’ve fucked lots of girls I don’t care about—because it feels good.
And I’ve made her cum before, gotten her wet plenty of times. So what’s the hang-up?
We sit there in silence for a minute.
“I understand I hurt you,” I say. “But oral doesn’t hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, picking up a bottle of bubbles and dumping some in the tub. I turn on the water so she won’t have to move.
“Can we talk about this?” I ask.
“I’m not going to change my mind, King. I hate it and I will always hate it. The only way I’ll ever let you do that is if I don’t have a choice.”
“Like today,” I say, swallowing the knot in my throat.
She sinks back into the water. “I’d rather you do what you did today than make me do the other thing.”
“If you hate it that much… You said you’ve done it before. Is that how you know you don’t like it?”
She swallows, moving the bubbles to cover her in the tub. “Yes.”
“Because… You didn’t want to that time, either,” I guess. “Someone forced you.”
She takes a long, shaky breath.
“Who was it?” I ask, my voice so quiet, so calm and still, she’d never guess the murderous rage gripping my heart. If my mother doubted I was capable of murder, I could give her a real clear answer now.
Eliza shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “I don’t want you to do anything. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“So you just let me fuck you when you didn’t want to, just like some other asshole? You couldn’t have told me beforehand that’s why you’re fucked up about it?”
“I didn’t let you,” she whispers, and a tear falls from her lashes into the water.
The shame that burns through my veins is like poison, like nothing I’ve felt before, not even when we came back from the party and saw that my sister was gone. I didn’t just fail Eliza. I actively destroyed her.
My hand fists at my side, but I keep the other one relaxed as I reach over the side of the tub to gently take hers. She cries quietly, but she doesn’t pull away. I don’t know if this is the last time I’ll hold her hand, so I don’t let go. It feels so small, so delicate, in mine. It makes me want to massacre anyone and everyone who ever hurt her.
“Who touched you?” I ask, my voice low and more menacing than I meant for it to be.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, wiping her cheeks with her free hand. “I was still a virgin for you. You know I was. You felt it. I wasn’t lying. Look.” She points to the bloody water from how roughly I fucked her, not knowing she was anything other than a brat who needed a little rough treatment to put her in line.
I measure my words carefully. “Do you really think I fucking care about that right now?”
I want to murder someone, but at the top of the list of people who hurt her is me. What I did is a thousand times worse than some asshole eating her out when she didn’t want it. The blood in the water is a testament to how much she didn’t want it, to how badly I fucked up. It didn’t just stain the linens in our room. It’s a stain on us, on our bond. I didn’t just violate her. I hurt her.
That blood is a stain on my fucking soul.
She looks at me and then away. “I just wanted you to know. You still got someone who’d never been fucked, just like you were promised. They just did… Other stuff.”