What do you think about your father’s current lifestyle?
Do you think it’s vulgar?
Do you aspire for the same thing?
Marcus had answered mechanically, all the while feeling his mind starting to break. Something about being in therapy made him want to remember—-
But it also made him want to forget...tokeepforgetting.
It was like having his soul torn into two, and it was excruciating, so much so that Marcus found himself lying.
“Yes,” Marcus told his therapist. “It hurts me that my parents don’t care about me.” But this was a lie, and so would be the other things he’d say.
Yes, I want to reconnect with them.
Yes, I miss them.
Yes, I still love them.
He kept lying and lying, and it worked. The therapist promised he no longer needed to come back as long as he answered this one last question correctly.
“Are you attracted to the kind of lifestyle your father leads?”
Marcus didn’t even think about it. “No.” It was the obviously right thing to say, but it was also at that moment he realized he was lying.
And this was the second turning point in his life.
Since then, Marcus began carefully picking his partners, dating only girls whose darkness matched his. In their eyes, he saw their need for pain, and in his eyes, he knew they saw the need to dispense it.
He didn’t know why it was so.
He only knew it was that stain in his soul which was to blame.
More time passed, and Marcus never felt the temptation to stray beyond the lines he had drawn for himself. In his world, only two types of women existed: those he could hurt, and those he couldn’t.
But then Anneke came.
Anneke with her dark hair, blue eyes, and curves that he would die to run his hands over—-
The first time he had seen her, he had known two things:
He wanted to fuck her.
But he also couldn’t, because she was clearly the kind of girl he could never hurt.
And this became even more obvious when he heard Jaak mention her name, and he realized that this wasthesister the de Konigh brothers had been telling him about every year. Not Fleur the mischief-maker, but Anneke the paragon—-
And he had wanted to fuck her even more after that.
****
THAT SUMMER WITH THEde Konighs turned out to be Marcus’ greatest challenge, with every second of his day an exercise of self-control and discipline. Everything about Anneke seemed frustratingly designed to conquer his every weakness, an angel who only turned into a temptress when she was with him.
Pain and sex used to be his only criteria for choosing which girls to date, but with Anneke, he discovered he could be attracted to another type.
Like a girl with a sense of humor, and Anneke was certainly that.
He also liked a girl who could be both shy and straightforward at the same time, and she was that, too.