The Filthy Series: The Complete Dark Erotic Serial Novel (16 page)

“What the fuck is this?” Rhett’s angry voice boomed around us. My head whipped around to see him standing there in the doorway, looking perfect in a dark blue suit.

“Rhett,” I whispered the word. He couldn’t have been real.

Taylor took a step back, dropping his hand, letting the powder fall to the floor.

“No!” I shouted, lunging for his hand, but it was gone, scattering out in non-existent particles. I gripped his arm. “Please, give me more!"

“What the fuck is going on?” Rhett’s voice boomed again, but I had stopped paying attention to him. I was on my knees staring up at Taylor. He had to give me what I wanted. He couldn’t do that. Couldn’t just take it away. I couldn’t wait another day, not when I had been so close to having it.

“Daddy, the coke, please.”

Taylor shoved me backward and I twisted awkwardly hitting my back against the bedframe.

“It’s not what it looks like, son.” Taylor took a step toward Rhett holding out his hands.

“Then what the fuck is it? Why is she naked? Why—” He pushed his way past Taylor and came toward me. “What happened?” He was staring at my stomach.

I opened my mouth, but Taylor cut me off. “She left the other day and when she came back she had those.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Why is she naked?” His eyes were wild. “Why are you naked, Faye?” He jerked a hand through his perfectly styled hair ruffling it. “Why was she asking you for coke, dad?”

“Calm down son, just calm down okay? Let’s go down stairs and I’ll tell you everything.”

Rhett shook his head. His face was red, his eyes everywhere, going back and forth between Taylor and I. “No. Tell me what happened.”

I knew this was my chance. It was my chance to tell the truth. My chance where someone could actually believe me. It could happen. I could escape this life. This house of horrors that had become my home.

“He—”

“She’s a cocaine addict, Rhett.” Taylor cut me off. His voice was sad, disappointed. Like I was the cause of that disappointment.

“What?” Rhett stared down at me confused. “And you were just what? Giving her some? While she’s fucking naked?” He jerked his gaze away from me and shoved both of his palms against Taylor’s bare chest, forcing him to stumble backward and bump into the dark wood dresser that held a big flat screen TV. “Were you going to fuck her?” he shouted. “Have you been fucking her?” He made a fist and swung before Taylor could answer. Taylor didn’t even have a chance to move out of the way. Rhett’s fist caught him right in the cheek, causing a split just under his eye.

“Dammit, Rhett. Shit!” Taylor pressed his palm to his face and righted himself. “It’s not what you think.”

“Then explain it to me. Now.” He popped his knuckles and shrugged his jacket off letting it land on the floor in lump behind him. I was much in the same position as the coat. Just a lump on the floor. A pathetic, useless lump that had been seconds away from my little taste of heaven before it was jerked away.

“She admitted to me after she came home that she had a drug problem.”

“So you got her some?” Rhett asked angrily.

“I didn’t know what do!” Taylor threw his hands up. “She’s my little girl. I raised her! I didn’t want her to be on drugs, but I couldn’t handle the pain the withdrawal was putting her through.” He shook his head back and forth as if it tortured him for me to be in pain. As if the very thought wrecked him, as if he wasn’t the cause of it all. As if he didn’t revel in those moments when I begged him for the drugs and for his cock. “So I got her some. I have connections at work.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Rhett flexed his fists.

“I had no choice. I gave her some, but I told her I wanted her to get clean, that I would help her. That those drugs were all I was going to give her. And when she ran out, that would be it.” He rubbed his chin hard. “But it wasn’t enough. She demanded more, but I didn’t give it to her. So she left.”

“No.” The word was out of my mouth before I realized I had spoken. Rhett whirled around, he was breathing hard, clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly.

“What?”

“That’s not what—” But the look on Taylor’s face made me choke on my words. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was more than anger. It was fucking fury. The look that covered the face of psychos who murdered innocent people. It was a look of a man who would destroy anything and anyone to keep the truth from coming out. I snapped my mouth closed immediately.

What if I tell him and he doesn’t believe me? He will leave and then what will Taylor do?

I didn’t want to find out.

“What is it, Faye?”

I shook my head and looked down at my knees, I’d drawn them up to cover my body. I wrapped my arms around them and closed my eyes.

No one will ever know the truth.
And that thought wounded me. Destroyed me.

“I just got home from work. I pulled my shirt off as I was coming in the bedroom and I found her on my bed like this,” Taylor said. “She wanted the coke. Said she would fuck me for it. But I would never do that. She’s my daughter. I don’t know what happened to her while she was gone, or why her skin is like that. I’ve literally been home ten minutes, Rhett.” He paused and I let the lies wash over me—his perfect voice threatening to convince even me that it was all true. “I still have some of the drugs so I decided to give her some. I couldn’t stand to see her like this. Bringing herself down to using sex for it. It breaks my heart.”

Tears fell from my eyes, splattering on the tops of my knees as the lies spun round and round, twining me up in razor sharp wires.

“You tried to use sex to get drugs?” I glanced up at Rhett’s voice. He was staring down at me with his arrogant eyes. Thinking he was above me, like always. His upper lip curled. “Shouldn’t fucking surprise me. Isn't that what prostitute's do? Use sex to get everything they want? The old men weren’t enough so you had to try and fuck the man who raised you?” He shook his head hard. “You disgust
me
. I should have left you at the fucking Truck Stop!” he yelled and I flinched.

“What?” Taylor’s voice was deafening in the room. The sound of it burned my ears. “A prostitute?”

“Put some fucking clothes on,” Rhett hissed, grabbing the shirt I’d taken off and tossing it at me.

“You were a prostitute?” Taylor’s hateful gaze leveled on me. Terror carved its way through my body. He had believed me when I said that I hadn’t been with anyone else. He’d spent the last month thinking he was my one and only. By some miracle he had believed my half-assed bullshit story.

“That’s where I found her. Behind some old dirty truck stop fucking strangers for money. It’s where she’s been since she left.”

I could see the fire in Taylor’s eyes while his mind wound around the truth. Tears flowed harder now, pouring down my face.

What will he do to me?

“Let’s go downstairs and talk, Rhett,” Taylor put his hand on Rhett’s shoulder, but Rhett shoved Taylor away before storming out of the room.

Taylor stayed with me, but only for a moment. Only for his gaze to linger on mine. There was so much there, so much emotion. So much hurt. He looked like his heart was breaking, being ripped out of his chest. But then the feeling was covered with hate. Down right, dirty hate. It reminded me of the way Rhett looked at me, but so much worse.

“You’re going to be sorry,” he said before leaving me alone.

SIX

The second Taylor’s footsteps started retreating the tears came harder, like a dam had been broken, they ran out of me in waves, drenching the shirt in my lap. The shirt I still hadn’t put on.

What would he do to me now?

The thought chilled me to the bone. He would hurt me. He had been hurting me for a month, using the cocaine as a way to keep me here. But now what? What would he do now that he knew the truth? Now that he knew of all the men I had been with?

I rocked back and forth, my achy body thrumming with tension.

I have to do something.

But what could I do?

I stopped moving. The reality of my only option slammed into me like a brick, no, like a fucking bulldozer. With effort I pushed myself off the floor and scrambled into the bathroom. This one was much bigger than the one attached to my bedroom upstairs. It was the master bathroom, with two beautifully polished dark marble sinks. But I didn’t care about the beauty of it all in that moment. Beauty was the last thing on my mind as I looked in the mirror at myself.

The woman who looked back at me was even more demented and damaged than the woman who had been staring back a month ago, her face smeared with blood. The woman there now was skinnier, her skin paler. There were dark, ugly circles under her brown eyes and her long black hair a tangled, matted mess that needed to be combed. The tears that ran down her cheeks looked like glass. They were clear little orbs, the only thing on her face that proved she wasn’t dead.

It was hard for me to accept that this woman and I were one in the same. We were monsters, her and I. Every time I saw her she was even more lost than the last time. She was dirtier each time. A new slice on her belly, a deep seated craving itching at her skin for more and more and more until the point where she would do anything to have what she wanted. She would fuck him over and over as long as she had those few moments of bliss. She would do anything.
Anything
to escape reality for a few seconds.

The woman in the mirror was me. And I despised her. I hated her. I understood why Rhett hated me. Why Taylor hated me. I was some sort of poison. It was in my blood. It had to be. I was the common denominator for all their hate. Even my own mother hated me. At the end she had watched him fuck me. Watched him pound into me with his stiff cock harder than he ever had before while I cried. While I begged for him to stop and her to help me.

He didn’t stop. She didn’t help. She watched while she sipped some expensive drink from a martini glass. And she smiled. She smiled while he ruined me.

“No. No. No!” I shook my head and slammed my fist into the mirror. The glass cracked under my weight, fragmenting my reflection, making my face lopsided and crooked. I liked it better that way. Distorted.

I jerked open the medicine cabinet, revealing what I came for. The tiny pill bottles. There were more than twenty of them. My mother’s name written on each one. Medicine Taylor still hadn’t thrown out.

I grabbed the bottle with the most medicine inside and twisted off the cap. My hands were heavy, bumbling and slow, but it still came off, revealing big white pills. For a moment I stared at them. Studied them. Focused on them. They were made to heal, whatever they were. They were made to fix, to repair. To help. But that’s not what I was going to use them for.

The pills in this bottle were the answer. They were going to solve all my problems. They were going to take me out of this fucked up world I was in. They were going to save me. They were the
only
thing that could save me.

I tipped to bottle on its end, taking as many pills into my mouth as I could. My throat was dry and only a few made it down. I wrenched the faucet on and shoved my face under it forcing the pills down my throat. My mouth tasted like cotton and I gagged, my throat wanting to reject them, but I didn’t let it. I forced them all down. Until they were gone and the bottle was empty.

I dropped it on the floor. It fell from my fingertips, seeming to fall in slow motion before clacking against the tile.

I felt nothing at first. Nothing but the ache under my skin. The same ache that plagued me day after day. Panic set in.
What if this doesn’t work? What if he comes back and I’m fine? What if—

But I shut down my thoughts and jerked open the top drawer on Taylor’s side of the sink. The answer lay there. A razor. The one Taylor used to shave his face every morning, to keep his skin smooth and flawless. I yanked it out and this time I didn’t stop to ponder the blade. I turned the razor sideways and shoved it against my wrist. Pressing down as hard as I could I drug it up my arm. It tore my skin open, blood leaping to the surface. I whimpered at the pain, but I didn’t stop. It had to be done.

Wooziness set in as I pulled the blade from my skin. I slid down on the wall across from the sink. I stared down at my arm, watching the blood leak out. I tried to move it so I could use the blade on my other one, but arms felt heavy, like I was trying to lift a car. So I let go of the razor, let it fall to the tile like the pill bottle, like my dripping blood. It seemed to run faster and I had to look away as my head started to spin.

I was twisting away from life and into reality. Death.

Rhett’s face flashed in my head. He hated me, but I didn’t hate him. Even after the things he said when he saw me with his dad, I didn’t hate him. I couldn’t because of who he had been to me back before I ran away. He had been the only person who seemed to actually care about me. Even now, he had wanted to help.

But it was too late. I was beyond all help. And now he would be able to forget. He would be able to move on with his life without me and the poison, the filth that seemed to follow me everywhere I went.