Page 47 of By His Side
Darien laughed. “I thought I already was. I can’t think of another reason why I’m currently taking your cock.”
“No?” I leaned forward, pushing my cock deeper as I thrust harder. “Maybe because you do it so well.”
Talk stopped at that point, both of us saving our energy for fucking as I gave it to him in long, sure strokes, his cock oozing pre-cum as I stimulated his prostate repeatedly. When I pulled him up onto his knees, my hips moving furiously, he took the change in position as an invitation to stroke his cock. I knocked his hand away. “Not yet.” I softened my demand with a kiss. “I want to come at the same time.”
He nodded, waiting until I was close before wrapping his hand around his cock and stroking himself. It wasn’t quite at the same time, Darien still beating me to it, but it was as near as damn it, my orgasm coming less than a minute after his.
After, we lay naked and sweaty, both of us staring up at the ceiling. I replayed the conversation from the kitchen and realized that Darien’s reluctance to push me had resulted in one major omission from the story. “Ask me the question again.”
“What question?” Darien sounded genuinely confused.
“The one you asked me before.”
The mattress gave slightly as Darien turned on his side and propped himself up on one elbow. “Do you mean the one that had you freaking out the last time I asked it? I’m too tired to take on the snarling dogtonight.”
I laughed at his phrasing. “No snarling dog, I promise. Ask me.”
The breath Darien heaved out said he didn’t quite believe my assurances, and I hated him feeling that way. I was going to need to work hard to prove he could trust me not to flip out, and there was no time like the present. “Where were you the night Lily Reynolds was murdered?”
Even though I’d told him to ask it, it didn’t stop my breath from freezing in my chest. I covered my discomfort—or at least I tried to—by sitting up and pulling the sheet across my lap. There was such a thing as being too naked. Instead of lying down, I propped myself up against the headboard. “We had a basement.” Just as he had in the kitchen, Darien didn’t prompt me when I fell silent, patiently waiting until I was ready to continue.
“Julian was all about control. You’ve probably already worked that out about him?” In my peripheral vision, Darien nodded. “He came up with a new thing two years into our relationship, just after the first time I walked out on him… I figure he thought it would stop me from doing it again. We’d fight…” I frowned at my description. They’d been Julian’s words, something he always said every time he convinced me to go back, that all couples fight. They’d never been fights, really. They’d been Julian finding fault and me trying to appease him, to stop it from blowing up into more. Sometimes it had worked, and other times it had been a lost cause. “He’d drag me into the basement and lock me down there.”
“Fuck!” Darien sounded genuinely appalled by the notion.
I laughed. “It wasn’t a dungeon. He didn’t secure me to the wall with manacles, and there weren’t rats running around. It was a fully converted basement. There was no bed, but there was a comfortable sofa. Comfortable enough to sleep on.”
“How long did he leave you down there for?”
I played with the corner of the sheet, pleating it and then letting it come apart before starting over. “It varied. Sometimes just a couple of hours so I could”—I let go of the sheet to make quotation marks in the air—“calm down. Other times it was days.”
“Days? Didn’t anyone miss you? They would have come looking for you, surely?”
“He took my phone. Back when I still had friends, before I drove them away on his instruction, he’d text them pretending to be me, claiming I was ill or that he’d surprised me with a romantic getaway. You wouldn’t believe the places I went to while I was in that basement. Venice. Florence. Even a weekend in New York once. Obviously, once he’d alienated me from them for good, it was no longer a problem. Then he’d just have work to deal with, and he’d call in sick for me.”
“What about food?”
“I got into the habit of leaving stuff down there. Crisps. Biscuits. Cans of stuff. That sort of thing. There was a camping stove down there, so I used that to cook so everything wasn’t cold. There was a toilet, thankfully. No washing facilities apart from a small sink, but you can’t have everything.”
I risked a glance at Darien to find him looking stricken. “It wasn’t that bad. It was quite peaceful, to be honest. It gave me a break from Julian. I used to read books and do crosswords.”
“Not that bad!” Stricken changed to disbelief. “He took away your freedom. He lied to your friends and your workplace to cover up what a worthless piece of shit he was.”
I went back to pleating the sheet, the action comforting. “So you asked me where I was the night the girl… the night Lily was killed… The same place I was the night he got rid of the body. Safely tucked away in the basement, that’s where. Later, I wondered how many times he’d picked a fight as an excuse to get me out of the way. Nothingcramps your style more when your girlfriend’s coming round than having your boyfriend lurking in the background. ”
“Why didn’t you tell the courts where you were?”
I was laughing before Darien had even finished asking his question. “You think I didn’t? You think I covered for him?”
Darien frowned. “But if you told them, I don’t understand why they still found you guilty.”
“Because… they didn’t believe me. They believed him. He was extremely convincing on the witness stand. Even I have to admit that. And he was clever enough to have thought ahead. By the time anyone got around to looking at the basement, there was no longer a lock on it, or any signs that there’d ever been one. The bastard had taken it off. So you can understand them struggling to believe that part of the story. How can you lock someone somewhere that’s not lockable?”
“They must have believed the rest.”
“Must they?” The snarling dog rose to the surface, and I pushed it down, refusing to give in to it. Not here. Not with Darien. Not when he’d been nothing but good to me. I wouldn’t take my frustration out on him. I counted to ten before I spoke, keeping my voice carefully modulated. “I was bigger than Julian. They couldn’t see how he could force me into a basement if I didn’t want to go. They underestimated the tenacity of the fucker. He managed it just fine. Add to that the fact that I’d told no one. There were no medical records to back up my version of events because I saw no one. It was my word against his. And he lied through his teeth. He painted me as some sort of fantasist. The only saving grace was that he spent so long turning me into a Walter Mitty character who makes up lies about his boyfriend abusing him, that he forgot to give me the same treatment when pinning the murder on me, and he went down for it, anyway.”
Darien let out a slow breath. During my heartfelt tirade, he’d joined me under the covers. “It’s not fair.”
