16
Newark Airport
Marc
“This is as faras I can go.”
She knew that, but I felt the need to say it. Her bags had been checked, but she had a carry-on over her shoulder. Her hair was loose, and her eyes were red. She’d cried the entire drive here, and I didn’t try to stop her.
She was supposed to be getting ready for her first semester of college. Instead, she was being exiled to Switzerland for some purpose only her father truly understood.
I’d taken her virginity hard last night. Probably too hard, but I’d warned her I wouldn’t be gentle. She’d been too sore to fuck again this morning and she wasn’t ready for oral, so we’d taken a shower together and I showed her how to give me a hand job.
She’d loved that. Loved turning me on, making me come. Watching it happen.
She thought she’d begun to understand her power in that moment, but she didn’t know a quarter of it.
“I don’t want to go,” she sniffed. “I know I have to, and I’m going to. I just don’t want to.”
“You’ll text me when you arrive.”
She nodded.
“We can do this, Ash.”
“What? I’m going to be in Switzerland. You’re going to be at school fucking all the women. I feel like nothing is the way it’s supposed to be and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why my father is doing any of this. It’s not like he cares about us being together. He knows we’ve been on the estate together the entire time he’s been gone.”
“Yeah, well, maybe he thinks I’m following the rules.”
Her brow furrowed at that.
“No friends at the house, no drugs and stay away from my daughter. Those have been my house rules since I first got to the estate.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I know. He never wanted me to associate with you. Why didn’t he want me to have any friends?”
“I wasn’t your friend last night,” I reminded her.
She blushed, and I tucked her against me. It was strange not fighting my normal instincts around her. But something had shifted last night. Like, suddenly, I was tired of fighting both her and myself. She’d slept in my arms, and, when I finally stopped thinking, I’d slept better than I had since I’d left my mom.
Like I was safe, or some stupid shit like that.
“You need to go,” I told her. I was done being sentimental. I needed to start focusing on one thing: getting through school as quickly as possible. And she needed to do whatever the fuck someone did at a finishing school so she could find her way back as soon as possible.
Because only when she did would I be able to breathe again.
She nodded and pulled away. “You’ll be okay. I promise.”
“So will you,” I told her. “I promise.”
“I love you, Marc.”
So fucking vulnerable she was. Every single time with me.
I smirked. “I don’t entirely hate you.”
Which made her beam and do a fist pump. “Progress,” she hissed.
“I want a text every day,” I demanded.
