Page 84 of Dominate Me

Chapter Twenty

Jensen

Blindsided. A slap to the face wouldn’t have jolted me more than whatever in the fuck that was that just happened in the limo.

I stood in the alley, still so stunned and angry, and yeah...fucking hurt...I could barely move until the car disappeared.

It was only then I called the cab that would take me to Courtney’s, assuming that’s where she’d run off to.

Fuck. I hadn’t talked to her in years. Gong to see her might not have been the smartest thing to do, but to some extent, I was still to blame for this. Yeah she was unstable, but had I never introduced her to the lifestyle I’d so desperately craved, she might not have become so twisted...so desperate to feel, for external pain to relieve her internal ones.

And now I had another woman in my life, a woman I not only cared about, but could go the distance with, who was pushing. Pushing me to go farther than we’d already discussed.

Haley’s proposal, her manipulation in getting us to Luminous hadn’t only shocked the hell out of me, I never would have figured her to be a woman to try to top from the bottom.

I clenched my teeth—ground them so hard they should have broken.

My phone rang in my pocket and startled me. Dylan’s name popped up on the screen and I growled at the phone in my hand. Fucking Luminous. It was the source of all my problems.

“What in the hell are you doing outside the club and where’d Haley go?”

I turned around, found one of the cameras pointing at me and lifted my middle finger. “Tell Joe in there to fuck off and quit staring at me.”

Dylan barked out a laugh. “Surprised as hell she wanted to go tonight, not going to lie. You wanna tell me why you’re out there looking like someone just kicked you in the balls?”

“You can’t fucking see me.” After the disastrous meeting between Haley and my mom, we’d taken off. Gabby and Dylan had planned to stay longer.

“New security app I have on my phone, doesn’t matter and stop changing the subject. What happened?”

I ran a hand across my jaw and groaned. “I’m not even fucking sure. What’d she say to you?”

“Oh God, we go back to junior high again? I don’t play this he-said she-said bullshit, but she didn’t say a thing. Just asked if the club was open tonight. I figured she wanted to show off her tan ass for the club—show you off to the club. Not what I assumed?”

“I don’t even know. She said some shit about you and Gabby, the collar which she’d talked about before. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels trying to catch up to a conversation and I’m still not sure what it was about.”

“How’d it end?”

Sudden shame ate away at my gut. Hell, had I really done that? “I called Red, Dylan.”

He coughed loudly. “You did fucking what? Why?”

“Because! Because she’d just filled my head with shit about Courtney, and barely paid attention to meeting my mom, and I don’t know why the fuck I did it, but I couldn’t bring her here, not tonight.” Possibly not ever. I didn’t think I ever wanted Haley on display for dozens of leering eyes. Men wanting to jerk off to her alabaster skin while I marked it.

But if it was what she wanted...needed...could I give that to her? I was supposed to be the one setting the fucking limits, making the rules. Subs were supposed to follow them. And here I was, my first trip back to Dom-ville and I had another woman trying to pull the strings.

“Gabby told me about Courtney, Jensen. Whatever happened wasn’t your fault. I thought you were past this shit. This has Meredith all over it.”

He didn’t understand. He never did. I was over having Courtney in my life, over the fact I couldn’t have helped her if I wanted, over the fact that I’d missed the signs, but it still wasn’t right to abandon her, either. Besides Meredith she didn’t have any family, no other real friends I knew of.

“I’m headed to her house to see her.”

“And then you’re going to Haley’s to discipline her, right?”

I ran my hand down my jaw, and caught a flash of the yellow taxi cab pull to the end of the street. I hurried toward it. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Fucking hell, Jensen. Get your sub in line. She pushed you too far and you need to manage that shit, you don’t let it make you run from her. You forget everything I taught you or are you going soft?”

His tone was teasing. His words were spot on and hit me in the chest, flaying me wide open.

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