Page 112 of The Hookup
“That piece of shit.” The mere mention of the man seemed to make Luke’s muscles freeze up. Lifting his hand to his neck again, he gingerly touched below the scar. “I think I impressed him the most when he caught me screwing his whore.”
Her eyes nearly bugged right out of her head. “You… you didwhat?”
“I wanted to get my own back,” he said, staring at the floor, his hands steepled together. “After my mom killed herself, I knew the only way to get him back, to hit him where it hurt was to show him what it felt like when the person you loved screwed someone else.”
Sadness swirled around her, leaving her tied up in ribbons of pity and love and hurt. She felt for this man, felt his pain as acutely as if it were her own. He turned to her and smiled. “Turned out, she was only seven years older than me. So we ended up in bed.”
“She seduced you?” Kay asked, horrified. .
“Iseducedher.Wasn’t hard. I was a fumbling teen until I met her.”
She tipped her head to the side, forgetting to breathe.
“She didn’t take much persuading either,” he continued, “After sleeping with a shriveled old prune like my old man, she was desperate for someone more her own age.”
She couldn’t find the words to voice her shock. The scene played out in her head and the idea of Luke as a motherless teenager seeking revenge upset her in so many ways. “But you must have been underage.”
“It’s no big deal. Sex is sex. I was almost of age. And at least I wasn’t a virgin anymore.”
Now she understood it all, his coldness, and contempt, and the way he had sometimes treated her. This man was messed up, and he was hurting, and none of it was his fault. She leaned towards him, putting her arm around his waist. “You wanted to impress your father’s wife? Is that it?” she asked, not quite understanding his quest for one-upmanship.”
Luke laughed cruelly. “This new one’s wife number three. He married the one I screwed, and then he threw her out the day he caught us. I’d been fucking her for months by the time he found out.”
“You poor thing,” she murmured. Her head was spinning out of control; the thoughts, the images and the sadness of it all, of how his young life and family had shattered. She wanted to hold Luke in her arms and cradle him.
“It was the same day he threw me out, and then I moved into Travis’s apartment.”
“There was nothing more between you two?”
“Hell no. I didn’tloveher. I didn’t even care for her. Iusedher. She was a means to an end, and it worked. It almost destroyed him when he found out.”
It still didn’t make sense.
Who had he wanted to impress?
“I wanted Maggie to know I was doing fine.”
“What’s … ” She had started to ask what Maggie had to do with any of it, and it took a moment, maybe three or four moments, before she pieced it all together.
“She broke my heart,” he said, his voice tapering off as he looked away. “I walked in on them one day when I came back from work early,” he told her. “It must be hardwired into my DNA, walking in on people having sex.”
It was there, starting to rise, the bile, and acid, and feeling of nausea. Rising from the pit of her belly, a slow, heaving monster ready to push upwards. She could feel the room spinning around her, as if a tornado had gobbled it all up.
“But she’s married to your brother.”
“She was my girlfriend first.”
Maggie had been the one who’d left him broken-hearted. Kay remembered back to that first night, when he’d mentioned his rules. She’d hit on the truth without even realizing.
“Maybe she preferred him to me. Maybe I need to treat women better than I do. Have respect for them, but you tell me, how the hell am I supposed to do that?”
He was blabbering on, not even realizing.
“So it was Maggie you wanted to impress?”
He nodded.
And that was why he’d asked her along to the wedding? All along she had foolishly believed he’d invited her because he was starting to feel something for her.
