Page 66 of Broken by my Bully
Sure, Professor, let me break it down for you.
I fought tooth and nail to get a grant to AHC, because my life was a shit show and I was about two steps away from jumping off a cliff.
Literally.
Like,literally, literally.
But my ex-best friend has decided to hate me so much for leaving town when I was sixteen that he’s making my new life as hellish as the old one. He wants me out, but I refuse to back down, because my entire life changed when I was awarded that grant.
Now I finally have hope. I finally have a purpose. My misery suddenly feels like a precursor of something great. Not a portent of an awful life.
“Telling you won’t change a fucking thing,” I mutter, dropping my head to glare into my mug.
This fucker lures me in here with false promises, and all I get is awful-tasting cocoa and him prying into my private life.
Where the fuck are my marshmallows?
“Haven…” He says it in that tired voice people use when they’re trying to talk sense into someone young, dumb, and full of?—
Ha! Almost, but not quite.
“I’m going to miss my next class,” I tell him, standing so fast that the blanket slides to the floor. But I leave it there, because fuck him.
“Please sit down. I just want to?—”
“Are you taking me back, or should I get an Uber?” I stand there,arms crossed, staring at the door, trying not to notice how dangerous and beautiful he looks in the firelight. Like some ancient god that could devour me whole.
“Haven.” His low, commanding tone makes me want to sink back onto the couch. To let him pry every secret from my lips while his hands do terrible, depraved, wonderful things to my body.
I’m bluffing about calling an Uber, of course. Don’t even have the app installed on my phone. And if I did, they’d need a credit card.
Hate to inconvenience you, Professor, but you’re the one who brought me here. Should have known I was a loose cannon. Don’t they teach you that at professor school?
He rises, sets his cocoa down next to mine, and walks silently to the bookshelf. Plucks out a slim volume, presses it into my chest as he passes on his way to the door.
“It’s a fascinating read,” he says, voice dropping to that professorial purr that makes my mouth dry. “Zimbardo explores how circumstance and authority can reveal the monster hidden beneath someone’s civilization and restraint.”
I can’t breathe. Can’t think.
Because I know he’s not talking about the book anymore.
“Some people need permission to embrace their inner villain. Others...” His eyes flick to the bruise on my jaw. “Others just need someone to show them they were never heroes to begin with.”
He steps back, leaving me clutching the book.
“You’ll especially enjoy the chapter on willing victims.”
Clouds have gathered en masse on the horizon, throwing the entire town into an eerie premature twilight as we drive back to town.
The silence in the Tesla is suffocating.
I can smell his expensive cologne, and something darker beneath.My thighs are still pressed together, and I hate that I’m wet. Hate that my body responds to him like this when my mind knows better.
“You don’t have to drive me all the way back,” I say when we pass a bus stop, because I need to get away from him before I do something stupid.
Like climb into his lap and beg him to hurt me the way I need to be hurt.
“I’d rather make sure you arrived safely.”
