Read episode 24 here: http://bit.ly/allureserial
My mother had just settled into my guest room for the time being and he’d been following her around happily since she arrived.
She said something else to him, something I didn’t catch, her voice trailing deeper into the apartment. I didn’t know where she was heading, and I couldn’t bring myself to investigate.
I was stuck there, both physically and mentally. Unable to move. Unable to think clearly. Barely able to function.
“When it gets tough, you need to remember me right now. How much I love you and how far I’m willing to go not to lose you. Because it’s all that’s gonna matter.”
I ran my hand down the side of my face and blinked back a fresh round of tears.
“As soon as we’re back from the conference, we’re going fully official.”
Instead, we ended up separating and it was all my own doing.
“You’ll never belong to any of the other men that want you. Only me.”
He wasn’t lying about that, that bastard. The truth of that statement was an unforgivable cage around me, one that grew tighter every second. Instead of loosening his grip on me, the weeks without him made his ownership stronger.
I was approaching critical mass.
Functioning without him wasn’t so hard the first week in a half. I was a zombie who barely ate or slept. I showed up to work and school by rote, stuck on autopilot.
But then reality started to set in, one vicious day at a time.
Then he found me in that restaurant yesterday with Keith.
The taste of him after so many weeks without . . .
Relapse is ten times harder than the initial addiction. Another truth I learned since Dorian made me come in that alley yesterday.
“I fucking adore you, baby, and I would’ve never left you. No matter how much seeing something like that wrecked me. I would’ve stayed. I can’t live without you.”
My hand shook as I ran it across my mouth. The same mouth he’d devoured.
The mouth he’d fucked God knew how many times.
The mouth he’d claimed belonged to him solely.
He wasn’t lying about that either.
Oh, God. I was starting to tremble everywhere. The emotions I kept bottling up were bubbling to the surface. The urge to run to my phone and call Dorian over grew stronger by the second.
Then I remembered the videos.
What I’d seen.
It’s not that I wanted to judge him for his past. When I started falling for him, I didn’t even care that he had one. He already had a reputation as a party boy manwhore. I never thought about it.
It never occurred to me that his past included group sex and sex videos, though.
And had it remained in the past, it could’ve been ignored. Yet it didn’t.
His past had collided with our present, destroying it.
Casting our future in doubt.