Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

  I said nothing.

  “Answer me,” he said, voice dripping with threat as he leaned in again, so close he looked as though he wanted to eat me.

  “Answer me!”

  “OK fine! I fucking met him online, OK? On a prison dating site. He’s big and tattooed and scary looking and maybe he’s a bad idea but I don’t care, because he makes me feel amazing.”

  He sat back in his seat and looked genuinely shocked.

  “Maddy, what are you saying?”

  I stared at his face.

  He was speechless.

  “I think I should go now,” I said, and reached down to pick up my handbag.

  A flash of panic flickered over his face.

  “Go? Where are you going? We haven’t finished our dinner yet.”

  I felt sincerely sorry for him.

  “And I’m not your girlfriend,” I said.

  I felt afraid of him. I wanted to leave.

  “What did he do? Is he a murderer or something? What if he hurts you?” he asked. I only had to smirk at him for him to see the irony in what he had said.

  “Tell me, Maddy. At least tell me what he did.”

  “I don’t know what he did. And I don’t care.”

  “So you’re just going to screw around with some weird guy who’s been in prison and you don’t even know what he did?”

  I pushed back my chair and stood to leave.

  “I expected more from you, Maddy. You’re being cruel. I can’t believe you’re being like this,” he said, trying a different tack. But I knew all his tacks.

  “What happened to me taking as long as I needed? What about wanting to be my friend?”

  I pushed the chair back in and left him there with the two steaks and the fake plastic light and the people around our table casting curious glances at us.

  I walked out.

  I suddenly saw my life through Zack’s eyes. When did I become such a weak, battered woman? Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to get dressed up and come out to meet this man, this man who had hurt me so much? What the hell was wrong with me?

  Outside in the cool night air, I breathed in deep and felt my head clear. There was no question about it – Alex had to disappear from my life. I was done holding onto him. He was wasting my time. I could have been doing anything I wanted tonight. I could be at home with my animals, or doing something fun or …I could be curled up in Zack’s arms.

  The more I walked on, though, the more Zack didn’t seem like such a savior either. If I was done tolerating crap from one man, why should I accept it from another? Maybe I did want to know. He was so evasive. Lately, I had tried asking him gently about his prison sentence, but he had only said it would be too difficult for him to say, that the wounds were still fresh. That he wanted to tell me, and he would tell me, but only when the moment was right.

  Well, why couldn’t I decide when the moment was right? I pulled my coat around me and walked a little faster. I whipped my phone from out my pocket and texted him.

  Maddy: Come over tonight. I miss you. We need to talk.

  I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and walked on. It was blunt. Forceful even. But the evening air was so invigorating and cold, it all felt right. We did need to talk. And as I walked on, alone with my thoughts, I started to realize that I wasn’t even that scared of the dark anymore.

  Chapter Sixteen – Zack

  “When I returned home from deployment, I was in rough shape,” I said. “It was hard for me to ask for help, and back then I didn’t even know much about PTSD. I thought that I was just stressed; just getting back into the swing of things, and that it wasn’t so bad. But I was so jumpy. So paranoid, too.”

  I looked at my face in the mirror. Was that the face of someone you’d trust? Would a sweet girl like Maddy believe any of it? I could go back further, I guess. I could tell her about dad and ma and why I joined the military at all. Or further back still, when I was five years old and Ben and I were still good friends and… well, none of that was important now.

  I cleared my throat and looked square into the mirror again. If I had any hope of keeping this miraculous girl in my life, it would only be because I could look her in the eye and tell her the truth.

  “My ex-girlfriend and I had a very difficult relationship. She waited for me but when I came back things were different between us. We fought more. We were both really angry people.”

  I stopped here, distracted by the dripping bathroom tap and the thought that there was no elegant way to say what I needed to say. I straightened my shoulders and tried to keep my voice clear.

  “I wanted to leave again, and she didn’t want me to. We fought so much. Eventually, I snapped at her one evening. She came up behind me and I don’t know, I just snapped. I hit her, but only by accident. Like I said, I didn’t even understand about PTSD back then. In my mind, it wasn’t really her that I hit. I just …acted from instinct. She wasn’t hurt badly, not at all. She was just shocked. She cried and cried …oh God it freaks me out just to think about the way that she cried that night. I tried to say sorry but it was no use. She was so afraid of me. It killed me. She wouldn’t even let me touch her.”

  I looked at my reflection.

  Was that the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Zack? Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure anymore. I had been asked that question so many times – did you hit her though? You actually hit her? – that everything else fell away.

  “I felt so bad. She was angry about so many things, but I guess that became the thing she held onto. I told her we needed to break up, that I wanted to go abroad again, get some air. She didn’t want that either. Long story short, she reported me to the police. She …she took photos of the bruise. It looked so much worse than it was. She told everyone. I was convicted of domestic violence. I didn’t fight it. I could see how just fighting it was causing everyone so much pain, so I just went with it… I mean, I did hit her, right? It was messed up. I was kind of glad to go to prison, just to get away from everything.”

  I looked back at myself, trying to see my face as she might see it. I didn’t want her to think I was some sleazy asshole trying to explain away something as rotten as hitting a woman. But I also wanted her to understand. I hadn’t meant it. I wasn’t some saint or anything, but I would never, ever hit a woman. That’s just not who I am. But there it was: I had hit her. A fact. And as that horrible purple mark on my ex’s skin leered back at me, I guess I decided that maybe I wasn’t as good a guy as I thought I was.

  I took another deep breath, quickly brushed my teeth and headed out. It was weird of her, to send a text so late at night, but she lived pretty close by and she was right. We did need to chat. I drove in silence, practicing my speech in my head, nervously thumping the steering wheel. To my surprise, she was sitting outside on the steps as I pulled up into the driveway.

  I parked, turned off the engine and stepped out, slamming the car door behind me.

  “I thought you hated sitting in the dark?” I said playfully. I could see her white teeth smiling back at me from the porch steps.

  “Yeah, I do. But tonight’s so pretty I decided to sit outside for a bit,” she said.

  I sat down beside her. I noticed she had pinned back her hair with a clip, and looking again I realized she was wearing makeup and heels. I’d have to ask her about that later.

  I pulled a box from inside my jacket, tapped out a cigarette, and lit it in the darkness, the orange glow bobbing between us as we sat in silence.

  She said nothing. It was my turn to speak, I suppose. I knew what she wanted to know, and enough was enough already. Either I would tell her and she’d leave, or I wouldn’t tell her and …what? I had to tell her.

  “When I got back home from deployment,” I started, “I was in a pretty bad place. Back then I didn’t even know about PTSD. I thought that I was just stressed, but I was so jumpy and paranoid all the time.”

  Damn. It sounded forced as hell.

  “My ex and I foug
ht a lot because of it. We were both really angry people,” I said, and I sensed her stirring in the darkness. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t. I had to go on.

  “I… she came up behind me one day, just as a joke? I don’t know. She scared the daylights out of me, and I turned around and I … I hit her. Pretty hard too.”

  “You actually hit her?” said her voice in the darkness.

  “I didn’t mean to, though. It was an accident.”

  That’s all it really came down to.

  “So, you went to jail because you hit your girlfriend by accident?” she said, incredulous.

  My eyes stung a little as I realized that no, she wasn’t going to smile and believe my stupid, almost unbelievable story and that yes, it looked bad. Really bad.

  “Well, she reported me for domestic violence. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but the judge wanted to make a lesson out of me, and you know, I had this supervisor who also had it in for me since day one and he got involved, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion, and since I was an idiot and basically owned up to all of it…”

  “Wait, but you did hit her?” she said.

  My throat felt dry.

  “Yes. Yes, I did hit her. But like I said, it was by accident.”

  The night didn’t seem so cool and calm anymore.

  “It just seems so weird that you would go to jail for one small mistake like that…” she said quietly.

  Of course she would say that. Any woman with sense would say that. I knew what she was getting at. She waited in the dark for me to tell her what else I had done. For the secret behind the secret.

  But there was nothing. Sure, technically, I wasn’t a domestic abuser. I hadn’t hit her on purpose. This much was true. But maybe I deserved the punishment anyway, in a roundabout sort of way.

  I had done things in Iraq that were forgiving, but perhaps not strictly forgivable. Maybe I failed to stop myself from getting to that point. She needed me to be strong and I wasn’t, and so maybe two years was exactly the punishment I deserved. I didn’t know how to tell her this, though.

  “So, you had PTSD? You hit her because you were stressed?” she asked. I could almost feel the whirring of her brain as she tried to figure it out. Oh, it was more than ‘stress’. The things I had seen and done were not ‘stress’. When I came back, my whole world fell to pieces around me. Everything I thought I knew, everyone I loved, all of it broke down all around me, and none of it made sense anymore. I stopped being able to speak. Somedays, I felt like the only thing holding me together was the literal clenching of my jaw, or me holding my breath. That if I unballed my fists everything would fall to chaos again.

  “Yeah. I was stressed. Really stressed. I didn’t mean it. I loved her. I never wanted to hurt her. But …but I did.”

  This wasn’t at all how my speech was meant to go. That word ‘love’ felt dangerous on my tongue now, and I watched her in the silence as she thought a moment.

  “Well, I believe you,” she said.

  I hadn’t realized that she was unsure whether to believe me or not. “You did what you did, and you never meant to hurt her, so I can’t judge you,” she said. It felt strange, as though she was just saying the words to convince herself.

  “Have you ever hit a woman again? I’m just asking because you …well, when my ex came around…”

  I reached out and touched her thigh. Her jeans felt so cold under my fingertips.

  “Maddy, please, I beg you, whatever happens, please know that I would never hurt you.”

  It’s always like this. You start life in the military with crowds of people cheering you on. They can’t wait for you to go out there into the muck and fight, and be a fucking man, and protect your country and all that other crap. And when you come back with blood on your hands, those same people are suddenly afraid. You went too close to the thing you were meant to be destroying, and now you scare them. They want you to put on a tie and a nice clean shirt and forget all about the humanity you threw away, for them.

  She turned and looked at me, and I could see the distant streetlights reflecting off the wet globes of her eyes. She had that same dizzy, intoxicated look on her face as when she had first come with me, the first time she had let me deep inside her, and trusted me with those raw, unbridled parts of her that we both were shocked to discover. I had laughed and slapped her bare ass at the time. Now, just the thought of it made my stomach turn.

  She exhaled loudly and tried to smile.

  “Well, that’s not so bad. Weird but… at least you’re not a murderer!” she said.

  My stomach lurched inside.

  “I understand. I hope you never …well, it’s not for me to say. Thank you for telling me,” she said. She used exactly the same patronizing tone as my stress counsellors did. I hated it. She folded her arms tightly over her beautiful breasts and looked away again.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

  * * *

  Inside she put on a pot of chamomile tea and fussed a little with the dogs. I sat on the sofa and idly scratched the ear of Merlin, an ancient collie with a habit of resting her head on people’s knees and smiling up at them.

  “Are you angry?” I asked, as she busied herself round the kitchen.

  “Me? No. Of course not. I understand, this is how these things go. I’m sorry you went through all that.”

  The words sounded hollow. She appeared in the room with the pot and two cups, and forced another smile. Something ached at the back of my throat.

  “Are you like… getting therapy? For the PTSD?”

  What she meant was, are you still a threat?

  I nodded.

  I went once or twice a week and had sessions with some old bat who had never crossed the state line and smelt like stale smoke, but yeah, technically, I was doing all the things I should have been. Just sucking it up and dealing with it.

  She sat beside me and we kissed. This was our usual routine. The sofa was our spot. Since the first time we had fucked, this had become our little nest. The secret, sacred place where she had shown me all sorts of wonderful things, and opened up to me. The only place in this run down house where things were beautiful and magical for a moment, where her body did enchanted things and the reason they did them was me. This sofa was brown and old and scuffed, but it was also an altar where I worshipped her, and where she taught me how to open deeper and deeper doors inside her.

  And now, she was keeping her distance, sitting all the way over to the side and trying to smile even though I could tell she didn’t want to.

  We chatted and spoke for a while and then she clinked down her teacup and leaned in closer.

  “I’m sorry if I’m a bit weird about what you just told me. You know …because of the way Alex was. I would just kick myself if I went and found another guy like that, you know?”

  It hurt me that I couldn’t think of anything to do or say to make her trust me in that moment.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She came close and kissed me again, and I held her, gently and carefully, my thoughts all over the place. Our clothes came off easily; by now we were well used to one another, to the buttons and zips, the ins and outs. I thought of the bruises I saw on her cheek that day. I ran my hands up and down her beautiful body and kissed her sweetly, but all I could see in my mind was the black and grey of her bruised skin.

  Maddy was different. She had been kind and in our hidden moments together on this sofa, she had shown me something: that though I had hurt a woman in the past, I could do other things, too. Good things. When she fluttered her eyes closed and let her head fall back, she showed me that my hands could bring pleasure, too. I didn’t want to hurt. I wanted to make her moan again, the same way she had the first time she had squirted all over me…

  I scooched over on the sofa closer to her and wrapped my eager body around hers. Everything would be fine, all could be forgiven, so long as her hair smelt just that swe
et and her little tongue moved just like that over my lips. My hand at the base of her neck, I pulled her head back and kissed her throat, and then I found that beautiful dark haze descending over me again, and I began to lose myself in her again, wanting to kiss her deeper and harder. I pawed at her urgently, her body soft under my hands. I yanked her shirt out of the way, eager to get at her sweet, beautiful breasts underneath. The fabric strained and pulled in my hands.

  She jumped back and glared at me, both little eyebrows kinked into an expression of concern.

  “Hey, easy tiger,” she said.

  My face burned. I leaned in again, but her hands were blocking her now, and though she kissed me back, her body seemed a little hesitant. Closed somehow.

  “You ok?”

  “I’m fine!” she said and pulled me in for another kiss.

  We did all the same things we had done a dozen times before. I kissed her. I took off her clothes and she took off mine. She kissed me, sucked the tip of my cock, kissed me again. I lay down on top of her and parted her legs.

  It was all the same. And yet it wasn’t.

  “Are you sure you’re fine?” I asked her again. She seemed irritated at the question.

  “Yes, I’m fine, what’s wrong? Are you fine?”

  She was right there, in my arms, and yet I felt her drifting away from me.

  “When I fought with Alex …it was because …I guess he reminded me of myself. Do you understand that? I never want to be like that, Maddy.”

  She smiled. “I know.”

  I slid inside her but she was all the wrong kinds of tight. She climbed on top, and again I stared at the ceiling that badly needed repairs, and my mind got tangled up on the way she was looking down at me, and how cold her body seemed compared to normal. I thrust a few times and she moaned and twisted her head side to side. I came quickly, mostly by accident, and she flopped down on me, looking relieved.

  “And you…?” I said coyly, tracing fingertips down her belly and snaking them between her legs. “It’s your turn now…”