“The Dragons? That was the name of the gang?”
He nodded.
“That’s why you have a dragon tattoo.”
“No. I have the tattoo because I got out.” He turned so that I had a better look at his back. “The gang sign was a small dragon on the right shoulder. See it?”
I peered, then found an outline of a dragon hidden inside the bolder, wilder artwork of the beautiful creature that covered Cole’s back.
“This one’s mine. I drew it. I designed it. I hired the artist to do the needlework. And the most important part was covering up that mark. Making my own symbol.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said, feeling absurdly proud that he had not only done that, but that he’d thought of it. “You took something horrible and made it beautiful.”
“I tried,” he said. “But the horrible still creeps in around the edges. I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said, before I could ask what he meant. “I was talking about the gang. We were into everything, but drugs mostly. That and guarding our turf and all the bullshit that goes along with that life. Even then I knew it was bullshit,” he said, meeting my eyes. “But I also knew it was the only option I had.”
“It must have been so hard.” I could picture him, so young, his innocence stripped from him. Tears pricked my eyes, and I brutally brushed them away.
“Wasn’t easy,” he said. “But I didn’t mean for this to be a lesson in gang culture.”
“You wanted to tell me about Anita,” I prompted.
“She was my rite of passage,” he said, in the kind of flat voice that made me want to pull him close and hold him tight.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that no one gets a cut of any real income without being fully inducted. And no one is inducted until they’ve popped their cherry. More than that, though. One night wasn’t enough. No, you had to be fully initiated. And that’s where Anita came in.”
“She was your first.”
“In so many ways.” His voice was raw. Hateful. “She liked pain. Serious pain. Giving and receiving. Cigarette burns. Wire pulled tight around your cock. Knives. Straws jammed up your urethra. God knows what up your ass. She was a sadistic, masochistic bitch, and she tied every single goddamn orgasm to one of her fucked up games.”
I shook my head, not really willing to believe that what he was saying could be true. “She made you—”
“There’s a parabola of pain, you know. After a period of time, it turns to pleasure. Not just the kind of pain I’ve shared with you. But real pain. Torture pain. The kind of pain that pulls state secrets and turns spies. But you cross a line, and that torture doesn’t work anymore, because the victim has slipped over into euphoria. So if you want to fuck up somebody’s sexual wiring, then you take a kid—a kid who’s barely had a hard-on much less an orgasm—and you wind him up and jack him off over and over. You make it hurt, then you make it feel good, then you make it hurt again—” His voice had gone hard, and now it broke. “Shit,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me any more,” I said.
“But I do, because with me there was more than just the way her fucked up games messed with my mind and rewired everything that gets me hard. She pushed my limits with sex—and couple that with the shit my mother left me with—impulse control problems, anger management, all the bullshit that lingers when you’ve got that goddamn ‘crack baby’ label. Makes me like a goddamn bomb just waiting to explode and you can damn well bet that sex is one of the triggers.”
He paced to the end of the room, then came back and started the circle again. I watched him, my heart breaking for the boy he’d been and the man he’d become.
Finally, he stopped in front of me. “Bottom line is I’m fucked up.”
“No,” I said, standing so that I could press my hands to his face. “The bottom line is that you’re the strongest man I know.”
“Kat—”
“No,” I said fiercely. “Don’t you dare argue with me. Maybe you are fucked up. So what? I mean, who isn’t? But you’re not screwed up like that. You don’t take it that far. You don’t explode—not really. You don’t hurt yourself or me like that.”
I could see that he wanted to interrupt, and so I pressed a fingertip to his lips. “You’ve defied your past in so many ways, Cole.” I kept my voice gentle, hoping he could understand how much I meant these words. “You’re not the least bit like Anita. She’s inhuman. But you’re not. You’re just the opposite,” I said as I drew my arms around him and pressed my cheek to his chest. “I know, because you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
His body was stiff against mine at first, and then I felt his lips brush my hair and his arms go around my waist. He relaxed, his body molding to mine. “Christ, Kat,” he said. “You unravel me.”
My heart swelled, and I clung to him a moment longer, then pulled back so that I could see his face. “Come back to bed,” I said. “I want you to hold me.”
“How could I ever let go?”
I moved to the bed and drew him down, then lost myself to the simple feel of his arms around me and his skin against mine. “I like this. Just being next to you. It’s nice.”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “It is.” He stroked his fingertips lightly over my shoulder. “The hard and the wild burns through you, so intense you never want to let it go. But these soft moments . . . they’re what give you the fuel to burn in the first place.”