Filthy 6: A Dark Erotic Serial Read online

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No.”

  “Faye, come on, it’s been six months…”

  I spun around to be greeted with the view of him climbing out of bed, slipping the condom off his softening cock. He was sexy, there was no doubting that, and his dick, oh baby, his dick was thick and long, and he knew how to use it. That’s why I’d kept him around longer than I’d ever kept anyone else around.

  “You knew up front that I wasn’t looking for anything serious.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “It’s six in the morning, Faye. I have to be in class in two hours. I could have been sleeping right now, but instead I’m here with you. You called me at four in the morning. I drove forty-five minutes to get here.”

  “Yeah, to fuck, clearly.”

  “But that’s not all this.” He came around the bed. The pleading in his voice stung me. I hadn’t let this happen in a long time. I was better at getting rid of them before they got attached. A month or two, sometimes three was long enough. But I’d let Casey slip through the cracks somehow. I’d let our fucking go on for too long. And that’s all it was. Just straight up animalistic fucking. We didn’t go out on dates. We didn’t see each other in public. We fucked in my apartment. That’s it.

  “Yes, it is.” I’d let it go on this long because I was tired of finding someone new. Of having to show them what I wanted. And what I wanted was simple. I wanted rough, hate sex. I wanted someone to fuck me, literally, with their hate. It was the only kind of sex that got me off anymore, so it was the only kind of sex I had.

  “No, it’s not.”

  I sighed and took a step back. I was too tired for this. I glanced over at my bed. The king-size sleep number was calling my name.

  “So, that’s just it? I tell you how I feel and you just dump me?”

  The ache in his voice made my heart twinge, but he would never know by the look on my face. I taught myself to be impassive, to not show compassion. His feelings shouldn’t have mattered. I’d lived through things that would make him recoil and run crying to his mommy. But he didn’t know. He would never know, and kicking him out after I’d given him multiple orgasms wasn’t something most men would call a loss.

  “Get out.” The venom in my voice used to surprise me—not anymore.

  He took a step forward, reminding me of just now naked he really was. His body was one of those that didn’t come around every day, with bulging muscles and carved out abs. Disappointment snaked through me. I wouldn’t get to enjoy a rough fuck with him one more time.

  “What is his name?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “His name. The guy who made you this way.”

  I recoiled at his words. “What are you talking about?” Panic bubbled under my skin. Does he know? No one knew. My new life was separate from the one I left behind. I was someone else. I was Faye Turner, twenty-six year old adjunct professor at the local community college in Ft. Worth. I was the woman who had started over. The one who’d gone to college, taking no less than eighteen hours a semester from the moment I began. I was the woman who spent late nights in the library. The one who went to school every semester, including summer, and when I got my bachelors degree in May, I started on my Master’s two weeks later in summer school.

  I was the girl with her nose in a book. The unassuming woman who studied hard and aced her classes, but in private, liked to be brutally and roughly fucked while the man at her back screamed words of hate in her ear. That was me. It didn’t sound simple, but it was, compared to the story I could really tell. The one where I fucked my daddy and pined for the love of my step-brother. The one where I sold my body and snorted coke off dirty hands. That was the me no one would ever know again.

  “Someone hurt you. That’s what happened, right? Some guy broke your heart and now you’re hell bent on never letting that happen again.”

  “Get the fuck out. Don’t make me say it again.”

  Casey’s face dropped. He turned around and grabbed his clothes, shuffling into them. What did he know? He didn’t know me. He didn’t know who I was, or the things that had happened to me. He was just a kid anyway, twenty years old, that I’d met at a bar. That’s all he was. Just someone to fuck.

  He didn’t say anything else when he left. Just shuffled out and slammed the door.

  A giggle left my lips once he was gone. It was one of those giggles that was always followed with tears. How ridiculous that he would think he loved me. A woman who didn’t care about him at all. Whenever he tried to talk to me about something that didn’t involve fucking, I shut him down. I treated him like shit. I only fucked him on my terms. How could he think he loved that? How could he think that I could love him back? It miffed me and made me sad.

  Love used to be the only thing I ever wanted. I turned away from the door and blinked back tears. Rhett’s face popped into my mind, unbidden. I had gotten good at pretending he never existed. Sometimes I could go days without thinking about him. But then something like this would happen.

  “Some guy broke your heart and now you’re hell bent on never letting that happen again.”

  Oh, Casey had no idea the extent of my hurt. He didn’t know about the disbelief I’d experienced when I went to live with my mother’s sister, my aunt Gina. When I stayed there for over a month and Rhett never came. I had been foolish. I should have known he wouldn’t come, but part of me was certain he would. That he would realize what he had lost. That he would come back for me.

  He always came back for me.

  But he hadn’t. Not that time. Not the time when it really counted. He never came.

  That was when I started college. I had to get my mind off everything. I had to do something, and then it became my passion, my desperation. I had to fill every waking moment gaining knowledge. It was ridiculous, I was woman who had spent years frying my brain and suddenly I became this sponge desperate for answers, for knowledge, for truth.

  I glanced over at the window, to the light green curtains that darkened my view of the rising sun and brushed my fingers against the bottom of my nose. I didn’t think about it often. The addiction. But there were moments like this one. Moments where I felt vulnerable and lost, when I craved that blissful haze the coke had given me. Casey had looked at me as if he could see my story, as if it was written there in my eyes. As if he knew of all the things I had done, as if he could see the filth I tried so hard to hide.

  “No.” I shook my head and climbed back into bed. I wouldn’t do this to myself. Not today. Casey was just bitter, and I was just tired. That was all it was. The digital clock next to my bed glowed thirty minutes after six.

  I can still get another hour before I need to get ready for class.

  I pushed those thoughts away. The thoughts about the past that was long since gone—the past that was never coming back.

  FOUR

  Faye.

  My bag bobbed against my leg as I hurried up the steps to class. Just three hours ago I had been fucking Casey, and now I was running in heels up five flights of stairs. Of course it would be the day I accidentally overslept that the elevator would break down. I glanced at my watch. I was nearly ten minutes late. I’d be lucky if even half of my students waited around for me.

  Today there’s a guest speaker.

  “Shit.” I pumped my legs faster, feeling the burn in my upper thighs. A student coming down the steps snorted, before I realized I’d spoken out loud. This was only my second semester to teach, though during college I had been a teacher’s assistant and helped out with big lectures. I never expected to get a real job teaching at college level. It was what I had wanted, but I never thought it would really happen. Former junky prostitutes didn’t accomplish things like that. They didn’t teach anyone anything—unless it was showing a new girl how to deep throat. But somehow I had. Somehow I had landed the job teaching three different Freshman classes American Government. Students got extra credit if they brought in their boss one day during the sem
ester and had them talk about how the federal government affected their job.

  By the time I reached the fifth floor I was sweating, the liquid tracking down my back and making my white shirt stick to my skin. I took a deep breath outside the classroom, trying to calm my erratic heart. I tugged on my pencil skirt, straightening it, hoping no one would notice what a mess I was today.

  I stepped inside and smiled, glancing around briefly. “Sorry I’m late everyone.” Most of the students were present from what I could tell.

  “We almost gave up on you,” a girl in the front row said.

  I sat my bag down and smiled. “It’s a good thing you didn’t.” I pulled out my notebook and glanced over the day’s schedule. I typically had the employer who was in for the day, speak to the class first before I gave any sort of lecture. “Today, we have Colleen on the schedule with her employer…” I looked up from the list and glanced around for Colleen. She was a small blonde who sat near the back. But my eyes never found Colleen’s. They found someone else’s. Someone’s eyes I hadn’t seen in years. Six years.

  “I don’t love you, Faye.”

  The words the owner of those eyes spoke so long ago. They popped into my head, they swam around in the sadness I’d locked away.

  Rhett Hale sat in my classroom at the back. He sat in one those rolling chairs, the black ones that all the students sat in. Except he seemed consume the chair, the space, the table in front of him. He was like a black hole that engulfed everything in his path. Except it wasn’t the darkness that consumed everything. It was green. The color of those eyes. Eyes I had loved. Eyes I had wanted to spend the rest of my life looking into. A black suit encased him. He looked bigger than I remembered, more muscular. A few days growth of beard covered his cheeks, and his dark blond hair was a little bit longer than he used to wear it.

  But it was him. There was no doubting it. My heart sped up in my chest. The stupid organ—it pounded heavy, so loud I could practically feel it banging against my eardrums.

  “Yes, I brought my boss, Rhett Hale,” Colleen said from next to Rhett, snapping my attention away from him and over to her.

  “Your boss,” I repeated.

  How is this possible? My mind scurried a million miles a second. He wasn’t here. He couldn’t be here. I hadn’t seen him in years.

  Years.

  Six years.

  “Do you want him to speak now, or at the end of class?”

  “Hmm?” I glanced back to Colleen, careful to avoid looking at Rhett again.

  “Do you want—”

  “Oh, right.” My cheeks heated. “Now is good. I’ll lecture afterwards, like normal.” I started shuffling through the day’s lecture to avoid looking at the back of the room. I could see them moving in my peripheral vision. Colleen and Rhett. They were moving to the front of the room. I purposely walked around to the other end of the table to avoid bumping into them.

  As I sat down to watch the presentation, I started to feel it. That itch just under my skin. It had been long time since I had felt that desperation, that need for hazy relief, more than once in a day. But now it was pounding under my skin, throbbing right along with the beat of my heart, demanding I escape. That I run. I was good at that. At running. I had done it my whole life, until now. Until I’d found my place, my happiness in the world where I was free.

  “Faye, are you okay?”

  I sucked in a breath at the sound of his voice. I hadn’t heard it in so long. It seemed surreal, that deep tenor that was solely his own. I glanced up and our gazes clashed. He stood at the podium now, concern etched into his features. The expression reminded me of how he used to look at me, with pity, worry, concern. They used to all blend together and I’d hated it. I’d fucking loathed it. But I wasn’t that girl anymore. I wasn’t the lonely, lost girl who everyone pitied. I was more than that. I was a successful woman. I wasn’t the broken child who wore her heart on her sleeve anymore. I was the woman who did what she wanted and didn’t let anything hurt her. I was someone different now, and Rhett couldn’t hurt me. Not again.

  I used the mask I was so familiar with now, the one that smoothed my features with confidence. I smiled. “Yes, Mr. Hale.” I glanced at Colleen, who stood nervously next to Rhett. “Go ahead, Colleen.”

  “I’m Mr. Hale’s assistant…” She started talking, but I shut down my thoughts, ignoring her. I didn’t pay attention to the things she said about him. I knew what he did for a living. I knew he hadn’t changed. His appearance was the same, albeit the laugh lines around his eyes were deeper, a little more weathered than before. I didn’t need for Colleen to tell me that he was a lawyer, that he was good at his job. I knew all of those things.

  I just couldn’t fathom that he was here in my classroom. Part of me wanted to touch him to make sure he was real. There were some days that I imagined he had never really existed from the way he had dropped out of my life.

  You ran away.

  He pushed me away. I corrected my mind angrily.

  And then it left me, the excitement. The thrill of Rhett standing before me. It whooshed out of my lungs with a gush of air and was replaced with something else. Bitterness. It consumed me. He made a choice six years ago. He didn’t choose me.

  I’d given him the option, the chance. I’d given him my heart and he ripped to nothing. To fucking shreds and left me alone and broken. He was nothing to me. Just a man. A stranger.

  “Thanks for the introduction, Colleen. Just like she said I work as a lawyer, I specialize in…” I didn’t stiffen at the sound of his voice this time. My skin didn’t tingle. I felt nothing and I liked it. I sat bone still, my eyes watching him, glaring as he spoke.

  He was so calm and collected, moving his hands back and forth. As if I wasn’t sitting here before him. His sister, the one he fucked up against his car. It was as if I had never really existed and for a moment I questioned it again. If it had all really happened or if I was just a fucking delusional idiot.

  I’m not. He’s real. What happened was fucking real.

  I wished it wasn’t. I had wished for that so many times it was disgusting. The pain that used to plague me. That used to thrum through my veins day after day when I thought of it, of him.

  I sat rigidly as he continued to talk, to drone on and on about the things he did at the firm, about how it related to class. My class. He didn’t look at me at all the entire time. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.

  And then he was finished and the class was applauding. I couldn’t bring my hands together to perform the polite gesture. I could wear the mask on my face, but I couldn’t applaud him. I just couldn’t do it. He moved with Colleen away from podium and I breathed a small sigh of relief. He would leave now. I would give my lecture. Things would go back to normal. I could pretend like I never saw him.

  But you did see him. He’s here.

  I wanted to punch my subconscious for being such a bitch.

  I took a deep breath as I moved back to the podium, but when I got there I realized that Rhett hadn’t made his way toward the door like most of my guest speakers. He had fixed himself back in the chair he sat in previously. His eyes were on me again, but I didn’t meet them. I couldn’t. Not again. Not here in front of the whole class. If I did, I didn’t know what I would do. Something had come to a raging boil inside me as he gave his speech. Something bitter, and angry. Something that wanted to fucking lash out at him and destroy him until he didn’t exist. Until he was just a figment of my broken imagination.

  I opened my mouth to address the class. “We left off last time…” But I couldn’t finish my sentence. Those eyes. Those fucking green eyes. I could feel them. They were glued to me and I couldn’t shake them. I couldn’t focus. My mind splintered with rage.

  Why the fuck is he here?

  “Class dismissed,” I heard myself say. I blanched at the sound of my voice. It trembled like a nervous little girl.

  “All right! Out early for spring break!” Two young guys high-fived on th
e back row while everyone else started to chatter and pack up. I never let them go early, but today was an exception apparently. I was off today—off my fucking life apparently. The things that happened with Casey this morning were only the beginning of everything. I couldn’t just stand up there and lecture with Rhett sitting in the back watching me.

  I packed up my papers quickly. If I hurried I could get out of here.

  Will he try to talk to me?

  Panic flared inside me. I didn’t want to talk to him. I couldn’t. I just—

  “Faye?”

  My stone cold resolve that I’d found while he talked to the class had fractured somehow and I jumped, glancing over to where he stood. He was just a few feet away, his hands in his pockets, a look of indecision painted on his face.

  “What?” My voice was still a little shaky, but I was proud of the poison that backed it.

  He frowned. “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  I snorted. “As if you didn’t know this was my class you were coming to.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have come if you knew.” It had been six years. Six fucking years. He didn’t know that I was the teacher, because he would have stayed far away if he had.

  “I would have come. I would have come a long time ago if I’d known.”

  I flinched at his words, glancing around the classroom to see that last person exit the room. “What are—”

  “Are you okay?” He took a step toward me and I flinched. I fucking flinched, like a scared child. The click of the door closing behind the last student made the moment real. I was alone in the room. Alone with him. Rhett.

  I blinked at the absurdity of it all.

  “Why are you here?”

  He swallowed. “I came with Colleen. To give the speech.”

  “Right. Great job.” I slung my bag over my shoulder.

  “Can we talk?” he asked. And I did what I didn’t want to do. I looked into his eyes again and the scalding anger I’d felt just before I dismissed class came rushing back.