Page 67 of Dissolving Prejudice

Fuck.

“Yeah,” I rasped, shaking my head. “Felt too hot in there.” Not looking at Jordan, I signaled the bartender to give me two more shots when we were joined by unwanted company.

“It’s fucking hot out there,” an annoyingly sexy voice rasped, and I took a deep breath before slowly turning my head to see sexy, shirtless, sweaty Camilo stopping by my side.

“What’s up, Jordy?” he asked while ignoring me and high-fiving Jordan.

What. The. Hell.

“Aren’t you sick?” Jordan frowned after he’d been forced to take Camilo’s high five.

“Sick?” Camilo smirked, then walked past me.

“Yeah, Miles mentioned you had food poisoning or something.”

“Oh, that.” Camilo’s smirk turned into a smile before he patted Jordan’s chest. “Nah. I took a good swim today that helped me feel much better.”

Clueless to Camilo’s attempt to mess with me, Jordan nodded. “That’s good to know.”

“Here,” Camilo suddenly said before he shoved the drink he was holding into Jordan’s hand. “I better not drink too much; I have a girl waiting.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at the same girl he’d danced with the whole night. “Anyway, you two have a gorgeous evening.” With a wink and a grin, the motherfucker left, and I swore to God I was ready to break something.

“This is actually good,” Jordan hummed, and I turned to see him taking a sip from the stupid drink.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I grunted, asking the lord for power because I was seriously losing it.

Shay-Lee

“I told you to go easy on those drinks,” I grunted while dragging Jordan’s heavy-ass body into our suite. Pausing to catch some breath, I looked at the bed and calculated the number of steps left before I’d be able to toss him at it.

Jordan was too damn wasted to reply and instead hummed his response. Tired, I tightened my hold around his waist and began walking until I reached the damn bed. He was too heavy for me to carry, so I tried dropping him off gently, only to be pulled down with him. He landed right on the soft mattress, with me on top. Surprisingly, that didn’t wake him, and he continued to doze like Sleeping Beauty.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you weigh a ton.” I wiped my forehead from the sweat of carrying him all the way back here. I warned him about drinking too much, but he didn’t listen, and just like I predicted, the number of cocktails he’d consumed tonight had gotten the better of him. Only I didn’t expect he’d pass out this bad, and I doubted I’d ever seen him so wasted other than when he took my sleep medication on flights.

“You’re such a cute dork, you know that?” I smiled and squeezed his handsome face before getting off him and walking to the bathroom.

My body was sore and tired from the day, not to mention my head, which had been a mess ever since Camilo left with that woman. How far would he go just to mess with me? I know the answer to that. There wasn’t a line he wouldn’t cross to get what he wanted, and the same applied to me. And while knowing he’d do just about anything to own me boosted my body with an unbelievable amount of possessiveness, a certain thought crept into my mind. What if tonight wasn’t a game, and Camilo truly was attracted to that whore? What if he’d come to realize I wasn’t worth the hassle?

And even though I shouldn’t, as I was engaged to someone else, I couldn’t help but be washed over by fear. Scared that leaving him in the water was the last straw, I looked up at the mirror.

What did he even see in me? I’d been, and still was, nothing but a joke—an image of my father’s creation. Tracing my skin with the pads of my fingers, I eyed myself with horror. Each year, I looked more and more like him. My eyes, jaw, nose, lips, everything about me was beginning to shape into the form of the monster who ruined not only my life but also Camilo’s, so why the fuck did he ever come back to begin with? If I were him, I would have run as far away from me as possible and stayed there.

I snorted at the thought, and the pathetic sound echoed around in the empty bathroom. Evidently, no matter how many hours I spent talking to Soren and Blaire, at the end of the day, when it was just me, there was no place to hide.

I was still disgusting.

I was still a perversion who slept with his own father. Oops. I didn’t sleep with him—I was raped by him, but did it matter? In the end, it was my own fault, wasn’t it? Just like Orson loved to claim, I was nothing but a mere whore. So maybe my father was never to blame as I was the one to seduce him.

“S-shit,” I hissed, biting my lip. I knew this wasn’t the case, and those were just the demons in my head, but those thoughts had a grip on me that I couldn’t shake. If only my father were here, I could have talked to him. I could have asked him why he had to love me in such a sick way. But he wasn’t here. They say he died in an airplane crash, but I doubted it. My father was too big of a person to just… die. Besides, people expecting me to believe he was gone simply because they pulled something out of the water and claimed it was him? What a joke. A sad-ass joke I didn’t buy for a second because I knew what he was.

A monster.

My father was a demon, and anyone who believed he actually died that day was a fool because it took a lot more than that to kill such darkness.

My skin erupted with goose bumps the way it always did when I thought of him, and I looked over my shoulder at the empty bathroom. I could never get rid of the sickening feeling that he was here, lurking in the dark, waiting for the right time to strike.

Closing my eyes, I shook my head. This was why I shouldn’t be drinking because the moment I lost control over myself, all those thoughts that never really went away came back at once.

After a long, hot shower, I returned to our room, where Jordan was exactly as I left him. With a sigh, I went over to him to make sure he was covered with the blanket before I grabbed a pair of boxer briefs for myself, put them on, and went over to my side of the bed.