Page 26 of Meant for You

You’re making shit worse. Cool it the hell down.

“Someone hurts you, I get pissed,” I said, because that was the truth and all the other things flying around my head needed to stay right the hell there.

She reached over and curled her fingers around my forearm. “Dane, he didn’t hurt me. He was gentle and considerate.”

Bullshit. “He get you off?”

I wanted to bang my head on the steering wheel as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Why the fuck had I said that? I didn’t want to know the answer to that. But then, Everly had been the one to take us there, hadn’t she? That’s the kind of shit I’d need to know if I was going to do what she wanted.

She was quiet several very long seconds. I glanced over, and she was looking at her fingers curled in her lap.

Shit. “I’ll take that as a no,” I said.

“Not everyone can orgasm during sex,” she said, eyes now trained straight ahead.

I snorted. Which was extremely dickish of me, but I was fucked if I could stop.

Her gaze shot to me. “I hate to break this to you, Casanova, but if every girl you’ve slept with—and I know the number is vast—has wailed like a fire siren as soon as Little Dane made an appearance, at least some of them were faking it. It takes more than just wiggling it around a few times. Or do you have a magic penis?”

I choked. “Little Dane? Wiggling it around? Fucking hell, no wonder you didn’t get off. Did this fuckwit even try?”

“Of course he did!”

“Okay, you’re right, not all girls can get off from fucking alone. They need more than just a dick, which is why I make sure the women I’m with get off first. It’s not fun if we’re both not enjoying it. This guy, he sounds like a selfish asshole to me.”

“He was not.”

I hated that she was defending this dickhead. “Babe, if you have to go home afterward and finish yourself off, there’s something wrong.”

She said nothing, the cab of the truck going deathly silent. I glanced over at her again and she was bright red.

Fuck. That’s exactly what she’d done.

I needed to cut out my own tongue and get it over with. I also needed to scrub my brain, because I had no business having the image I did playing on a loop in my head.

I gripped the steering wheel tight enough to make it groan. “Shit, I’m sorry for being a dick, Eves. I just…I guess I’m territorial when it comes to you,” I said, going for honesty. “I know it’s fucked up and twisted.” I rubbed at the pain behind my sternum. “It’s like I hate that the fucker touched you, because I want to protect you from everything and everyone, but I also hate that he didn’t do you right, because you deserve that.” I glanced over at her again. “Does that make any sense whatsoever?”

The cab was shadowed, making her eyes look darker. “I get it, but at the same time, you’ve been out of my life a long time, Dane. You can’t just walk back in and be this way. If we’re going to be friends again, you need to respect the fact that there are boundaries.”

We’d never had them before. None. And the night before, her boundaries had included asking me to teach her to fuck.

Shit, I knew my possessiveness was a problem. It always had been, which was why I stayed away for so long, but I thought I had it somewhat under control now. Obviously not.

But then we’d come from a fucked-up place. Two terrified kids clinging to each other. I’d spent almost every night in that foster home too afraid to go to sleep, that if I closed my eyes, one of Wayne’s drunk friends would come and try and get to Eves. That they’d snatch her out of my bed. I saw the way they looked at her. Heard the shit they said when they were drunk.

The shit they did when they had parties at the house.

I’d been everything to her, in a seriously messed-up way. Brother, father, protector, best friend, and I was only fourteen fucking years old. I lived off nervous energy, constantly on edge, worried if I dropped my guard even once, let her out of my sight, they’d take her, they’d hurt her, or worse.

It skewed shit, the way I saw Everly, the way I treated her, until I took it too far and I’d known I needed to back off before I hurt her.

And in the process, I’d hurt her even more.

“I’m finding my way with you, Eves. Trying to get to a middle ground, you know? But I’m struggling,” I said, giving her more honesty.

“I know. And we’ll get there. But I need you to trust me…and I need you to stop treating me like I’m some delicate thing that will fracture if someone looks at me wrong. I’m not that little girl anymore.”

Yeah, I knew that, and that was another thing that I was struggling with. The girl sitting beside me was far from the skinny little girl curled against me in the dark, relying on me to keep her safe. She was a woman, a fucking gorgeous, funny, confident woman. So beautiful my gut ached looking at her.