Bad for You by Weston Parker
34
BRITTANY
Breakup sex was a funny thing. A concept I’d never really understood. The same could be said for angry sex. If people were breaking up or angry with one another, I’d just never really gotten why or how they would end up having sex.
Angry, heartbroken, and breakup sex all rolled into one was a whole different creature. One that shouldn’t have existed, but it did. As I was learning at this very moment.
It was crazy, but it was like I couldn’t stop that creature from taking me over. Like it was driving me to have just one last time. To say the goodbye we should’ve said all those years ago and never got to say.
With Tristin’s rock-hard cock in my mouth, it was possibly the worst time to start crying, but I couldn’t stop the tears from springing to my eyes. My insides were in such a mess of emotions that even I didn’t know how I was really feeling. Angry, heartbroken, hurt, horny, desperate, helpless, and defeated all came to mind, but none of them seemed like a strong enough word by itself to really describe what was going on inside me.
What I’d been trying to prove when I’d suddenly gone down on him, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I’d wanted to leave him with one final memory of me making him feel good. He moaned and ran his hands through my hair, his hips thrusting and his veiny shaft throbbing between my lips, but then just as suddenly, I was on my back and he was tearing the rest of my clothes off.
I could cry for having had that one last opportunity to make him feel anything positive about me stolen from me, but when he buried his head between my legs and licked me like I was a Popsicle on a hot summer’s day, I also wanted to cry because I knew it would never feel this good again. Grabbing my pillow out from under my head, I shoved it over my face and let the tears go free right along with the moans.
It was the most surreal, confusing experience of my entire life, and yet it was also exactly what I needed. To say goodbye. To close this chapter on what might’ve been but never really stood a chance.
My first orgasm was so beautiful that it, too, made me cry. Tristin kissed the tears away, then kissed my lips when he finally sank into me after only stopping long enough to put a condom on.
His gaze stayed on mine as he buried himself inside me, and I swore there were times when it looked like he had tears in his eyes too. It was all too much for me, and eventually, I let my lids flutter closed and just focused on committing the feel of him to memory.
What had started out as nothing more than to satiate the need to say goodbye turned into fast and hard fucking before it slowed down into lovemaking. It lasted forever and not long enough at all.
When he finally found his own release after driving me over the edge again, I rolled away from him as soon as he was done. If I cuddled, if I let myself stay in his arms for even one more minute, I wouldn’t be able to do what needed to be done.
“Where are you going?” he murmured as he sat up when I crawled out of bed. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes hazy, and his hair a mess.
Knowing it would be the last time I got to see him like this, I smiled sadly and reached for my clothes. “I’m getting dressed. You should too. I need to go pick Lou up, and you need to leave.”
“Excuse me?”
I hid my face behind my hair as I pulled my jeans back on, struggling to fight off the urge to cry some more. “I made a mistake in thinking we could get past the obstacles between us. I don’t fit into your world, and I never will. Frankly, neither will Lou.”
“What the fuck, Brit?” He raked his hands through his hair and stared at me with utter disbelief in those golden orbs I loved so much. “We just had sex, and now you’re telling me it’s over? I mean, I knew there was something bad going through your head, but I figured we’d moved past it at around orgasm number three. Just talk to me. Please?”
“We didn’t move past anything. Don’t you see? We can’t move past it because ‘it’”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“is your entire world. It’s your mother, your father’s life, your family’s company, your grandfather’s legacy. Those aren’t things we can just get over or move past.”
He threw his arms out to his sides, still not making a move to get out of my damn bed. “That’s bullshit. Bullshit and noise, remember? Would you just stop for one fucking minute and really think about it?”
“I can’t, Tristin.” My voice broke, and I held all the air in my lungs, squeezing my eyes shut as I jammed my shirt over my head. “I can’t slow down because my world is crumbling around me, but I’m a mom now. At least in reality, if not in name, and I need to go pick up Lou. You need to leave. Go back to Faye and tell your mother I’m done. This isn’t a game, as you correctly pointed out. It’s my life. Lou’s life. He’s already had a shitty run at it. The last thing he needs is to have your mother gunning for him too when she realizes her latest play didn’t work to break us up. If she won’t accept me being part of your life, she’ll never accept a child who comes from where he does. Especially not one with his behavioral history.”
“That’s what’s happening here? You’re breaking up with me because of my mother?” he spat, clearly upset as he started throwing on his own clothes. “Again? Despite the fact that you know I’ve never let her control me, but now you’re letting her control you? A-fucking-again?”
“Yes.” I jerked my head up, narrowing my eyes at him as I straightened out my shirt and snapped my hair into a fresh ponytail using the band it had been in before. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. You might think she doesn’t control you, but you’re living in her house. You’re working in a company she might as well run. You came home, left the Air Force, because she called. You took another woman out on a date and let her kiss you because she put you in a corner.”
I grabbed my car keys from the counter and pointed toward the door. “Now I need you to leave because I might not know how to feel, and I might not know what I’m going to do, or how I’m going to raise a child by myself, but I do know that I’m done letting her make me feel like shit.”
Tristin glared at me, his chest heaving as he stood there looking like he didn’t know whether to kiss me or spank me, but then he did as I asked. He stormed out of my bedroom without another word, and I heard the clatter of the key I’d given him on the glass table at the front door before it slammed behind him.
A fresh round of sobs burst out of me, an emptiness like I’d never known before setting in. By the time I got to Shelley’s a couple of hours later, I’d finally managed to stop crying, but I still felt just this side of dead inside.
Shelley hugged me again, then made me a cup of coffee and led me to her backyard where Lou and her nephew, Damon, were catching fireflies. We sat down, and she reached over to squeeze my arm. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, wrapping my hands around the steaming cup and watching the steam skitter across the surface in the light breeze. “Wait, let me correct that. I want to talk about it, but I don’t know how. There’s nothing to say except that it was stupid to have gotten involved with him again.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” she replied gently. “You’ve loved that man almost your whole life. Giving love a chance can never be stupid.”
“It was in my case.” I sighed and glanced up at the stars above, then felt a searing pain in my heart when I remembered what Tristin had said about them on that yacht. “In all the years we’ve been apart, nothing has really changed. Not anything that matters, anyway. His life and his destiny are still his life and his destiny. It’s all been mapped out for him since before he was even conceived.”
“That doesn’t seem fair, though.” She lifted her cup to her mouth, taking a small sip as she stared off into the middle distance. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but did you give him a chance to explain? Was he cheating on you? Because I can’t help feeling that he’d never do that. Not after everything you guys have been through.”
“The way he tells it, he didn’t cheat on me,” I admitted. “Truth be told, I even believe him, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the same as what has always mattered. I’m not the girl who ought to be at Tristin Ramsey’s side, and I’m never going to be.”
Her face scrunched up. “That can’t be right. Where is this coming from? Who decided that you shouldn’t be at his side because it sure as hell doesn’t seem to have been him?”
“His mother.” My heart constricted when I thought about Selena winning again. “Before you tell me that he’s a grown man and that I shouldn’t care about what she thinks, it’s not like that with them. Those powerful families don’t work the same way we do, and his dad is sick. So there’s that.”
She didn’t respond immediately, but I could see she didn’t quite agree with what I’d said. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t even know if I agreed with me, so I couldn’t blame her for feeling the same way.
What I did know was that I wouldn’t let that poisonous woman anywhere near Lou. Not when she always seemed to come up with a way to stomp on me so effectively. If the press got wind of Tristin’s involvement with him and Selena managed to spin the story the way she always did… Yeah. No.
I couldn’t let that happen to him any more than I could allow it to happen to myself any longer. It simply wasn’t an option.
“Are you sure you don’t want him to sleep over tonight?” Shelley asked, nodding toward Lou and Damon. “They’re getting along really well. He’d be fine with us.”
“I know he would be, but I’d feel better if he was at home with me,” I said. “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t want to be alone tonight, and I don’t want him to be either. I need to explain about Tristin. He’ll be expecting him to come over later or tomorrow, and I’d rather he not feel like I’ve been hiding things from him.”
It was a conversation I was dreading, but it needed to take place. The most important thing would be making sure Lou knew it wasn’t his fault that we hadn’t worked out, but I was new at this, and I had no idea what to say to make him believe me.
But I had to figure it out—by myself—because that was how I would be from now on. And that? That freaking sucked.
