He drove his fingers in her hair and wrenched her head back. “I want you to scream my name, Jaxx. I want to hear you scream it.” He raised one knee and tilted her hips slightly, allowing him to go that much deeper, and then he was plowing into her again. “Come for me right now!”
Her climax spiked and rippled through her shuddering body, completely fragmenting her. She screamed his name and a second later he was growling hers as he slammed home one last time and pulsed deep inside her. Then they both collapsed.
In that state where ‘awake’ wasn’t far off but opening your eyes felt like too much effort, Connor rolled over in bed to snuggle against Jaxx. His arm found nothing. The surprise of it – strange how waking up with her for a few mornings in France and then a couple here in his bed felt more familiar than a lifetime of waking up alone – made him squint. No, she wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was cold. He lifted only his head, intending to call her name, but movement in the corner caught his eye. There she sat on the stool that was usually kept in the bathroom. Two things registered: She was fully dressed, and she had a strange glint in her eyes. He lifted enough to support himself on one elbow. “Jaxx?”
“You once said that you nearly came to see me on my fifteenth. If you had gone to the Glennons’, I wouldn’t have been there. And if you had asked them where I was and then gone there, you wouldn’t have seen me with some boy. You’d have seen a police car.”
Aware that she was now about to open up to him, he sat up straight and gave her his full attention. Then what she said sunk in: she wouldn’t have been at the Glennons’? Police car?
Jaxxon clasped her hands together. “The night after you left, Nick Crawley’s gang turned up at the house. They wanted to know where you were and figured you wouldn’t have gone anywhere without telling me where. I guessed by the bruises and cuts Nick was covered in that you’d beat him senseless. A couple of his mates were in a similar shape – especially that Sean Beckett.” Who was still a sick shit and she could only hope he hadn’t found Celia and the little girl. “They knew I wouldn’t lie about where you were because they knew you wouldn’t have cared if they found you, so when I told them I didn’t know but that you’d be coming to see me they believed it.” So had she. “They kept cornering me outside school, wanting to know if you’d been in touch. I always had Leah with me and whatever boyfriend she had at the time so they never did much.”
He wanted to know what exactly she meant by ‘never did much’ but he didn’t want to interrupt her flow.
“But then, six months after you’d gone, she left. The day after that, Nick, who had reached the conclusion that if you hadn’t been in touch yet then you weren’t going to, cornered me outside school. I was on my own. He said that if he couldn’t give you the beating you’d given him, he’d settle on using me. Their plan was to take turns on me. What Nick wasn’t expecting was for me to fight. When I got a good opening I booted him in the bollocks and legged it. You remember how fast I was. When I ran into the Glennons’ with my hair looking like a bird’s nest, my clothes ripped and bruises already forming they were concerned. Until I mentioned Nick’s name. He was their nephew, remember. They didn’t phone the police, they phoned Social Services, made me out to be some Jezebel and said they wanted me moved.”
“Jaxx,” he said in a quiet voice, shaking his head, “I’m so sorry.”
She smiled a sad smile. “Why, are you a god? Did you make all that happen?”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you know I’m right. Anyway,” she paused and took a deep breath, aware that what she told him now might forever change how he looked at her, “I was supposed to go into a home – it’s not easy finding placements for troubled teenagers – but instead I ended up with this family who were religious fanatics. Other than taking their religion a little too far, they were alright. It was their son who was the problem. Obviously Matthew was the perfect Christian boy when his parents were around.”
The disgust as she talked about the boy said enough for him to guess what had happened. “He raped you,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “No. I let him do it.”
“But, Jaxx, why?”
“Because it was either I was a good girl and did what I was told, or he’d use the five year old girl who moved there the same day as me. And he would’ve done. It wasn’t about sex, it was about control and power. Teenager, kid, boy, girl – those details didn’t matter. To him, the foster kids in his house were toys. As long as I let him use me he left the others alone.”
“Didn’t you tell anyone?”
“You think anyone would have believed me after what the Glennons had said about me? And like I said, the parents only saw a good Christian boy. If you said anything about him you were punished.”
“But you told the Plod eventually? That’s why they came?”
“For the weeks running up to my fifteenth he kept saying he had a nice surprise for me, he was going to make sure it was a special night. I didn’t know what he meant, didn’t want to.”
Connor gritted his teeth. His fists were clenched so tight his knuckles were white.
“The night before my fifteenth I set my alarm for 2:30am to go meet him in the shed like he told me, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring my hand to even touch the bedroom door handle. It was about 3am when he finally came looking for me. I was in bed, pretending to be asleep. I could smell Vodka on him so he must have got trashed while he was waiting.” Even now the smell of Vodka triggered flashbacks. “It wasn’t ’til he got close that I saw the big knife. I honestly don’t remember thinking anything, I just reacted. I grabbed my art scissors from the desk near the bed and stabbed him in his side. His parents phoned the Plod, wanting me arrested. I didn’t tell the Copper everything, just that I saw someone breaking into my room and then the knife and acted on instinct. But he smelled the Vodka on Matthew and the good Christian boy couldn’t come up with an acceptable reason why he’d have a knife and be coming into my room at 3am. It turned out that some of the kids who’d been there before me had made a complaint about him so he’d already been on the Plod’s radar. A case was built and he was eventually prosecuted. I’d left foster care by then.”