Free Boy (The Training House #2) by Eden Bradley

getting off the stuff.”
    “Of course,” she agrees. “Because that’s your strength.”
    “It didn’t fucking feel like it at the time. Or…maybe it did.”
    It comes back to me, then. The fear and the thrill. The dark and the flesh. The absolute goddamn powerlessness, and me taking my fucking power back, in grand form. I exhale, long and slow.
    “You know what got me to stop using heroine? One night when I was sixteen—I’d been using about a year—I was hustling at Balboa Park. This trick comes up to me, we negotiate my price to blow him, then I have him follow me to my favorite bush, and three other guys show up and fucking gang rape me. But you know what? The problem wasn’t being gang-banged against my will. The problem was that I liked it. And I knew I had to get my shit under control to figure that out, that I had to get off the drugs—out from behind the mask—to feel that again. That’s what really living is, you know? The shit with the fucking sparkle. You can’t have one without the other—not anyone I ever knew. Those people who think life is one or the other? They’re the ones who are missing out. Not us poor kinky fuckers. We have it all .”
    She curls hard into my side, her hands grasping at my chest, then hanging onto my shoulder, and I feel her hot tears on my skin.
    “Don’t, Aimée. Don’t you fucking feel sorry for me,” I growl, unable to keep the fury from creeping into my voice.
    “I’m not. I don’t. It’s not pity. But it’s still terrible, a terrible, hard way to grow up. And perhaps selfishly, it makes me think of my own childhood. We were both lost children, weren’t we? Even if it was in very different ways. When you’re a kid, it all amounts to the same thing—not having anyone to protect or care for you, not having that safety net. I suppose that’s part of my need to be a slave, too—having someone care for me. Or, taking care of me, even if all they want is for me to serve their needs. But I’ve been lucky, for the most part. It sounds like we both have, as far as our kink lives are concerned. Well, maybe me more than you. But don’t you find you get that out of it, at least at this point? No? Please don’t scowl at me—I didn’t mean to make any assumptions. I’m sorry.” She stops, sniffling, then another tear drops onto my skin, hot and melting its way into my chest. Into my heart, whether I like to admit it or not. “But Christopher,” she goes on, her voice so soft I can barely hear it, “I can still feel sad for what you’ve had to go through, can’t I?”
    “I don’t know. No one else ever has.”
    She lets out a breathy sigh, her fingers smoothing tentatively over my skin. “No wonder you’re so angry,” she says, still quiet.
    But I’m fucking pissed. Pissed at my past. Pissed that I feel like a goddamn victim having to talk about it, or maybe because someone is actually sympathetic to my fucking pathetic lot in life. I don’t like to feel pathetic. Anything but that.
    “Yeah. Fuck it. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
    She sits up suddenly, looking down at me, her green eyes gleaming softly in the twilight bathing our little stall. “Don’t,” she pleads. “It matters. It does. It matters to me.”
    “Why?” I still don’t have the rage under control. It’s not her. It’s simply there , an ancient part of me, like the rings on a tree, except those rings may as well be steel cables wrapped around my body, holding the deeply fermented ire in place.
    She’s watching me again, her brows furrowed, her lovely face all soft, elegant lines. “I don’t really understand it—why you make me feel the strange things I do. Things that are so new to me, so different, I don’t even know how to process it. All I know is, this feels important, meeting you, being with you. I have to ask myself, is this what I’ve been missing with my Masters, with my Mistress? With the men I’ve tried to have relationships with outside of kink?