Morally Imperfect: A Bully Romance (The Bully Project Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 3

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Kids on the block

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  EPILOGUE

  Stay Connected

  Kids on the block

  Sometimes life carefully unveils itself. Layer by layer. Unfolding into something simple, something manageable. Sometimes, life doesn’t take its time. It rears the ugliest parts of itself and wails ‘here the fuck I am. You’re not properly equipped, physically or emotionally, but you’re gonna have to deal with me anyway.’ That’s been the story of my life for forever, and I guess, at this point, I’m prepared for the ‘for always’.

  Two hours, sixteen minutes and five seconds ago, I killed my sister. My twin sister. With my bare hands. Held her head under water and struggled against her while she struggled for breath.

  Two hours, sixteen minutes and six seconds ago, I knew a kind of hate that I never thought could ever be a part of me.

  Two hours, sixteen minutes and seven seconds ago, I became the monster under my own damn bed.

  I’ve been counting down the seconds ever since it happened, unsure of what to do or where to run to. Outside of home, there really isn’t much of anywhere else to go. I know, however, that I can’t go there. It’s not that I think my mother will see the guilt plastered all over my face, or catch a whiff of the scent of murder that I can’t seem to avoid. What I’m afraid of, is that just like always, she won’t know that a damn thing is wrong. That I’ll tell her that Sara-Lee is gone, and she’ll look at me with the same dead look she’s carried in her eyes ever since I was nothing more than a kid.

  I sit with my knees in the sand, the cold breeze stale against my skin despite the sharpness of its chill. There’s a cop to my right and one to my left and a mass more of them closer to the beach. A blow up boat slips between the shallow waves and another floats deeper out. They’re searching, but they’re not finding a damn thing. Tears sting my eyes as I watch them. I am guilty, but they haven’t smelled the guilt on me yet.

  When the cop with the messy red hair reaches down to me for the third time tonight, those tears still don’t slip. Maybe it’s because I want him to question it; to wonder why a brother who lost his sister - his twin sister - wouldn’t be sending guttural cries out into the universe.

  “Son,” he says, “are you sure she didn’t wander back onto the beach when you weren’t looking?”

  I’m surer than he could ever begin to imagine. But I won’t tell him that. Of course I won’t. I might have done something that not even a third of the population would ever think of finding the strength to do, but I’m still nothing more than a coward.

  “She was just there. Beside me,” I say. My voice sounds strange, even to my own ears, making it hard to wonder if he can hear that I’m lying. If he can hear just how much it pains me to lie. “And then she wasn’t,” I continue, my tone clipped, my breaths coming in shorter now. Maybe I do look like I’m grieving. It wouldn’t be hard to believe, because in all honesty, I am.

  I struggle to find my way to my feet, not accepting the assistance of the cop’s outstretched hand. The last thing I need is for anyone to be nice to me. A part of me is fucking livid that I’m not being accused. I’ve watched enough detective shows to know that guys like this feed on the guilt of both the innocent and the guilty. It doesn’t matter what you did or did not do, they’ll make you feel like just by being there, you are in the wrong. They’re struggling hard to play that role with me now. It shouldn’t suck, but it does. So much so that I almost want to scream the words at them. “I killed her. I killer her. I fucking killed her.” But I don’t. I can’t. I’m not brave enough or strong enough and life sure as shit didn’t do a damn thing to prepare me for this moment.

  Raking stiff fingers through my hair, I tilt my head a little to the right and catch a glimpse of Cornelia. She’s got a blanket draped over her shoulder and four consoling hands promising her that everything will be alright. They’re not wrong. She’ll be alright. She always has been, even when she didn’t know it.

  I wonder, but only for a moment, what that must feel like - knowing that your problems are only ever momentary. That life might suck for now, but it won’t suck forever. You see, Cornelia doesn’t have the kind of demons that I have. Kids like me picked on her, pushed her around a bit, called her names, made her feel like she was less than. But there’s a big world out there, ready to prove to her that we were all wrong. She’ll shine just like she was always meant to. I’m happy for her, but I’m also green with envy.

  Eyes point in my direction and feet start to stomp. They’re moving closer to me now. Cornelia. The cop. Cornelia. The cop. Somehow, it’s her that I fear the most. But I guess that makes sense, doesn’t it? I don’t exactly know how much she knows; how much she saw. It’s possible that she’s aware of exactly what it is that I have done. Maybe she’s more fucked up than I think she is. Maybe she wanted Sara to die. Maybe she gets some kind of female boner out of the fact that it was me who killed her. Or maybe - and most likely - she doesn’t know a damn thing. She’s always had that kind of innocence about her. Always thought the best of the worst kind of people.

  “Marcus,” she starts, when she’s only a few feet away from me. This isn’t exactly the time for nonchalance. I can’t play it cool and pretend that I’m ‘Marcus Heartthrob’, the bully, the badass, the unbendable and unbreakable because right now, I haven’t just cracked. I have broken. Into so many pieces that I know that when I get the chance to take a look, I won’t recognize myself.

  “We should call your mom,” Cornelia says. She’s not wrong. She’s also not right, of course.

  I shake my head. Of all the things to feel right now, embarrassment shouldn’t be one of them, so why is it that that is exactly what I feel?

  The cop beside me, the one who’s had his hand on my shoulder this entire time, inches back just a little. From his pocket, he pulls a brick of a cellphone and extends the device in my direction. I look at it like it’s something alien to me. “She’s at work,” I say.

  Cornelia shakes her head. She knows that I’m lying because she, just like almost everyone in this town, knows that the only work my mother does is pushing a needle into her veins. Still, the truth remains that she won’t be up for conversation. Won’t even understand the severity of what has happened.

  “She’ll want to know,” the cop assures me.

  A laugh, drier than sawdust rumbles from my throat. “Really?” I hiss. “What mother wants to hear that her daughter’s dead?”

  The color drains from the cop’s face and I immediately feel like an ass. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s just trying to help. As for me, I don’t really have the right to be an ass, but here I am, being one anyway. I almost hate how natural it comes to me.

  “You have to call her, Marcus,” Cornelia insists. She’s got her hands on me now, the softness of her palm doing the opposite of comforting me. When she moves even closer to cup my face between her palms, a switch flicks inside of me and all of a sudden, it feels l
ike the entire world has been turned on its head. Tears, hot and heavy, pummel down my cheeks. My lungs struggle for breath and my hands scratch at my throat in an attempt to assist the air on its quest to enter my lungs. I can hear voices, up close and in the distance, but they’re all just as much of a mess as the chaos in my head.

  “Help me,” I want to scream. “Somebody, please.” It feels like I’m suffocating. Like I’ve somehow swallowed my conscience without realizing that it was too big to go down. The entirety of it seems to be lodged in my throat and no matter how much I scratch, I can’t seem to get it out.

  More hands are on me now. Someone’s insisting that I’m in shock. Someone’s calling for the paramedics. And Cornelia. Poor, poor, poor, Cornelia. She’s trying like hell to hold it together. Trying to be strong. But I can hear in her voice that she is breaking. I might have been trying to save her from something here. I might have been trying to protect her. But as her voice cuts through the other voices, I’m not sure that this won’t ruin her just as much as the very thing I was trying to protect her from.

  A bearded man in a smooth black uniform drops to my side and meets me eye to eye, telling me to breathe. Slowly...in. Slowly...out. Cornelia, to my right, grips my hand like I mean something to her. If my heart wasn’t already broken in two, it would crack right down the middle because of the gesture.

  Why couldn’t this have been how we spent the last few years? Why did everything have to go to shit so royally? The answer is me. She has no blame in any of this. I know that and if I were to ask her, she would blame me too.

  I listen to the paramedic and try my damnedest to control the way my breaths hit my lungs. Slowly...in. Slowly...out. Cornelia’s hand in mine is somewhat of an anchor and I hold on to it for as long as she’ll let me, fully content with spending the rest of my life on this beach breathing in and breathing out with her hand in mine because right now, the world at least blurs at the edges just a little bit. Right now, the weight of what I’ve done doesn’t feel so hard to bear.

  Chapter One

  Marcus was gone. Right before my eyes, the car rolled away, leaving me feeling nothing short of conflicted. Never, not in a million and one years did I ever expect to feel like him walking away wasn’t for the better.

  Ten minutes must have gone by without me moving an inch. All these years I’d told myself that there wasn’t a single thing I could and would and should ever want from him and here I was, standing, hoping that by the grace of something holier than I, he would return and lay the truth at my feet.

  “Cornelia,” the voice of the man who I gave my heart to not too long ago, was no more than a whisper to my ears when usually, every word he said, no matter how quiet, would bounce excitedly against my eardrums.

  Maddox’s hand touched my shoulder and carefully, he spun me around to face him. Had it not been for him reaching out a thumb to trail the tears down my cheek, I wouldn’t have known that I was crying. And perhaps those cries wouldn’t have turned into sobs. Pulling me further into his arms, he held on to me, like he was afraid. Like he had something to fear. Like maybe he thought I was slipping away.

  “Closure,” I told him, not untangling myself from his hold. “I was fine when I thought I didn’t need it, but now…” The words were an admission just as much as they were a reassurance. The last thing he needed was to think that he was losing me to my past.

  “Robert said he left,” Maddox said, his voice strained. “And he did so, leaving you with more questions than answers.” Better words could not have been found and so, I didn’t try to find them. Instead, I nodded and trusted that just like before, everything would fade until it hardly existed anymore. It would take some time, yes. Even as an adult, there were parts of my life that Marcus haunted. Now that he’d walked right back into my life – despite how little time he spent, I knew that it would take some time for me to completely rid myself from thoughts of him.

  Maddox wrapped his arms tightly around me and we stood like that for a short while, just allowing time to pass. When finally I felt like I’d caught my fair share of breaths, I gestured for him to go inside. He didn’t hesitate, bending where I needed him to bend, without any pushback at all. A part of me wondered how long things would be like that.

  Maddox was all man, bold and fearless, the one who bent things at his will, not the one who bent for someone else. Yet, that was the case now. A part of me didn’t care because right now was all that mattered.

  His hand in mine brought enough comfort for me to slide a small smile into place. One foot in front of the other, I tackled the journey through the bold front doors and stepped inside the house. There, Robert was still explaining to the others that Marcus had packed up his things and decided not to go through with filming. He continued talking, trying to make an enemy out of Marcus. He was going on about my past, telling them things that he had no right to tell them about. That I was bullied. That there was nothing of substance holding Marcus’ cruelty together and once challenged he retreated like a turtle into its shell.

  “But who knows,” Robert added, “maybe there’s a chance that he’ll change his mind. Maybe he’ll come back and try to erase the image that he left here. Who knows?”

  For a second, I contemplated stepping in to defend both myself and Marcus, but then thought, what the hell would be the point? I was supposed to be on a journey to forgetting. I was supposed to be falling even deeper in love with Maddox, and Robert had already done enough to try to put a bridge between us. Sure, it was all a part of the show…which was exactly the problem, wasn’t it? Everything I said could be twisted and right now, I didn’t want to take my mind down that path and give Robert another opening to put a dent in something that felt so whole and right.

  To say that I was impatient for this show to come to a close, would be putting it lightly. That might have been a little ungrateful, yes. After all, I would have never found Maddox without it.

  “Now that that’s out of the way…let’s get on with the proceedings for the day.”

  Maddox tugged on my arm and I’ve never been more grateful to see that look of mischief in his eyes.

  “What do you say we get out of here? Skip out on whatever it is he has to say?”

  “I’d say that’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while.”

  “Wanna bet I can do even better?”

  I arched a brow at him in question.

  “Day drink,” he said and managed to win my heart all over again.

  Sometimes it’s the little things. Topped with a shot or two of Vodka. There was no fighting him on the suggestion. Once more, I put one foot in front of the other and allowed Maddox to lead the way.

  For the first time, I didn’t give a damn about the eyes that followed me as I left and when Robert called out to us, Maddox raised a hand, silencing him in a way that only a man like Maddox could.

  “Not now, Robert,” he said and squeezed my hand in his. The gesture was just about the most reassuring thing to ever happen to me in my life.

  Maddox.

  My love.

  My protector.

  Did I really need closure or a dance from the past if I had him? Would things fade just that much faster with him by my side? All of those thoughts pounded through my mind as we made our way up to the bedroom.

  Each step felt a little bit easier to take with Maddox being there to support them. And when the bedroom door closed behind us, I felt like I could breathe freely again.

  “Thank you for that,” I said, still grasping his hand in mine.

  A small smile brushed against Maddox’s lips. “You never ever have to thank me for protecting you,” he whispered. “Now, get changed so that I can struggle to keep it together as you walk out of this room.” His words came across with all the connotations they should have. And just like that, Maddox had shifted the tone of things without even a drop of alcohol being necessary.

  I sauntered in one direction and Maddox sauntered in the other. Despite the fact that our need for a
lcohol had diminished a little, we were still on our way to getting drunk, after all. But first, I needed a bikini.

  It took Maddox all of three minutes to slip out of his clothes and into swim shorts, beating me by a mere minute. My polka dot two piece hugged my curves in all the right places and as I looked in the mirror, for one of the first times in my life, I didn’t feel the strong-hold of my self-confidence. I felt beautiful. Desirable. Wanted.

  As soon as I’d inched my way closer to Maddox, I remembered exactly how all of this started and why it was so easy for me to not question my appeal when I was around him. Like a predator, his eyes zoomed in on me and before I knew it, my body was being attacked by his hands. In less than a second, he had me up against the door, all masculine in the way he hooked a leg between my thighs and impatiently rubbed at my center with his knee.

  “You’re making leaving this room impossible,” he grunted.

  I giggled like a love stricken school girl and felt as heat spread across my cheeks and then lower. “We had plans.”

  “And those plans have changed.” It wasn’t up for debate and he made certain of that by covering my mouth with his, halting any words that might have wanted to leave my lips in protest.

  There was no questioning just how wickedly my body reacted to Maddox. I was dripping wet within an instant and if he didn’t stop doing that damn thing with his knee, if he didn’t stop nibbling on my nipples like he was a man starved, I was going to come before he even had a chance to slip a finger into my bikini bottoms.

  “Maddox,” I moaned, trying to touch him, needing to feel the firmness of him against my palm, but he was having none of that. Throwing my hands above my head, he weaved his fingers into mine and tightened his grasp so that I didn’t stand a chance against him.