His big hands worked around the front of me as the soap cascaded out of my hair and down my shoulders. He wasn’t so much cleaning my chest as he was playing with my boobs and making me pant.

“Do you think you would’ve taken the hand if one was offered to you when you were younger?”

One of his hands flattened on my stomach and I felt his lips land softly on the back of my neck. He reached past me to turn off the water.

“No. I was destined to be a screw-up from the start.” He shoved his hands through his wet hair, stepped out of the shower stall, and found a towel that he handed over to me. “My dad was in jail before I was born, my mom had a ninth-grade education and no desire to live beyond the trailer park. I was always the poor kid, the white-trash kid, and instead of being ashamed of it, I used people’s pity, their sympathy, to get what I wanted.”

I watched him carefully as he wrapped a towel around his waist and leaned back against the tiny vanity. He watched me just as closely as I rubbed the excess water out of my long hair. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and went on.

“When I started school and I realized all the other kids brought lunch or had meal plans and I didn’t, at first it made me sad.” He shook his head and his mouth pulled tight. “Then it made me mad that all those kids had something I didn’t, that I had a mom that couldn’t get her act together enough to feed me. I found a girl in my class. She was quiet, didn’t really have any friends because she was shy and kind of weird, and I spent all my time convincing her we were the best of friends.” His eyes flashed from gold to bronze and I could literally see him falling into the decades-old memory. It obviously didn’t sit right with him now if the way his shoulders tightened was an indication. “She was a sweet kid, a little slow, but she had a huge heart and came from a lot of money. She brought me lunch every single day until fifth grade.”

I wrapped the towel turban style around my head and went to move past him. But his fingers locked onto my wrist and he pulled me to a stop in front of him. He wanted me to hear this, he was always trying to pull the curtain back and show me the darkness that swirled inside of him. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I already knew he was made up of black marks and misdeeds and I just didn’t care about them.

“In fifth grade I started to understand that the other girls in class besides her thought I was cute, that if I gave more than one girl attention I could get more than just lunch. I told one she was the prettiest girl in class so she would do my homework, told another I would be her boyfriend so she would buy me clothes, let another sneak kisses so that she would take me out to eat at restaurants, not even fancy ones because there aren’t any in Woodward, Kentucky. Then was another girl, she was awful. Stuck up, mean and horrible to anyone that crossed her path but because her family had a pool and she would invite me over to swim I decided to start walking her home from school. I loathed her but I did it every day because she had something I wanted. I did all of that after coldly and callously ditching the first girl that had been so nice to me and so sweet to me for years. I just unceremoniously ditched her and didn’t care when other kids teased her or made fun of her even after she made sure I never went hungry. I wasn’t even a teenager yet and I was already that kind of guy.”

I shook his hold off and went into the living area so I could put on the clothes I had stuffed in my purse. I wiggled into a pair of skinny jeans and pulled on a cute, off-the-shoulder sweater over a tank top. I took the towel off and shook out my tangled hair as I dug around for my brush. Asa came out of the bathroom scowling at me, so I lifted an eyebrow in his direction and worked on making my hair manageable.

“What?” I made sure to keep my voice light because I could see he was just waiting for me to unleash a torrent of disgust and judgment at him and was unsure what to do with my indifference.

“That’s all you have to say about what I just told you?” He dropped the towel in jerky moves and walked naked to his closet. He really was perfect. Every long, lean line of his back, every flex and dimpled indent in his backside, the broad expanse of his toned shoulders … there was nothing about him that had any hint of imperfection. It was an interesting juxtaposition that such a beautifully crafted shell held so much ugliness and self-loathing on the inside.

“What do you want me to say? That you suck? That you were a total jerk and deserved what you eventually got? Do you want me to tell you that was a totally douche move not just to the first girl that gotten taken in by you, but even to the mean one because you were just using her, too? You know all of that, Asa. You might not have known it then, or not cared, but now you do, so me telling you what you already know is pointless.” Once my hair was mostly tangle-free, I pulled it into a loose ponytail at the base of my neck and dug around in my purse for my makeup kit. “Someone should have been around to take care of that little boy so he didn’t have to resort to that behavior in the first place.”

He pulled a faded black T-shirt on over his head and plopped down heavily on the bed so he could pull on his boots.

“No one made me do those things, no one taught me. I figured it out on my own, and by the time I was a teenager, I had learned every dirty trick there was in the book.”

I sighed at him and slicked a coat of lip gloss across my mouth. I crossed my arms across my chest and met his predatory look with one of my own. “Do you want to confess every single sin you’ve ever committed to me? Do you think it will scare me away or absolve you of past misdeeds? Because I have to tell you, neither of those things is going to happen.” I furrowed my brow at him and made my voice hard so he would know I was serious and told him pointedly, “I’m never going to dislike you as much as you dislike yourself, Asa.”

He got to his feet and moved toward me. He really did look like a big, wild cat stalking its prey as he prowled closer and closer. He stopped when we were almost touching but I refused to look or flinch away from him.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Red.”

I reached out a hand and put it right over the place in his chest where his heart was thundering. He was upset, but like usual I knew it was directed more inwardly than it was at me.

“Yes, I do, because I’ve been having a really hard time liking myself ever since Dom got hurt. I know how it feels and exactly what it looks like. Why do you think I was chasing after you so hard? I needed someone that wouldn’t tell me it was just an accident, that it wasn’t my fault. I needed someone that it was okay to feel bad with, and so do you. We aren’t always going to do the right things, make the right choices, and somehow you’re the only one I feel safe with coming to terms with that. You don’t judge me, you don’t try and make it better. You just let me feel bad while making me feel really good … I want to do that for you, too.”