Puppet Master

Chapter Nine

The coffee had obviously gone cold.

It’d been twelve hours since he’d fucked her over. For the last time, she assured herself. She’d sat in her bed for the first three, staring at the ornate dresser, at the seemingly innocent looking plastic tub of scented moisturiser, all the remnant elements of her first sexual experiences, all the pieces of evidence that he’d actually been there, flesh and blood pulsing in this very room, that she’d not been inciting some wayward daydream, or all night and then this morning early daytime dream.

She’d ran her hands across her toned abdomen, marvelling at the aching muscles inside her, where he’d been hours before, and she’d felt floods of tears pool in puddles at the base of her neck, not caring to wipe them away, or even put on her robe.

She’d given him her body, her soul, to go along with the heart that she’d longed ago emotionally carved his name into. She’d finally made love with the man of her dreams, her fantasies, her protector. The man she’d been crazy in love with for most of her life. She’d been making love, while he’d popped over for a fuck.

To assuage the most basic of needs – lust. A need that had no room in the rabbit hole of Wonderland that was her rampant love for him.

She realised then, how pathetic this was, how useless it was to be in love with a man who ran from you. How pathetic it really was for her to flounder in puddles of her own fucking tears because, for whatever reason, he’d rejected her. Again.

She was twenty years old, she had a career, a future. If that didn’t include Jayden Caine, she could live with that. Just about. Or she hoped so ... No. She would not doubt herself, the only stable presence in her own life, she would not let him rule that, take her own strength from her. She’d worked too bloody hard for it!

And her steely resolve had her launching the offensive tub of moisturiser at the antique replica dressing table, the mirror reverberating until it reflected nothing more than the surface of the wood, at close range. In about twenty fractured pieces.

She stripped the sheets from the bed in a rage, dragging them, piled a foot and a half over her line of sight, into the large kitchen waste bin, still bare ass naked with a red blush across the seat of her behind.

Finally, she donned her white fluffy robe, marching around her lounge intent on scrubbing every last piece of Jayden from her apartment.

By two in the afternoon, she had set up an easel in front of the large picturesque window in the lounge area (she’d dragged her desk into a discreet corner, piled canvases upon it, and resolved to forget it was anything but storage for a future masterpiece), and it was there that she sat, with angry strokes of blazing colour across the piece in front of her, at ten o clock in the evening, more than eight hours later, when there was a furious thumping at her front door.

Obviously it was him. She’d expected him.

“So there are things in this life that you give enough of a shit about to come back for,” she remarked, with a sarcastic tone she’d never used with him before, a malice running through her words that would never have reared its head earlier in their relationship. But then again, he’d never fucked her and fucked off before, running from the flat like his ass was on fire, and she was a can of petrol waiting to get too close.