15: DANICA

Zenon is salty, but he smells so fresh, almost like he washed in cologne. I lick the tip of his head, thinking about how he just pleasured me.

He's so good at what he does. Whereas, he often used to want to do that back then, I wouldn't allow him to. That was something so personal and intimate, and I knew that I couldn't commit to Zenon the way that my life was set up back then.

I'm scared.

I'm scared because Zenon wants things from me that I don't know if I'm capable of giving him. I want to give him everything that he asks of me, but what if I fail?

Then there's the fact that his daughter is coming soon. If she doesn't like me, that will present more problems. I would never want him to be with me if his daughter didn't approve of us being together.

I will never expect him to choose between her and me.

My jaws hollow out as I take him further and further down my throat. I look up briefly and see the heavy, lust-lidden eyes that watch me so carefully. Beyond the lust and the watchful gaze, I see the wariness.

He's afraid to trust me, but he wants to so desperately. Zenon is taking a risk on me that all logical and conventional thinking warns him against.

He knows that I'm a high-risk stake and that taking the bet on me could leave him empty and dry. Yet, I don't plan to mislead him or break him down the way that I did before.

Only I can't make any promises. I can only take it one day at a time.

Zenon locks one of his hands in my hair, and he tugs and pushes my head and tugs and pushes repeatedly, sliding me up and down the length of his dick.

With his other hand, he grabs his arousal and squeezes it, making it pulse in my mouth, eventually causing me to choke on it as it expands in width. My hands grip his balls, working him over repeatedly until I feel him pulsing hard inside of me.

Zenon pulls back and says, "I need to be inside of you. I'm about to cum," he says.

Tugging me to my feet, he turns me around to face the bed. Grabbing one of my legs, he props it up onto the bed and pushes my other foot wide with his foot.

"Wait," I say, looking over his shoulder. "Grab a condom."

Zenon nods and moves away from me while I hold the position. When he returns sheathed in protection, he wastes no time slipping inside of me.

My fingers clench the satin sheets of the unmade bed, pulling the covers towards me. His hand goes to my lower back, shoving me further into the mattress. I bury my face in the covers and enjoy the feel of his hard cock shoving inside of me.

Zenon rocks back and forth repeatedly, and my mind drifts away. It drifts to a time when things weren't so good, and I allowed my body to be used for rich men's pleasure.

I think about all the foul things I've allowed them to do to me, and nausea crawls up my throat. Tears sting at my eyes, and my nose begins to run.

Unable to hold back any longer, I release a loud, wracking sob.

It takes Zenon a moment to realize that something is wrong, and when he does, he slides out of me immediately, turning me over to look in my face.

I'm struggling with holding the cries inside, and I hiccup before I lose my breath. Another gut-wrenching cry pours out of me, leaving me silenced and winded. My mouth is open, but no sound comes forth.

"Dani, I'm sorry, baby. Did I hurt you?"

I can't even bring myself to assuage his concerns by saying no or shaking my head. Zenon gathers me into his arms, and it occurs to me that a woman like Amaris wouldn't have taken him through this.

A woman like Amaris would have him laughing and enjoying life, not picking up the pieces of her broken mess.

Yet, here he is holding me on his lap and rocking me as he makes soothing noises. I curl into a fetal position, and he only holds me closer, locking those large, powerful arms around me to contain my little body against his massive one.

When the noise from my wailing finally subsides, Zenon rests his chin on the top of my head.

"Want to talk about it?" he asks.

Although I shake my head no, I don't say anything for a long while.

My throat is sore, and my eyes are gritty. I want to drift off to sleep, but not like this and not without giving him an explanation.

It's not lost on me that he's still wearing his condom, and the stickiness of it covered in my juices is sticking to my ass cheeks.

"Come on, let's get you into the shower and then into bed," Zenon says.

A shudder runs through me, and my entire body shakes. Nothing could ward off this chill because it doesn't emanate from the cold.

Zenon lifts me into his arms and carries me to the bathroom. He stands me up and turns on the three showerheads coming from the tiled wall in three directions. The water is warm but he turns it up, recalling how much I loved hot water.

I think about all the men who never cared what I wanted or needed. They only cared about what they could extract from me, and how easily I could be discarded when they were finished.

I was not even worth an afterthought when they finished with me. I wasn't a memory they would hold close to their chest or think about in the aftermath of the devastating actions they'd taken. I wasn't an indelible mark scarred into the recesses of their brains that would make them regret their choices one day.

No, I wasn't anything like that to them.

Yet, that's all they were to me. An indelible mark that would scar me forever and prevent me from having a normal life.

The water heats up more and more, stinging and pelting my body. I close my eyes losing myself in the comfort of the heat as it washes away the day's grime but does nothing for the memories behind my eyes.

Zenon's hands do that; from the way that he soaps my body all over to how he massages my scalp as he works the shampoo into a lather and deeply into my hair and scalp.

Slowly, my head drops back, luxuriating in the way that his fingers bring me sweet relief. When he finishes washing and rinsing my hair and body, he leads me to sit on the shower bench.

I lean against the tiled wall as he washes himself. Minutes later, he grabs a few towels, wrapping himself in one and me in another. With the final towel, he wraps my hair and then carries me from his bathroom, down the hall, and across to the other side of the house.

Zenon lays me in my bed and then crawls in beside me. Holding me in his arms, he tells me, "I told you that I wasn't going anywhere, Dani. You mean the world to me, and I'll fight to make you know that. I'll fight to make you strong enough, stable enough, and loving enough to fight for yourself."

I sink further into his hold, but I still don't speak. Maybe tomorrow I can explain to him what my breakdown was all about, but not tonight.

I'm exhausted from the emotional trip that I just went on. It caught me off guard coming out of nowhere.

My mind flies to and fro as it searches for a resolution to my problem. In the past, it never got quite this bad. Not after the drugs, anyway.

Never after the drugs.

It was too easy to pop some pills, smoke a joint, drink some wine, and do a few lines of coke. Those things, or a combination of them, would always alleviate the pain, storing that old hurt and shame in a locked closet to be taken out and looked at another day.

Tonight, though, I don't have that option. I lick around the inside of my mouth, just desiring one drop of alcohol.

Lucky for me, there's none in this house. I could hop into the rented Jeep that I've been using on the island and head to a store like I did before.

No, I can't do that. I can't do that to me or to him.

As if he can read my thoughts, Zenon's arms wrap tighter around me, and he kisses my head.

"I'm not going anywhere, baby. Even when you're at your worst, I'll always have your back."

His voice is heavy now, and I know that in a short while, he will drift off to sleep. Zenon always fell asleep before me in the past.

Yet, it's me who begins to succumb to the prickly, grabby fingers of sleep. It's me who sinks further into his hold, yawning and fighting sleep.

As Zenon rubs his hand up and down my arm, I struggle to stay awake. Finally, my eyes close, and I smile softly, thankful that I made it through another day. Another day, the battle with drugs and alcohol did not consume me.

My eyes fly open at some point in the middle of the night, and I stare into the darkness. Zenon's arms tighten around me, and he mumbles something unintelligible in his sleep.

I turn around and lift slightly to look over his massive shoulder. The red digital lights on the alarm clock show that it's a little after three in the morning.

"Hey," he mutters when I lay down again.

Zenon's eyes are super heavy and laced with redness from sleep.

"Go back to sleep," I say through a yawn. "I'm fine."

His hands move up to lace into my hair.

"I'm sorry," he mutters sleepily.

"For what?"

"I don't know what I did to hurt you, but I'm sorry," he mutters through the fog of sleep.

"It wasn't you."

"Then who?"

"Go to sleep. I'll tell you in the morning."

"Sleep will always be here."

Sighing, I reach a hand up and touch his jaw. Stroking the silken hairs of his beard, I stare into those beautiful, light brown eyes of his.

"Talk to me, Dani. What happened?"

His voice is clearer than it was moments before.

"I had a flashback in the middle of us having sex. I tried not to, but I couldn't help it."

"What sort of flashback, Dani?"

"At some of the parties that we girls were expected to attend, we were traded around from one man to another. When I was barely eighteen, we would have Japanese visitors. We were expected to do special favors for these men. Enjo kōsai or enko is what they would call it when they would give us money or luxury gifts in exchange for sexual favors."

"What sorts of sexual favors?"

"In the beginning, we were just expected to keep them engaged with light conversation or sit by their side during meetings. That grew into fondling us to full-on sex. There were orgies, and there were times when I would be with two or three men at once. Some would beat us, call us all sorts of names, and have us be with other girls while they watched. Then there were the golden showers and..."

"And what?" Zenon coaxes.

I swallow hard unable to believe that I'm about to tell him this, or that I can even find the words to say it myself.

"There was the one time where one of the men..."

"One of the men did what, Dani?"

Closing my eyes because I cannot bear to see the disgust in his eyes when I tell him, I say, "He um..."

"Danica, open your eyes, sweetheart, and look at me."

I do, but then I turn my back to him.

"Why can't you look at me?"

"Because I can't stand to see what I'll see in your eyes when I say this to you."

Zenon tugs me over again and stares at me.

"Please, baby, trust me with your pain."

"He defecated on me."

Zenon doesn't close his eyes or look away from me. I don't see disgust in his eyes. The only thing that I see is the anger that radiates, and I know that it isn't against me but against the man who did it to me.

Slowly, the anger turns to love.

"I went back to my hotel room each time and scrubbed my body. The only thing that we were allowed to do was insist that they use condoms. But they didn't always adhere to that. Whenever that happened, which was three different times, I instantly went to the clinic to ensure that I didn't pick up anything. I've been lucky enough to not have any diseases despite the lifestyle that I was living.

"The night that man defecated on me was more than I could take. No amount of washing my body and pouring bleach onto my skin could prevent me from feeling tainted. I smelled shit in my nose for several weeks and woke up in cold sweats from nightmares for a long time after that."

"This was after you signed with L.A. Models?"

"I was no longer with them when this happened. I had completed a two-year contract and went off with someone I met in the industry who promised that he would be able to open doors for me to have a more lucrative career."

"Not long after that, I finished the year on the contract that I was under and was able to connect with someone who linked me to Ford Models. That's who I finished my career with by the time that I retired."

"Was all this taking place when we met?"

"No. That was in my late teens. When I met you, I was still engaged in a few arrangements with men like Johan Jurgen, O'Dell Perry, and Mike O'Shaughnessy. They did none of the things those other men did, but I was still plagued by that. They engaged in rough sex and sometimes had me have threesomes with them and some other woman or man, but none of the other things. It wasn't so bad, I guess," I say softly.

Zenon remains there, staring at me so quietly for such a long time. If it weren't for his eyes being open, I would think that he'd fallen asleep. I eventually wonder if he has fallen asleep with his eyes open.

He breaks the silence after a while. His words relax me.

"I'm so sorry those monsters took advantage of you, Dani."

"I allowed it, Z. I let them use me and abuse me all for something so superficial. I did that to myself, Zenon. And do you know why?"

Zenon shakes his head as he wipes my tears away with the pads of his thumbs.

"Because I didn't know how to love myself. That's why I can't give all of me to you. I need to learn to be enough for myself first before I can be enough for anyone else."

Zenon presses a kiss on my forehead.

"You're already more than enough for me, Dani. I love you."

I close my eyes, looking forward to the day when, hopefully, I can return the sentiment. But I'm not there now.