“Elaborate, please,” I said.

“Are you asking for a head count?”

“Yes.” As soon as I said it, I wanted to change my answer.

“Are you going to give me one?” she asked, brow arched defiantly.

“I don’t have an exact number.”

“Do you have a ballpark estimate?”

I swallowed. The answer would not work in my favor. “Fuck, Tenley. I don’t know. I didn’t keep a journal chronicling my sexual exploits. I’ve done a lot of shit I’m not proud of. I don’t need written documentation to prove how much of a deviant I’ve been.” I took a step closer and she stiffened, so I stopped. “I’ve always rebelled against normal codes of behavior. Even when I was a kid with great parents who gave me just about anything I asked for. I have always pushed the boundaries. Socially, physically, sexually, all of it.” I needed to shut the fuck up before I said something that would make her run, or worse. But at the same time, part of me wanted to be done with pretending that the way I was with Tenley was the way I’d always been. She was different; she made me different. Better. She had to see that.

“What does that even mean?” she asked on a whisper.

“It means I didn’t follow the normal rules.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Do you really want details? Because I’m pretty sure you’d be much happier without them.”

“And I’m not sure I agree with you. Do you know how it felt to walk into my friend’s house and be bombarded by an entourage of women you’ve clearly been with?”

“I would hardly call it an ‘entourage.’ ”

“Oh no? Just out of curiosity, how many people at that party have you slept with? I counted five.”

She was spot on, but admitting it didn’t seem all that smart. “I didn’t sleep with any of those women.”

“Semantics, Hayden. Sex, fucking, whatever you want to call it, it amounts to the same thing.”

“Like hell it does!”

“What’s the difference? They get off, you get off, everybody’s happy,” she said acidly.

“I was never happy!” I shouted. “Shit.” I ran my hands through my hair, paced the length of her kitchen, and tried to calm the fuck down.

Tenley chewed on her nails, staying safely on the opposite side of the counter. I couldn’t blame her. I was acting like a psycho.

I took a deep breath. “I’m not doing a very good job explaining myself.”

“Or answering my questions.”

“Look, this isn’t a topic I’ve had to discuss before. I’m not exactly comfortable with it.”

“Maybe not, but tonight might have been easier if I hadn’t been blindsided,” Tenley fired back.

I threw my hands up in the air. “What did you want me to say? ‘I fucked this stripper back in the day. She likes to make my life hell by not letting me forget it. I hope you’re cool with that. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, there might be several women at this party that I’ve fucked before, too, but no biggie, they were just one-timers.’ Excuse me if I wasn’t all that excited to share those lovely details with you.”

Tenley looked shocked, and a little repulsed, which was the reason I didn’t want to tell her in the first place.

“Sienna is a stripper?”

“Was. Now she’s just a slut.”

She grimaced, like my words left a bad taste in her mouth.

“And you only had sex with her once?”

She looked so goddamn hopeful. It was like being stabbed in the chest with a rusty butter knife. I wanted to be able to answer in the affirmative. It would make things so much easier if I could say yes, but I’d omitted enough truths.

“Not exactly.”

She glared at me.

“I don’t usually do repeat offenses.”

“Excuse me?”

“That came out wrong.”

“You better hope it did,” she snapped. And this was why I wanted to be with her—for all of her naivete and her tragic past, she was still so full of fire.

“I was with Sienna more than once. We didn’t have a relationship, but she let me do raunchy shit with her and she didn’t mind tag-a-longs, so I kept it up for a while. Usually they were one-shot deals.” I cringed at how awful it sounded.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were they usually one-shot deals?”

“Because that was all it was.” I had no desire to explain any further.

“Elaborate, please.” She threw my words back at me.

I took a step closer, the urge to touch her almost debilitating. “After my parents died, I didn’t give a shit about anyone but myself. I didn’t want to connect with anyone, and I was fucked up on enough booze and drugs to make it easy to avoid falling into that trap. If I never went back for an encore, then I didn’t have to worry about someone wanting more than I had to give.”

“But you slept with Sienna more than once.”

I paused, caught up in memories from the past. I didn’t want to tell Tenley about the shit I did. I was snorting through my paychecks faster than I could cash them. Jamie, who was also working for Damen at the time, started talking about opening his own shop, but he didn’t have the money to go it alone. Even with Chris, they couldn’t manage it. There was all this money I couldn’t touch until I was twenty-one, and another chunk that would be freed up at twenty-five. My dad was a smart fucker in that respect. He set things up so that I wouldn’t piss it all away if something happened to them. He probably knew from the beginning how badly I would fuck things up when left to my own devices.

Nate and Jamie essentially saved my ass from becoming a brain-dead cokehead. I signed over temporary control of my finances to Nate so I could buy what eventually became Inked Armor. Jamie was the one who cut off the coke. Chris made sure I stayed clean. Nate ensured I didn’t piss away my money. But it came with a cost, because I couldn’t cope without vices. Sienna filled that role. Or rather, I filled her. Whenever. Wherever.

“Sienna and I fucked. That was it. And yes, it was more than once, but it wasn’t like either one of us was particularly attached. It wasn’t monogamous. She was up for pretty much anything. I was twenty and looking for ways to deal with my shit. I needed another outlet. It worked for a while, until I got bored and she got . . . whatever she got. Then she fucked Chris and we instituted the rule.” It was the only thing we brought with us from Art Addicts to Inked Armor.

“Chris had sex with her?” Tenley seemed disturbed by the idea.

“A couple of times.”

“And you were okay with that?”

“No. I wasn’t okay with it at all, but I couldn’t do anything about it after the fact.” I’d been furious with Chris. He was one of my closest friends. It had felt like a betrayal. I expected it from Sienna; that was how she worked, but never Chris.

“And that was it, then? You were done with her?”

“Not quite.”

I went back, again and again. For years. I went months without seeing her, and then she’d magically appear at Inked Armor asking for touch-ups or whatever bullshit excuse she could come up with. Other times I’d cave and end up at The Dollhouse looking for some kind of release from the endless fucking torture of living in my head.

She would be there, promising no boundaries, telling me it was okay that I was angry with her and she would make it up to me. And like a fucking idiot, I bought it. Every time. Desperate for the escape. It took me almost four years to finally get a clue and stop feeding into the bullshit. My uncle would probably have a field day with that if he could ever shrink-ify me. So far I had evaded his offers for therapy. I already knew I was fucked up. I didn’t need to pay someone to tell me that.

Tenley looked dumbfounded. “Why would you go back?”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

But that wasn’t it at all. Sienna was all I thought I deserved. She reaffirmed my inherent sense of worthlessness, because she suffered the same affliction.

“But it’s been more than a year since I’ve been with her,” I explained, wanting to be sure Tenley knew I was done with all that.