Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Ruin Me
After Brady's loud, rough night in his father's guest room, Jessa goes down for water and finds Forrest in his study listening to her secret voice with his hand on himself; upstairs she finds Brady's bet, leaves him at 2 a.m., and on the dark highway Forrest's truck starts playing her voice.
Brady had never fucked me like that before.
Two years together, and he'd never once made the headboard hit the wall.
Usually he was done in two minutes and asleep in three, and I lay there counting ceiling cracks.
Tonight he drove into me hard and fast.
"Louder," he kept saying into my ear. "Come on, Jess. Let me hear you."
So I gave him loud.
When he finished, he rolled off me laughing and reached for his phone before he reached for me.
We were in the guest room of his father's farmhouse, on the Ledford distillery outside Versailles, Kentucky.
His dad turned forty-seven tomorrow.
His aunt Lettie was throwing the birthday dinner, and Brady had driven me out for it.
I lay there sticky and wide awake while his thumbs flew across the screen.
"I'm getting water," I said.
He didn't look up.
I pulled on his old Ledford Bourbon T-shirt and went down the stairs barefoot.
The house was dark except for a line of gold under the study door.
Then I heard a woman's voice behind it.
Low. Warm. Out of breath.
"Please, Daddy. I've been so good. Don't make me wait anymore."
I stopped on the last stair.
I knew that voice better than anyone alive.
It was mine.
Episode twelve of Ruin Me. I'd recorded it last spring in my bedroom closet, wrapped in moving blankets, with my honey tea going cold by my knee.
Nobody in this house knew I was Honey Vale.
Nobody in the world knew, except my roommate Marlee and the man who owned the name, Lyman Ritchie.
The study door stood open a hand's width.
I should have walked past it.
I looked.
Forrest Ledford sat in a cracked leather wingback under one green lamp, with walls of books climbing into the dark behind him.
His head was tipped back against the leather. His eyes were closed.
His flannel shirt hung open. His belt was undone and his jeans were pushed down his thighs.
His big hand was wrapped around his cock, moving slowly.
As slowly as my voice.
On the speaker I whispered, "Tell me what you want."
His breath caught on the line, right on time.
I had met this man maybe six times. He'd shaken my hand at Christmas and asked how the roads were. He'd carved the ham at Easter.
In two years he'd said maybe forty words to me.
Now I stood in the dark and watched him stroke himself to my voice.
I didn't move.
His jaw was tight. A vein stood up along his forearm. His stomach tensed every time his hand came up.
My recorded voice moaned.
He groaned under it, low and rough, and I felt it between my legs.
The stair creaked under my foot.
His eyes opened.
He looked straight at me.
For one long second neither of us moved, and my own voice kept begging on the shelf behind him.
Then he reached out and stopped the speaker, and the study went silent.
He didn't scramble. He covered himself slowly.
"Jessa," he said.
I ran back up the stairs.
Brady was sitting against the headboard, grinning at his phone. He didn't even hear me come in.
The screen faced the door.
A group chat, him and three of his college friends.
The first message was from yesterday. "$500 says the old man hears her through the grate."
The next ones were from tonight.
"Told you. Grate goes straight to his study. Old man heard every second."
"Venmo'd. You're a sick man."
"Does she know?"
Brady had answered that one. "She doesn't know anything. That's the best part."
Then, one more. "He cut me off today. Let him sit down there and listen to what he can't have."
I looked at the floor.
In the corner by the dresser, where Brady had kicked the rag rug aside this afternoon, sat an old iron grate about a foot square.
Through the bars I could see a slice of green lamplight.
"Louder, Jess. Let me hear you."
Brady glanced up. "Hey. You get lost?"
I pulled his T-shirt over my head and dropped it on the grate.
"Whoa. Okay." He grinned wider. "Round two?"
I put on my bra. Then my jeans. Then my cream cardigan, buttoned all the way up.
"Jess. What are you doing?"
"You made a bet."
His grin slipped. "You read my phone?"
I spoke in my good voice, the one I use on the microphone, clear enough to carry through any floor in that house.
"Five hundred dollars says the old man hears her through the grate. She doesn't know anything. That's the best part."
He turned red from the neck up.
"Babe. It's a joke. It's the guys."
"Then laugh."
I zipped my bag.
"It's two in the morning," he said. "We're in the middle of nowhere. You don't have a car."
"I have feet."
"You're being dramatic. Come back to bed. You loved it. I heard you."
I stopped in the doorway.
"Brady, you've never heard me do anything I didn't want you to hear."
I walked out.
Forrest was standing in the front hall in his work boots.
His shirt was buttoned to the collar now. His truck keys were in his hand.
He didn't look at my face. He looked at my bag.
"I heard," he said quietly. He glanced at the ceiling. "That grate goes both ways."
Heat crawled up my neck.
"I'll drive you to Louisville."
"I'll call a ride."
"Nearest one's in Lexington. At two in the morning, that's an hour, and you'll wait for it on my porch." He held the front door open. "Or you get in the truck."
Upstairs, Brady yelled my name.
I got in the truck.
For ten miles neither of us said a word.
Black horse fences slid past in the headlights. He kept both hands on the wheel.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. "You shouldn't have seen that."
"Which part?"
He didn't answer.
At the interstate ramp his phone found the truck's speakers.
The dashboard lit up blue. Ruin Me. Episode 12.
And my voice poured out of every speaker in the cab, right where he'd stopped it.
"Don't stop, Daddy. Don't you dare stop."
He grabbed for the screen and missed. He hit it on the second try.
Silence.
Then he looked at me, really looked, the way nobody in that family ever had.
"Say something," he said.
I didn't.
His hands tightened on the wheel.
"Jessa. That's you."
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