Prey (Primal #1)

24

W e lay together in her single bed as I plotted to buy her a double bed and bring it up here to surprise her. This won’t be the end. I wanted more.

She fell asleep quickly because I exhausted the little thing, but she felt like heaven over my cock – her scent, the look on her face, everything was sublime. I wanted her bare and vulnerable to siphon out Annika, but all I saw and felt was Riley. I’d know if I kissed her, though. I’d know if Riley Laws was Annika if I tasted her, but I couldn’t remove this fucking mask as it would give my game away.

With every thrust into her warm, wet pussy, I thought of Annika’s flirtatious smiles, fluttering eyelashes, and long, wavy blond hair that drove me fucking crazy every time she swung her head around. Her touch and movements were Annika, but so many other features were Riley. The tone of her voice and laughter was Annika, and her mannerisms were Riley.

I couldn’t sleep and stared at the ceiling until the morning light suffocated the darkness, rolled out of bed, slipped my clothes on, and went to the bathroom. The fucking mask was itching my skin, and I took it off while I was in the stall and splashed cold water over my burning skin. The compression mask was unbearable to wear long-term, so I decided to discard it after I bought it. Whatever, the ski mask worked.

When I returned, Riley was sitting up with the blankets pulled up over her breasts, glasses on her pretty face, brown hair flowing over her naked shoulders, and wearing a tight smile as if she was worried about how I was going to treat her. Yeah, I bet she’s been the victim of the ‘fuck her and leave her’ scenario.

I smiled to reassure her, then was frustrated by the damn mask covering my mouth and tugged at it, wanting to remove it, but I couldn’t risk it yet.

“You said it hurts that you can’t kiss me,” her sweet, fearful voice and furrowed brow moved me and stirred something within my core that I couldn’t quite explain.

Until now, my number one motivation was to peel back layers to find Annika, but I only saw Riley and how I felt touching her. I was steadily falling for her charm, that dimple in her cheek, and how I made her pant and scream last night. It got me hot thinking about it.

“It did,” I replied, sitting beside her over the blankets. “It hurt like fucking hell. It hurts now because I want to kiss you so bad.”

She bit her bottom lip and gazed up at me under those glasses, and I pressed my lips against her temple, and all she could feel was the fucking wool.

“I saw tattoos,” she said, and I knew she was hinting at me taking my top off to give her a tour of my ink. I patted my upper arm, checking that the bandage was still there, covering the tatt of Annika, which I couldn’t let her see.

“I have a few,” I answered.

“Can I see?” she asked bashfully as fear clouded her eyes, expecting me to turn her down.

I hesitated before pulling my sweatshirt off again, and her mischievous green eyes ran all over my naked chest, arms, and back as she licked her bottom lip, and the heat rose in my pants again.

She leaned forward, still hugging the sheets, and I could see her naked backside making an hourglass curving up to her waist. There was a mole on her left shoulder blade in the shape of a tiny heart, and I remembered Annika having one similar. I saw it on various occasions when we’d go swimming in the backyard pool or when she wore a singlet top and tied her lustrous hair up into a ponytail.

Even though I liked Riley’s hand moving over my arms, inspecting my ink, my focus kept returning to that heart-shaped mole.

“Is that a new tattoo?’ she asked, referring to the bandage wrapped around my bicep.

“No,” I lied, because if I were going to continue to see her, I’d have to keep the Annika tatt covered. If she thought it was a new tattoo, she’d want to see it, and then I’d have to think of another reason. “It’s a scar from the same accident.”

“Oh?” her lips parted as those eyes and hands kept traveling all over my skin. “But I don’t see any other scars.”

“No,” I replied as I wound her hair around my finger, yet still, my obsessive gaze kept returning to that heart-shaped mole, trying to remember if Annika’s mole was on the left shoulder blade, like Riley’s. “It mostly got my face.”

Replaying those memories of Annika brought back the bad stuff - my father’s murder and my foster sister betraying us, the family that took her in, and the look on my mom’s face when we heard the gunshot.

A cloud of darkness draped over me, sucking the air out of this small room, and I needed to leave. Now. I needed to inhale fresh air and let my angry, fermenting thoughts settle before I did something stupid I might regret. I pulled away from her and slipped my sweater back on, ignoring the disappointed expression on her face.

“I have to go,” I urged, eager to free myself of her environment.

“Okay,” she breathed, shuffling under the covers.

“I’ll message you,” I told her, without looking back as I stepped to the door.

“Sure,” she murmured, and it was obvious that she didn’t believe me. However, I couldn’t explain that I had to distance myself from her to protect her.

“See you around,” I told her, still not looking back. I couldn’t look back at her because it would make everything worse.

A long-winded sigh replied, “Another one bites the dust,” as I closed the door on her.

While running down the stairs to the main entrance, that heart-shaped mole haunted my brain, but once I was outside in the cool morning air, I started to feel better. The mask drove me fucking insane. She drove me fucking insane.

As soon as I was behind the wheel of my car, I pulled the ski mask off, cranked the engine, and drove back to the frat house. Nothing sat right with me. I hated living in the frat house, hated being at college, hated school, hated every fucking thing, but I liked Riley, and that’s a problem.

My growing fondness for her might impede my incentive to find Annika, and the impending thought I had was that if Riley turned out to be Annika, how the fuck could I possibly drag her in front of the firing range to be destroyed by Mikky and Ronan.

Once back in my bedroom, I shut and locked the door behind me and took a key from under my mattress to unlock the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers. Inside was every memory I had collected of Annika.

I kept every picture until she betrayed us when she was sixteen, every letter she wrote me, and every gift she gave me. I told Mikky and Mom I lit a match to her stuff and let it burn, but that was a lie. I kept some items.

I tried to do it. When I dragged out all her clothes from her closet, threw all her cosmetics and toys, piled them up in the backyard, and had a bomb fire. But when I tried to throw the letters, birthday, Christmas, and other gifts on the flames, I couldn’t do it.

The photographs of her as a little girl show her with bright blond hair, a smiling mouth, and plump cheeks, but her eyes were empty and devoid of warmth—a reflection of the horrors of her life before she came to us. Slowly, with love, attention, and consistency, we noticed the warmth coming through in her nature, but it took a while, and I guess that was why I struggled to let her go.

I kept these things because I never gave up on her. I always had her back, and it was my arms she ran to when nightmares haunted her sleep. I never gave up on her, but she gave up on me.

I unfolded a letter she wrote me shortly after she came to live with us at eight years old. She was writing at the level of a five-year-old. She was always smart but wasn’t given the chance to thrive, so Mom and I spent every day after school working with her to increase her writing and reading skills, and it worked.

The first letter she wrote me was the most precious because I remember how proud she was. I kept that letter at the back of my drawer and brought it out a year later as proof of how much her literacy skills had improved.

All the letter said was GUNNER IS MY BEST FRIEND AND WE PLAY GAMES. But the spelling was all wrong, and the letters were all mixed up, but reading it became my go-to therapy when life fucked me off. The little pink butterfly at the top left corner was the cutest.

As she got older, she continued to write me letters. Many held secrets that she couldn’t say to my face, and I swore I would never tell another living soul what she confessed in the letters. Some of the information was about the way she was treated in foster care and the way she was treated at school, which was hard to read.

My favorite letters were when we started getting older, and the childlike antics grew into teenage feelings. I received a confession from her one day, saying that she wondered what it felt like to kiss me. It was funny because I had imagined what it felt like to kiss her since the day she arrived at our house, but it was several years later before that feeling returned.

She had a habit of leaving folded letters under my pillow, and I’d notice the crackle when my head landed and mumble, “The mailman has visited,” and was eager to read what confession she needed to offload on that day.

But as time went on and we got closer to that day when Dad was murdered, the letters became less frequent. I wasn’t alarmed by it and assumed it was because she was busy or maybe because she was growing out of it. We were sixteen, so I guess writing a letter to her foster brother wouldn’t last forever.

At the very bottom of the stack of letters was the one written on pink paper, which retained the scent of her perfume. The pink one was the hardest to open because it was the last letter she had written me. It was a ‘goodbye’ letter, but I thought Annika was fooling around, so I didn’t take it seriously. It was written differently; the pressure of her hand and how she worded it were hers but not hers.

Anyway, the letters were not why I opened the drawer, so I brushed aside to grab the stack of photographs of her. The mission was to find a picture of that mole on Annika’s shoulder blade. I know that I needed more than just a fucking mole, but it would be another box to tick of evidence to convince me that Riley was really Annika.

As I shuffled through the photographs, I could hear my roommates getting up and showering, so it must be around 7 AM. With each image of that beautiful blond, a sourness scorned my gut, and I had to pause to compose myself. Unfortunately, she looked fantastic in every photo, no matter what she did. Thick golden hair had fallen over her face as she frowned, pouting full lips, shooting me the middle finger. God, I loved her.

I lit a joint, opened the window, and sat on the ledge, gazing at the buildings housing students full swing into the term. Hanging in the window of a sorority house was a blue sheet with the words, RONAN, I WANT YOUR BABIES xx

I snorted as I pulled on the joint and grabbed my phone to take a pic. Poor ol’ Ronan had a never-ending stream of women after him because he was blessed with handsome features and an easy-going manner. He usually took everything in his stride, but the main reason he started living in Mikky’s apartment was because student life eventually wore him down.

Fuck, I’m glad women didn’t hassle me day in and day out as they did him. Ronan was an open likable guy, whereas I wasn’t. I was unapproachable and sullen, the perfect storm to deter unwanted attention.

It’s been a while since Ronan had a girlfriend, though. I assumed that was because he was focused on the club, especially now that Mikky was back.

After stubbing out my joint, I returned to the stack of photographs to find one of Annika in her bathing suit or summer clothes, baring her naked shoulders. I came across one with her in a turquoise sundress lying on her stomach on a beach lounger, with a book opened before her reading behind shades. The angle wasn’t great, but I detected a spot on her left shoulder blade. However, the bone was more pronounced because she was propped up on her elbows, so the spot appeared slightly different from Riley’s.

Fed up, I closed the drawer, locked it, and thought about Riley. Something she said as I was leaving bothered me a little. It was an offhand comment that, when I heard it, I thought she was trying to make me feel bad, but she didn’t seem like the type.

Me: Hi. What did u mean when u said, ‘another one bites the dust’?

While waiting for her to reply, I grabbed a clean towel to shower down the hall. Maybe I could wank off to Riley while I was in there.

Just as I was leaving, my phone beeped.

Riley: Men.

Me: Another man bites the dust?

Riley: Yes.

Me: What other man? Someone recent?

Riley: Forget it.

Me: No. Tell me who it was.

Riley: No.

Me: Is he at Gotland?

Riley:

I waited a couple of minutes for a reply as jealousy pounded in my head. She hadn’t been at Gotland long, and I hadn’t seen her with anyone, so it must’ve been before she moved here. I gave up waiting for a reply and showered, but when I returned, there was still no reply.

Me: You’re still my hobby.

Riley: So sweet xx

Okay, that reply got a smile out of me.