Chapter 20
Donavan
Alani hasn’t stirred in over an hour, and as much as I argued with myself over the fact that I’ve just let her keep her head in my lap while she sleeps, I haven’t moved her away either.
I should’ve taken her back to her dorm. As childish as she’s been acting, she was right. She’s an adult, and I have no right to try and control her behavior.
Yet, I’ve just pulled up outside Nash’s house, knowing her sister is living here with him now.
This is where she spent her summer, but I only know that because of conversations around the office.
I told myself I was checking in with Angel not checking up on my sister, but it made me realize I was lying to myself.
I never made contact with Alani. When others discussed her being home for the summer and working at a local diner, I made a point to never drive down that road.
I avoided her and somehow managed to keep busy with work instead of following her to and from her job.
I blame the blonde girl I was sent to save last week for forcing my hand.
I didn’t make it in time, but for some reason, it was more than the disappointment of not getting paid that settled in my chest. She looked nothing like Alani, but four days dead in a random field has the power to make anyone look different than they did alive.
I knew who I was looking for, and I had it on very good authority that was who was in the field, but her blood-stained hair made my mind race back to Alani. I had to see her. It was the only thing that would calm that voice in my head telling me she was gone.
What I found, her spiraling at college, was probably worse. Seeing her pain, the blankness in her eyes, cut me more than any knife ever could.
I shove at her shoulder, the serenity I managed on the drive to her sister’s house escaping out of the open windows.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her face lifting from my lap.
She looks at me rather than around. It’s clear she doesn’t care where she’s been brought.
“Get out of the fucking truck.”
She scrunches her nose like I just told her to walk through a pile of shit barefoot or something.
“My head hurts,” she complains.
“Coming down from X will do that,” I snap, opening the driver’s side door and climbing out.
I reach and pull her out too, waiting until she’s standing steady before letting her go. Unable to resist, my eyes drop to her thighs, the memory of how my cum dripped out of her last night threatening to make me hard, standing right here in the driveway.
I should probably hate myself for fucking her bare, but I just can’t muster the disdain for that or for the bruises on her neck. I fucked her hard, and she came even harder.
What pisses me off is the simple fact that she affects me at all. I sneer at her before turning around and walking toward the front door.
With the level of security Nash has on this place, I’m surprised he isn’t at the front door with a shotgun pointed at my head.
“Are you fucking serious, bringing me here?” she snaps as I walk up the front porch steps.
I bang on the door, unsurprised the man doesn’t have a doorbell. It would be too inviting. If this man is anything like me, he expects privacy.
It takes longer than I thought it would for someone to answer the door, but Nash doesn’t speak when he sees me. If anything, he looks terrified. Is he in some kind of trouble? Does he have a price on his head and he thinks I’m here to collect?
I open my mouth, but no words come out.
“Donavan,” he snaps, and it sounds like a warning.
I lock eyes with him, keeping them on his face even when Ayla steps out from behind him.
I step to the side, feeling Alani at my back, and I point at her. “She’s your goddamned problem.”
I walk away before he does something stupid like ask why she’s with me in the first place.
I know that whatever he and Ayla have has only grown in the months they’ve been together.
I’m fairly certain they’re trying their hand at being normal even though how they met a year or so ago was nothing but normal.
Going through what they did seems to have strengthened something between them.
There’s no doubt it’s some form of trauma bond, but I’m not in the business of telling people how to live their life.
I feel no freer than I did before pulling onto Nash’s property.
I should feel a hundred pounds lighter for offloading Alani to her sister, but my boots seem heavier than before, that voice in the back of my head warning me that I might be doing something wrong.
I’m trying to convince myself it’s this addiction to her I can’t seem to kick and not a warning that I’m making a mistake. This is exactly how addiction works. It convinces you that survival is impossible without the object of your obsession.
The passenger side door opens at the same time I climb into the driver’s side door.
“Are you fucking serious right now?” she snaps, settling back into the seat.
“Get the fuck out of my truck,” I snap.
“I can’t be around them and their fucked-up relationship.” She sounds a little broken, but all of her emotion is in her voice because her face is angry.
It does nothing to detract from her beauty.
“I know how it got started, and it just fucking disgusts me.”
I scoff before I can stop myself.
“Are you for real?” I point out the windshield toward the front porch where Nash has his arm around Ayla as they stare in our direction.
The urge to put the truck in reverse and haul ass out of there is because Nash is standing there with a fucking bedsheet wrapped around his waist as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
I hate the idea of Alani around a naked man, but I don’t think Nash would try anything with her.
He’s pretty obsessed with her sister right now.
I turn some in my seat to face her, hating the way her eyes scan my body, pausing on the tattoo-covered scars on my right arm before moving to my face.
“You don’t get to judge them.”
“You’re sure as hell quick to judge me. You have no right to yank me up and tell me what I’m going to do and what I’m not allowed to do.”
“You’re right,” I quickly agree. “And it stops now. Get out of my fucking truck.”
“No. You brought me here, you can damn well take me back to my fucking dorm.”
I can’t really argue with her reasoning.
“Just look at them,” she says, disgust on her face as she watches her sister and Nash. “So gross.”
I put the truck in reverse, throwing up dust from the gravel as I turn us around and drive back down the driveway.
“You sure have a lot of judgment in your tone for someone who got fucked raw on the side of the road last night after getting high and putting your own life in danger on Sixth Street.”
I peer over at her once we are at the end of the driveway, waiting for her to say something.
She doesn’t open her mouth. She doesn’t make threats about turning me in for killing that guy last night. Hell, from the way she’s acting, she may not even remember it.
She keeps her mouth clamped closed. It may possibly be the first time she hasn’t wasted her energy arguing with me.
I hate the silence, but it’s just one more contradiction battling in my head. I know if she were talking, I’d want her to fucking shut up, too.
The drive is silent, and it’s quite possibly the longest fucking five hours of my life.
She’s pulling on the door handle before the tires stop rolling in front of her dorm building.
She doesn’t look back over her shoulder before disappearing inside.
This has to be the last time. I can’t keep pulling her out of danger, only for her to do it over and over again. I’ve made my mistakes in life. I’ve suffered more than nearly every other person walking the earth.
I couldn’t save Maya, and the only reason I felt like I should’ve was because I put her in danger. She never asked for what happened to her.
Alani is begging for it, and there’s nothing I’ve said or done that has made her stop. She knows more than most what kind of evil exists in the world, and yet she still seems hell-bent to travel down this path of destruction.
The girl will get herself killed, and I just have to be okay with her blood being spilled. At least this time it won’t be my fault.