Chapter 13 Wren #2
He moves closer, and I push my palm into his stomach.
I don’t know why I do it. Maybe to stop him from getting any closer, or maybe, I’m flirting with the freedom darkness brings.
I’ve never touched a man in this way, let alone one built like this.
Wouldn’t dare to do such a thing in the light, either.
He feels as hard as I expected, and I swear, he hardens even more under my touch.
A beat passes, then another. I swallow hard, and I can’t be thinking straight, otherwise, I wouldn’t curl my hand into a fist so slowly. I wouldn’t graze my fingers down his torso, tracking every ridge and dip. I wouldn’t ball the fabric of his shirt into my palm.
Suddenly, he slams a hand against the wall by my head so hard the whole booth rattles. The vibration rumbles from my scalp to my toes, snapping me out of my trance.
I bring my forearms to my face, bracing for impact.
Instead, the door flies open.
“Walk.”
I grab my bags and shoot past him into the night, faster than a bullet from a gun.
The icy air kisses my sweaty nape and fills my lungs. It does absolutely nothing to calm me. I’m buzzing—part adrenaline, part disgust. I move on autopilot in a half walk, half jog toward the promenade.
Christ. I’m sick in the head. And not just because I didn’t think twice about hopping over the blood splatter on the sidewalk.
“What were you doing out here?”
I glance down at the walkway, and with a sinking feeling, realize Gabriel’s shadow is stretching alongside mine. “Volunteering.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I am now.
Though my feet throb in these heels, I don’t dare stop to put on my sneakers. Don’t want to risk him picking me up again. So I keep my head down and sheepishly keep moving, warily watching his shadow on the coattails of mine.
His heavy footsteps, my heavy breaths. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, so I do what I do best.
I force myself to lighten the mood.
“And what about you? Were you out partying tonight?” The moment the question leaves my lips, I know it’s a ridiculous thing to ask.
There’s no parallel universe in which I can imagine Gabriel Visconti two-stepping on a dance floor, beer in hand, having a good time.
But for once, I have no other conversation starters in my locker, so I carry on.
“I bet you get free drinks everywhere. Um, not because you’re scary or anything, but because you’re a Visconti.
Your cousins own most of the bars in Cove, right? ”
As expected, there’s no reply from behind me. Just frosty silence and a shadow haunting my own. It follows me from one end of Devil’s Cove to the other. When the glitzy lights abruptly meet the road leading out of town, my heart lifts an inch with the hopeful thought he’ll leave me from here.
A rough tug on my wrist spins me around and snatches my next breath. No such luck.
It feels instinctive to yank myself from his grasp, but the fury pulsating from his palm stops me. I must be more tired than I thought, as my gaze has no business dropping to his large hand around the cuff of my glove, and my imagination has no right to run in the direction it does.
I drink in black symbols and wonder what they mean, then scan silver scars and wonder what he did to get them.
His busted knuckles, protruding veins, thick, swollen fingers.
I wonder if he punches every man who follows women into phone booths.
I can’t imagine hands like these being anything but weapons, and now I’m wondering what else they do.
If they’re capable of a light caress, of skimming along the soft curve of a hip. If they ever slide south, under lacy fabric, and bring pleasure.
A wave of hot jealousy comes out of nowhere.
Jesus. I’m not tired. I’m out of my damn mind.
I move to pull away, but my eyes snag on the rivulet of blood trickling between two of his knuckles. It slowly drips over his thumb, then down the side of his hand. I still don’t move when it slithers, hot and wet, over my skittering pulse and into the cuff of my glove.
A tingle of unease and something darker hums through me as the blood trickles along the length of my palm. There’s that spark again. He punched a man, for me.
My gaze snaps up to meet his. He swallows whatever he turned me around to say and studies me instead, something between curiosity and regret flickering over his face.
He snatches his hand away and balls it into a fist by his side.
With a curt nod over his shoulder, a black car pulls off the curb and crawls toward us, its headlights illuminating the path ahead.
“Walk.”
Confused, but not stupid enough to argue, I turn around and start my journey home.
Unfortunately, leaving the bright lights of Cove doesn’t mean I get to leave him behind too. He falls in step behind me, his shadow stretching out along the road in the glow from the headlights trailing us.
The sight of it is starting to make me panic.
“You have a weapon?”
Gritting my teeth, I pick up my pace, trying to keep distance between us. “What, like pepper spray?”
“Like a gun.”
I choke out a laugh. I’d think he was kidding if I thought this man was capable of cracking a joke. “No,” I state. “It wouldn’t fit in my purse.”
His angry glare bores into my back. “So you can’t fight, can’t protect yourself. You wear those ridiculous shoes that you definitely can’t run in, and yet, you still insist on walking these streets alone after dark.” He mutters a curse under his breath. “You know what happens to girls like you?”
“They make it home safe and sound because bad things don’t happen on the coast.”
“They end up as a statistic on a Wikipedia page,” he spits back.
My heart flips, and the road ahead jolts. The irony comes out of left field and punches me in the gut, landing too close to home.
Good, I think bitterly. Because nothing else I do seems to finish that goddamn sentence.
His comment has thrown my thoughts off track, and now all I can focus on is the dreaded midnight email waiting for me when I get home. But it’s also behind the safety of my locked front door, so I force myself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
“What, you wanna be kidnapped? Raped? Murdered?” he carries on, voice growing darker by the syllable. “You’re a walking target. A sitting duck. And what the fuck were you thinking, putting your location on Instagram?”
My spine straightens, and I come to an abrupt stop. Curiosity and surprise spin me around. “You looked at my Instagram?”
He stands in the middle of the road, his looming frame backlit by the car’s headlights, and regards me with a look of contempt so violent my wrist burns from the memory of his grip.
I wait for the familiar shiver of trepidation, but it doesn’t come. My head is still in the phonebooth, along with the worst part of my soul. I hate that he brought it out of me.
Hate that he just won’t go away.
Fueled by frustration, I tilt my chin and return his glare. “I’m not a damsel in distress, and while I appreciate the concern, I don’t need your help. Besides,” I add, fumbling around in my collar for the cord hanging from my neck, “I have a whistle for emergencies.”
When met with his blank stare, I start to feel all itchy, so I give the whistle a pathetic toot. “See? More than capable of getting out of sticky situations.”
A dense beat passes. Then another.
His nostrils flare as his eyes fall to my lips and harden to black ice. Rage radiates out of every pore, and when he steps toward me, I wonder, for a heart-stopping second, if those hands I’m still thinking about will find their way to my throat.
It’s worse. They find their way to my hips instead, and then I’m balancing over his shoulder, staring at my whistle as it swings in and out of my vision.
“Wait!” I squeal, kicking my legs against the iron-clad grip on my calves. “Put me down!”
My plea falls on deaf ears, and the ground moves beneath Gabriel’s boots in a gray blur. The glow from the headlights spread wider, and so does the knot in my throat. I stuff the whistle back in my mouth and shout for help between loud, desperate blows.
He’s rough when he folds me in half. Even rougher when he drops me into the open car trunk.
And when the ink, scar, and green disappear behind the falling door, his voice is the roughest thing of all.
“Get out of this sticky situation, then.”