15. Marisol
15
MARISOL
The cassetelles are gone.
For the past nine hundred miles, I’ve been trying to resist Conchetta’s cassetelles in an almost superhuman exertion of willpower. The lunch and dinner Salvatore had prepared for me are long gone.
And now everything’s gone.
I should be angrier about the food. I held the styrofoam ice box of meals over a gas station trash can for several seconds until cursing and tossing it back inside the car. Someone picked out all my absolute favorites of Conchetta’s dishes, everything unnameable to me except for the desserts Conchetta would bring me in the kitchen.
It would’ve been a sweet gesture if I didn’t think Salvatore was trying to change my mind. He wanted to give me one last reminder of what I’m leaving behind.
I suck the powdered sugar off my fingertips. I’ve been surviving off of ramen and old deli ham for my entire life. A little home cooking isn’t going to drag me back.
And neither is sex. He almost got me there at the end—I nearly asked if I could stay after what I did. After what we did.
I probably shouldn’t have told him to eat me out, but in my defense, I completely assumed his “obsession” with me had been an act, and that he’d try to drop some macho shit like, I don’t eat out women, but you can suck my cock , and I was—still am—so sex-starved that there was a nonzero chance I would’ve done it just to feel a hard cock for the first time in months. Instead, I got the most hot, animalistic oral sex of my life. He ate me like a man starved, and for the rest of my life, the upper half of his face is going to be the star of all of my masturbation fantasies.
Bumpbumpbump.
I serve off the rumble strips and back onto the road. I’ve pulled over twice already to furiously rub one out, studying my rearview mirror for other cars on the highway. As soon as I find a hotel, I’m going to need to change my uncomfortably damp underwear.
The fact that he made me tell him I was his ? Denying me an orgasm until I did it? That was some caveman behavior—I’m not some pet that he gets to label as his and then give orders to?—
Bumpbumpbump.
I swerve back onto the road and ignore the throbbing between my legs to rub at my eyes.
In the privacy of my own thoughts? Okay, it was hot. Super fucking hot. And the whole thing gave me the strongest orgasm I’ve had in a long time.
Probably the last one you’ll have for a while.
I thought when I finally got away from Salvatore, I would feel relief or maybe satisfaction at winning our little game, but mostly I feel frustrated and alone, and I’m doing my best not to analyze that too closely.
I peer through the windshield at a giant green sign that flashes SEDGWICK in my headlights.
I need to find somewhere to pull over, but every time I consider it, I imagine Junior standing at the edge of one of the pitch-black cornfields holding a rusty saw. A boning knife. Pliers.
And each time, a sudden burst of energy jolts me awake, I cram a handful of sour gummy worms in my mouth, and I white-knuckle another fifty miles.
But now I’m out of gummy worms and my ass hurts and I have a cramp in my foot from pressing down the pedal for so long because the cruise control in this junker doesn’t work. Sedgwick it is. If Junior manages to hunt me down nine hundred miles away, at least I didn’t make it easy on him.
I haven’t used GPS for this entire trip, so I’m at the mercy of the street signs to get to a hotel. When I roll to a stop and peer up into a wooden sign that says Budget Inn , I’ve made it.
Some fucking luck to finally get my phone back and then have to leave it with Salvatore again. When he returned it to me, I stared at it for all of three seconds before handing it back to him. I don’t need any reminders about my loser contacts list, and it would’ve been too easy to use to track me. The ancient, battered flip phone he gifted me as a “clean” replacement made me half-consider just turning myself into Junior then and there.
“Don’t use it unless there’s an emergency,” Salvatore told me from outside the car. Then he’d stretched through the window to tug the seatbelt across me and click it into place. I could still smell my arousal on his face when he gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek and dropped his onyx ring into my lap. “Stay safe, passerotta. I’ll see you soon.”
I chucked the phone in a gas station bathroom somewhere in Iowa. But not before memorizing the single phone number in the contact list written as Husband .
And whoo, boy, does that do something dangerous to me.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Buck in the passenger seat. I peek into the cat carrier to make sure he’s still breathing, and yeah, he’s good. He’s been pouting the entire trip. It’s another thing I’m trying not to think too hard about. My elderly cat was depressed and heartbroken after losing Kristin and only came out of his shell for stupid Salvatore and now he’s being ripped away again and he doesn’t understand why.
I reach under my seat for the duffel bag of cash to pull out a handful of twenties. Salvatore gave me all the money he promised and the extra reward for finding his hidden camera. There’s enough with me to buy a small house in cash.
The camera was behind the bookcase, pointing straight toward my desk. Salvatore had hinted enough about its location that the bookcase was my first guest. I’d pulled all the books and trinkets off, checking them methodically and spotting a broken-off wooden B-17 airplane wing where Grant used to keep his planes. Salvatore said nothing when I glanced at him, but Grant treats his airplane models like babies, so I have my thoughts on the real culprit of that “accident”. With all the decor gone, I’d run my hands down the wooden bookcase, nearly running out of time until I noticed the outlet on the wall. An undetectable camera would need a power source and with how much time Salvatore said he watched me, it couldn’t run off of batteries alone. I stared at the outlet for a full minute until it struck me.
I told Salvatore the camera was inside the outlet, and now I’m a hundred thousand dollars richer. I can buy a small house and groceries from the fancy grocery stores.
But first, that camera discovery taught me a lesson. If Salvatore can hide a tiny, nearly invisible camera inside an electrical outlet, he can hide one anywhere. After tonight, I need to work on getting rid of everything he’s… gifted me. Getting rid of the cell phone was a good first step, but who knows what else he’s slapped a tracker onto.
Budget Inn’s just a single strip of doors and a front office in a parking lot. Two of the four street lamps in the area are broken, throwing the streets and fields beyond into inky darkness. I scurry across the sidewalk to the front doors, goosebumps rising on my arms.
When I burst in through the front doors, a man with neatly trimmed blond hair, a short beard, and a camo hoodie startles and nearly drops his book. We stare at each other.
“Do… you need a room?” he asks.
Right. Normal. “Yes, please,” I say, laughing nervously and approaching as my heart rate returns to normal.
His gaze travels down me, touching inappropriate places, before he glances back to his monitor and says in a low rumble, “Let me take care of that for you.”
I glance at his book. Crime and Punishment. Of fucking course it is.
“Do you have any pets?” he asks, giving me an easy, confident smile.
I cast about for a “no pets” sign and blurt out, “Uh—yes. A cat.”
The man—name tag says Brandon—shakes his head and then leans forward like he’s going to tell me a secret. “Let’s just keep that between us then.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Brandon frowns a little before turning to the monitor, all business now. Normally, the manly, confident, intellectual thing would be working wonders, but I can’t help but think he looks off . Hair too blond, eyes too blue, nose too precise. No smoke to the edge of his voice that makes me want to sink to my knees.
Brandon gives up on flirting after another impassive response which suits us both just fine.
Not long after, I have Buck locked into the bathroom with a litter box and water, and I’m lying on top of a thin mattress that smells of mildew. The overhead fan kicked off a snowstorm of dust when I turned it on, and I brushed off as much as I could from the sheets before lying down in full clothes. I miss the Coquatrix.
If I listen very closely, I can hear a woman crying a few doors down. Hopefully, someone just left their TV on too loud.
My whole body is exhausted, crushed under the weight of the stale hotel air. Even my eyelids are heavy and sticky. I want to sleep, but I need to make a plan for tomorrow. I should probably trade the car in for someone else’s as soon as possible because Salvatore’s definitely tracking that too.
And then I get to pick the place where I’m going to live in secrecy for the rest of my life .
Instead, my thoughts wonder to what Salvatore’s doing. Has he caught Junior yet? Is he watching me right now?
I clutch his onyx ring where it rests on a gas station necklace chain between my breasts.
He made me say I was his . He said he wanted to marry me and that he was going to find me. He fucked up, but he’s going to fix things.
I must be really love-starved because thinking about all of those things fills me with a sense of warmth. Of belonging.
When I pick a place to settle down, I’m going to buy a computer with all that money Salvatore gave me. And then I’m going to figure out how to watch him through all his cameras.
Something tells me he wouldn’t hate the idea.