Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Emmett
I wake in a cold sweat, clutching my chest as I gasp for air. My eyes flit around the room, unable to recognize where I am, and I toss away the bedding draped over my body as I hurtle toward the door and down the hallway.
The door is cracked when I reach Dad and Ro’s room, and all that I can see when I try to peek through the crack is darkness.
Nausea rolls through my gut when my hand makes contact with the door, but I push it open to let some of the light from the hall stream inside.
The two of them are tucked comfortably in their bed in a deep sleep, completely fine.
It was just a dream.
Closing the door quietly as I leave, I rest my back against the wall and press the heels of my palms into my eyes.
This happens almost every night now: sleep for a couple of hours, have a nightmare, wake up, try and fail to fall back asleep.
The nightmares are usually small, someone leaving me or lying to me, and more often than not, the person in the dream is faceless.
I just know that in the dream, I love that person and when I wake up, there’s a sense of hurt that takes me a while to shake.
I’ve never dreamt about my dad dying before.
I know that I won’t be able to go back to sleep, so I go back to my room to grab my headphones and a pair of pants before heading down to the kitchen for a bottle of water.
Without any goal in mind, without any idea of where I’m going, as soon as I step out of the front door, I just start running. I run past the large security gate and down the quiet road that leads away from the house, pushing my legs as hard as they’ll let me.
I stop six miles or so from Dad’s house, resting against a tree while I sip on my water.
Streaks of pink and orange slip through the tops of the buildings and the few other trees scattered throughout the area to tell me that morning is coming, and I stay to watch the sun rise before I start the trek back home.
This doesn’t happen to me. The last time that I had a nightmare, I was probably nine years old, and that was only because Davis let me watch Nightmare On Elm Street right before I went to bed.
I never should have met Anna. Ever since I met her, they won’t stop, and I feel like I’m going fucking crazy.
The house is full of life when I walk back through the front door, following the sound of my family through to the kitchen, where breakfast is being made.
Macie bounces on the tips of her toes, peeking past Rowan to watch her work.
Dad sips on his coffee at the island, bouncing Sarah on his knee while he chats with the girls.
His phone sits in front of him, almost guaranteed to have the morning news waiting for him, but he pays it no mind; his focus is on his family.
“Hey,” I greet them as I walk in.
“Bubba!” Macie shouts, running over to wrap her tiny arms around my waist, and I drape an arm around her neck to lean down and give her a kiss on the top of her head.
“Did you get some sleep?” Dad asks.
“Yeah,” Ro chimes in with a furrowed brow. “Were you in—”
I stop her with a subtle shake of my head. “Yeah I did,” I lie to my dad, squeezing his shoulder, “just got up early and thought I’d take a page from your book and go for a run.”
He seems proud. He thinks that my going for a morning run means that I’m getting better. He has no idea that standing here, talking to him, I’m fighting every instinct in my mind screaming at me to hug him and make sure that this is real and that the dream I had was just that.
He has no idea how fucked up I actually am.
“Can you take your sister, bud?” Dad asks as we both see Ro blow out a breath.
“Yep.” I pull Sarah into my arms as Dad swings a stool around to the other side of the island and guides Ro to sit down on it. Inclining my head toward the dining room, I tell Macie, “Come on, supergirl, let’s go set the table.”
As we work to get each place set, complete with floral-printed place mats that my dad would never in a million years have picked out on his own, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
My face scrunches while I stare at the text message on the screen: a GPS link to a place I’ve never heard of, followed by one simple instruction.
UNKNOWN: Eleven PM. Come alone.
What the fuck?
·
I blink at the address on my phone’s GPS, then at the building in front of me. This can’t be right. Swiping the map away, I pull open my text messages and double check that I have the right address. I do.
If you’d asked me even six months ago if I would agree to meet someone from an unknown number at a random address texted to me, I’d have called you insane because six months ago, I would have blocked the damn number like any sane, reasonable person would do.
I must no longer be sane nor reasonable, because I walk toward the front door of a place called The Velvet Vault, every inch of it lit up with neon signage, and I hand the woman working the door my ID. She scans over it for a second and follows by giving me a pat-down.
Smacking on a piece of gum with her mouth open, she hands my ID back to me and inclines her head toward the door, telling me that I’m supposed to sit at the bar and wait.
It weirds me out, sure, but I’m entirely too invested at this point to walk away, so I do exactly that, taking a seat on one of the velvet-clad stools as the pop music over the speaker pours into my ears.
I wait a good five minutes before ordering a drink for myself, and as I sip on it, I swivel in the stool, taking in my surroundings.
It mostly looks like any smaller bar on a busy night, but some of the décor inside catches my attention; particularly a neon light against one wall that makes up the outline of two women locked in a kiss.
Looking back behind the bar, I notice that sandwiched between some T-shirts hung up for display sits a flag, a sharp angle to the left side made up of shades of pink, blue, black and brown, and next to the point, going straight across, line the colors of the rainbow.
I spin in my seat, looking at each of the walls in the building, taking in the different-colored flags that line them.
This is a gay bar.
“Excuse me,” I say, waving over the bartender. “Do you know who I’m supposed to be meeting here?”
Shoving a towel into a glass to dry it, he smiles and jerks his chin behind me. I turn to see Nash Montgomery standing behind me. He flicks his wrist toward himself to check the time on his Rolex, then looks at me with a grin.
“You’re early,” he points out, almost sounding impressed. He takes the seat next to mine and pulls my drink to his lips, taking a sip from it.
“Why am I here?”
A hand comes up to cup my jaw, and my stomach flips at the sensation. “I want to play with my new toy,” he answers.
“I am not your toy,” I bite, shoving his hand away. “Stop calling me that.”
A feline smile crawls across his face as he fidgets with the thin chain around his neck.
“You keep telling me that,” he says, “but then you let me play with you, anyway.” He lifts my drink to his lips again.
“I think even more than you like to push the rules, you like to be chased. Isn’t that right, pretty boy? ”
Maybe it’s because the music is so loud in here, but I could almost swear that ‘pretty boy’ had less hatred in it this time. I could almost be tricked into believing that it was a compliment.
“And I think you don’t understand the word ‘no,’” I tell him, slapping a twenty dollar bill onto the bar as I stand. His hand grips my wrist like a vise and I have to hold back the urge to deck him across the jaw. “Leave. Me. Alone.”
“Do you remember what I told you would happen if you talked back to me?” He growls, arching a brow. “Sit down and have a drink.”
I stand firm, staring him down, and he jerks his hand to pull me back toward the stool that I just left. I land on it with a grunt and narrow my eyes at him.
“He’ll take a Manhattan,” Nash tells the bartender, throwing me a self-satisfied smirk.
Minutes later, the drink is set in front of me and I wrap my hand around the glass, glaring daggers at Nash as I bring it to my lips. My eyes don’t leave his as I gulp down the drink, setting the glass back down onto the bar emptied.
“There,” I say as I exhale, “I had a drink.”
Laughter bubbles up from Nash’s chest, cracking open a brilliant smile. He downs the rest of the drink he’d stolen from me and gives the bartender a nod. “Another for each of us,” he says, turning his gaze on me, “and then only water.”
Heat ripples through me and I’m honestly not sure if it’s from his tone or the whiskey, but I don’t move from my seat either way.
I sip the second drink more slowly, savoring it as I really soak in his obnoxiously-handsome features.
Every angle of his face is carved from marble; strong and sharp, his jawline defined even through the dark hair that covers it, matching the slick, perfectly-coiffed hair on his head; so dark that it could almost be black, but not quite.
The hint of a deep chocolate brown still shines through in the right light.
As Nash sips on his drink, his defined adam’s apple bobs, drawing my eye to his neck and to the crucifix that he always seems to wear around it.
My gaze moves from his neck, trailing down the shape of his body. His clothes are looser-fitted, more casual than I’ve ever seen him wear, but his broad, sculpted build shows through in spite of the forgiving fabric.
Catching myself staring at him, I throw the rest of my drink down my throat to wash down the cold sweat forming at the back of my neck.
I’m not sure how long we sit there, not speaking to one another, before he finally pulls me off of my stool and into the rest of the patrons, all dancing and sweating to the music. Something electric hums between us as we stand immobile, staring each other down.
I want to hit him.
I want to knock him out.
I want to go home.
But more than anything, I just want to…