2. Scarlet #2
How would he know that if he hadn’t been watching too? The question danced on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back since I didn’t know whether he was being helpful or flirtatious.
“By the way,” he continued, almost chuckling, “I hope you stick to working in a casino instead of gambling in one because you have zero poker face. You’re wondering why I’m paying attention.
It’s because he’s not exactly quiet, and it’s fairly obvious he’s waiting for you to get off your shift.
Do you need someone to walk you to your car when you’re clocked out? ”
The question was sweet on the surface. It made my skin go hot and my pussy tingle for the first time in ages.
What I wouldn't give to get a guy like him alone—at least, the old version of me, the one who hadn’t sworn off men for the foreseeable future.
“I don’t think so, but thank you for caring.
Really.” Out of the frying pan into the fire.
No, thank you. I was through making the mistake of trusting the wrong people just because they offered temporary comfort.
He accepted my response easily enough, returning to the slot machine and sipping his beer.
His presence weighed heavily on my mind and my sex-starved body, but my hormones wouldn’t be a problem for long.
I would clock out in another fifteen minutes, and my aching feet would be relieved.
It was one thing to stand at a table for hours on end but another to crisscross the casino floor countless times.
I really needed to get a step counter to see how many miles I walked every night.
My purse was full of cash by the time I clocked out, leaving through the back door with a handful of others on my shift.
“Goodnight!” I called out, though it was closer to morning by now.
The sun would be up in an hour or so. It was disorienting, spending hours on end in a windowless casino, cut off from the outside world.
That was all by design, naturally. The customers needed to be completely cut off from reality, to lose track of time, to exist only from one bet to the next.
My beat-up Chevy waited for me in the employee lot, looking like salvation after a particularly long shift.
It would be worth it once I got home, even if my apartment was nobody’s idea of luxury.
I didn’t need luxury. I’d experienced luxury, and where had it gotten me?
It had taken me all the way to Primm, a town where I couldn’t even use my actual name while working.
It was somewhere I’d only stopped because Reno had seemed too obvious a retreat, and Primm meant being on the border between Nevada and California, where I intended to move on after hoarding enough tip money.
When I considered the trade-off, I wished I had never accepted Dominic’s invitation for a drink after my shift ended.
That invitation changed the course of my life and left me adopting a name that wasn’t mine, dyeing my hair, and trying to blend in with the strangers around me just in case the wrong people ever came looking around.
“Hey!”
I was halfway to opening my car door when I heard it. There probably wasn’t a woman in existence who didn’t recognize the tone in a man’s voice once he decided he was through playing nice. A man pissed off because he didn’t get what he thought he was entitled to.
I barely had time to turn before I ended up shoved against the car door hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.
“The fuck is your problem?” he snarled, and it didn’t take a glimpse of him in the reflection from the window to know Trucker Hat Guy had followed me outside.
For one brief, panicked moment, I remembered the guy who offered to walk me out. Why had I turned him down?
“Get off me,” I gritted out, driving an elbow into his stomach hard enough to make him stumble backward. I fumbled for the door handle, determined to escape inside the car and get the hell out of there.
I managed to grab hold, but not before he took hold of me again, turning me in place and pressing my back against the door when he leaned his considerable weight against me. He loomed large, making it a struggle to breathe.
“Not such a little smartass cunt now, are you?” he snarled in my face. The stench of whiskey wrapped itself around me, making me gag, making me wish I had never served him.
“Off… me…” I groaned. All he did in response was roll his hips, pressing his dick against me, making sheer terror burst into full colorful life inside my skull.
Adrenaline coursed through me, my heart racing a mile a minute, all my instincts telling me to scream.
I couldn’t get enough air to scream. I could only weakly gasp while he ran his unwelcome hands over my body, making me gag and shudder until I was finally able to drive a knee into his balls.
Not hard, but enough to make him fall back.
Grasping himself with one hand, taking hold of my ponytail with the other, he yanked hard enough that I dropped to my knees.
Agony exploded behind my eyes, spreading across my scalp, lighting it on fire while my knees screamed as the rough pavement scraped them through my jeans.
“Do you want to play, bitch?” he growled, yanking my head back so I could stare up at him, his face inches away, spittle flying. “Is that what you want? Do you think this is a fucking game? Let me show you who makes the fucking rules.”
The hand he used to cup himself now curled into a fist before he cocked his arm back, preparing to strike.
Suddenly, my hair was free and my head along with it. I did the only thing I could think to do, curling into a ball, lacing my fingers across the back of my head to protect myself. And then I waited.
Instead of a fresh burst of pain where his fist landed, I heard a deep grunt before what sounded like a sack of potatoes hitting the ground. A very large sack, one that groaned again.
Holding my breath, I opened my eyes, gasping when I found the trucker’s hat lying on the ground between me and the man now getting the living shit kicked out of him.
He was on his back, pulled partway up by his shirt collar so a very large, muscular man could deliver one blow after another to his face.
“You asked her if she wanted to play. Don’t you want to play with me, fucker?” Again, he punched him, and soon the sound of cracking bones followed every pained, strangled grunt. “Why don’t you try going up against somebody your own size, huh?”
It was brutal enough to turn my stomach, the sight of blood splashing across my attacker’s shirt, the sound of one of his teeth hitting the ground, along with the line of blood he spat out before trying to breathe.
“Please,” he whimpered, but his pleas went unheard until another punch made him go limp.
The man responsible let him drop to the ground but stood over him, fists clenched at his sides, his broad chest and shoulders heaving with every ragged breath. A soft grunt accompanied those breaths and brought to mind a victorious animal standing over his kill.
Only the man on the ground wasn’t dead. His chest rose and fell. How could he have lived through a beating like that? I had never seen anything like it and could hardly believe it was real.
But the pain in my knees was real. My tender scalp was real. The stench of blood? Most definitely real, and it turned my stomach.
The grunting animal turned to look down at me, and I realized he wasn’t an animal at all. I had served him at the slot machine. He asked if I needed help. He must have followed me the way the bleeding, unconscious man on the ground had.
Now, he extended a hand to me. “Are you okay?” he asked in a voice much rougher than the one I’d heard earlier. Almost scary. What was scarier was his blood-splattered hand hovering inches from my face. I wouldn’t have touched it for anything.
He seemed to understand that, pulling it back when I stared at it.
“I’m okay,” I whispered, unsteady as I got on my feet. All this time, nobody else walked past. I would have gotten hurt much worse if it hadn’t been for this guy coming to my rescue.
That didn’t mean I could bring myself to look him in the eye, instead opening my car door.
All that mattered was getting out of here, away from this.
I couldn’t stand the metalic smell of blood anymore.
“Thank you,” I thought to mumble before getting inside.
“You’d better go before somebody comes out and sees you. ”
“Don’t worry. I can handle it.”
He sounded so sure of himself. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d beaten somebody half to death. I didn’t want to know what I thought he meant.
Instead of asking, I got behind the wheel and drove out of the lot without looking back. Moving on autopilot, I only cared about getting home and locking the door.
However, something told me not even the strongest lock could offer comfort after what I’d come close to suffering and had witnessed.