CHAPTER FIVE #2
Saliva slams to the back of my throat. I choke and cough, swinging my hand up in between us to muffle the sound of me being too anxious for someone like him. “What?”
“Come on,” he laughs, snatching my hand from my face and pulling me to the back door.
I hate being out of control. It suffocates me, makes my skin too tight and sharpens every inhale.
The visceral reaction to getting dragged outside, into the brightness that weighs the air heavy with torridity, cracks my chest with the feeling of being silenced.
You didn’t say no.
He listens when I say no. Yet I still haven’t said it.
He quickly stops and reaches around me, closing the door with a vivid smile that lifts my skin and allows me to breathe.
“Where are we going?” I adjust my hand in his, following the finger he’s directing to the old, blue truck I only see when he brings groceries home.
The flit of my heart snaps my eyes to his, mechanically taking the steps he’s guiding. “I’m leaving? Why? How? Where?”
His Adam’s apple bobs with a rusty laugh. “You’re so fucking precious.”
Butterflies tilt my stomach, introducing me to a foreign feeling of living inside a pleasant dream.
My reverie.
I marvel at him, unable to speak through the giddy drum numbing my throat.
All good things come to an end.
The voice that antagonizes me kills the butterflies, leaving their lifeless flight to settle in my stomach and rot my happiness.
My hand must turn limp with my heavy walk. He squeezes it and stops next to the passenger door, bending down to observe the dullness of my face.
“Sorry, I’m fine,” I smile, trying to slip my hand away from his lethal grip.
He briefly looks at the attempt, then snaps his eyes back to mine with hitched brows and shoves our joined hands into the front pocket of his cargo pants. “Quit it.”
“What?”
I try tugging my arm some more, but his hand is a trap. He’s not willing to release what he’s caught.
His dark hair is messily framing his annoyed eyes and he’s staring at me, patiently waiting for me to stop ruining everything.
I give up, puffing so exasperatedly it blows strings of my hair into his face.
“Good girl,” he nods.
It’s not uncommon for him to acknowledge me or tell me I did a good job. But “good girl” is different. It’s validating, brewing up some suppressed urge to continue pleasing him.
He smiles, pulling our locked hands from his pocket and opening the door for me. “I know I said sometimes things are better left unsaid, but-” bracing an arm on the door, he tips his head and lures me closer to his salacious grin “-I really wanna see how bad you can get.”
I’m passing away. My blood is coagulating, and my lungs are bricked up.
No. That doesn’t sound right.
Is that right? Bricked up?
Surely not.
Jesus, I’m sweating and it’s impossible to breathe.
Combing my hair away from my burning face, I finally get my hand back and instinctively start pulling at the fraying of my shorts. “Razor, if that, uh, is what, you know, you…” My shoulders bump, awkwardly looking away from his intense gaze.
“No.” He cups underneath my jaw, pulling my focus back to him. “Look at me when you’re talkin’ to me.”
He’s destructive in the sun. His pools of mahogany are too warm for how often I feel cold, and his smattering of dark moles humanizes how ungodly the strength of his face is.
Unable to calm the swelling emotional reaction to him, my eyes start to roam away again. But Razor wants what he wants. And right now, he wants my attention.
His fingers lock to my face, enough to jerk my eyes to his one last time in an unspoken warning. “If I what?” He cocks his head, sliding his arm over the door to comb his fingers through my hair.
“Razor?! Can I use the phone?!” Aries shouts behind me.
He huffs, breaking our forced contact and lowering his hand from my face. “You don’t have to ask me anymore.”
“Cool! Thanks!”
The back door starts squealing closed, but screeches back open, and I don’t know why, but the flatline of his lips as he registers Aries popping back out makes me laugh.
“You should probably get some condoms! Bunnies breed like crazy!”
As quick as the bubbles of glee fizzed my chest, they’re shooting down my throat and making me sick.
Not, like, a throw up, feverish sick. It’s an illness that’s beginning to root deep within my being.
It starts with a nauseating ache that thrums high up my waist. My tongue gets flooded with saliva, and each swallow to correct it has me shifting and tensing my thighs, wondering how good punishment would feel when carnal need is the reason I’m misbehaving.
Not because I want to leave.
I can’t say that to him. I don’t think I ever will. Unless one day I wake up with actual ovaries that give me more power than a demanding reproductive system.
This is insane. I’m acting hysterical. I need to break whatever compulsion I’ve fallen under with him and focus on the things that matter.
Clearing the nerves from my throat, I scratch my face and help myself up into the torn cloth seat he’s been barricading.
“Why doesn’t she need to ask?” I shift my quizzical brows to him, robotically hooking my fingers around the seatbelt.
“I thought the phone was off limits unless you sat with us? And why do you get so much responsibility?”
Taking in his subtle surprise, my mind rewinds on what I just said, and I grow self-conscious that I over spoke.
“I’m not sure, Bun,” he says softly, running his thumb down the edge of the door. “Maybe Carl knows I wouldn’t take off.”
“Because you’re happy here?”
“God, fuck no,” he shakes his head, huffing out a sardonic laugh and inching the door closed. “It’s complicated.”
Everything is.
Turning to the fractured chip in the windshield, my stomach knots, and him shutting down the conversation by closing the door—sinks me further into the hard seat.
It’s caustic. Constantly tiptoeing around the truth. I don’t know why I thought Razor would be any different than everyone else. Really, I don’t know why I got confident in asking him any of that in the first place.
Everyone lies. Everyone sugarcoats how brainwashed we are, how sick the reality of putting on top of the line performances for spare change and degradation is.
The only one that’s given it to me straight is Aries. And even she knows more than she leads me to believe.