CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BUNNY
Lifting the mug to her lips, Duse takes a steaming sip with her narrow eyes fixed on me from across the table, her golden brown skin glistening in the morning sun.
My heart has been beating too fast for over thirteen hours now. I’m shifting and blotting my face, trying to pretend like I’m normal and everything’s fine, like I can sit across from Duse and Gwen reading the paper as if Junior’s name won’t be in it soon.
Or will it?
Was Razor just trying to scare me?
My chest stretches up with a deep inhale, eyeing the kitchen door, waiting for him to walk through it at any moment.
“What’s going on with you?” Duse asks.
“Hm?” I look back at her, trying to breathe away the burn of my face. “Nothing. I’m okay. Why?”
Gwen lowers her shared half of the newspaper, adjusting her legs on Duse’s lap and doing a fast scan of me.
“You’re exceptionally, uh…. antsy.” Duse rests her mug on the table, leaning back in her chair and sharing the same laser-like study of me as Gwen.
“Is it that good?” Gwen questions.
My brows plunge, my heart ticking faster. “What? Is what good?”
“Razor’s dick. He’s got you sittin’ on a vibrator.” Gwen frowns, her blue eyes getting bigger to slide down me.
“Babe.” Duse’s braids shake with her head.
Embarrassment gushes to the forefront of the turmoil I’ve been experiencing, making my hairline damp and my skin hive up. “I haven’t had sex with him…”
Gwen gasps, the newspaper rattling with her hustle to smack it down. “He only ate your cookie?”
“Gwen,” Duse warns, cocking an eye at her with slack jaw.
“Now what?” Gwen turns a palm up, messing with her frizzy rollers and twiddling her peach toenails in the air. “Razor’s the one that blabbed while goin’ all psycho. I’m just curious.”
Duse sighs, shifting her jaded attention to me about to vomit everywhere.
“Sorry, Bun. I think what she’s trying to get at is that you’ve been even more anxious after…
” She rolls her lips, sharpening her vision to slits that say what she’s thinking.
“Um, are you okay? Like… do you feel safe?” Her eyes dart toward my bedroom door, pointing out the crater I already had to lie to Ora about.
“Oh, my God,” I rush, my eyes rounding with a pacifying hand shooting up. “No, uh, yes. I’m sorry, it’s nothing like that. I think, uh…”
Just tell them. They’re right there and listening.
“I think Razor’s…”
The screen door ripping the stiff air apart behind me shuts me up, my eyes glossing over with a conflicting rush of thrill and despair.
“It’s nothing,” I whisper to them.
They’re not believing me. Which, I don’t know if that helps or makes things worse. But girls understand girls. Our vaginas talk or something, because if it were a man I was trying to fess up to, he wouldn’t read the room. Instead, he’d blab his big fricking mouth and get me caught.
While the predacious presence slinks closer, both Duse and Gwen jump into a random conversation, as if the door was just alarming enough to briefly cut them off.
“Well, Razor’s right there,” Gwen points over my head, giving Duse an applauding smile of elation. “I’m sure he won’t mind goin’ in there for a big ole meaty strap.”
She doesn’t want to. Cross my heart, hope to die, I know she doesn’t.
But Duse gets a whiff of my panic and rasps out the most convincing laugh and smacks a hand to the table, shooting her best puppy eyes and batting lashes to what’s making my skin slowly crawl off the bone. “Would you be so kind, Raze?”
He’s getting closer.
Oh, Jesus, do something.
Scooting my chair back, the loud scream the legs do across the linoleum shoot too many eyes to me. An awkward laugh huffs through my nose, abandoning the seat and swerving around the oval table.
But his heat.
His heat is migrating off his body, stretching through the small gap between us as I widely step away from him coming to a stop near the table.
I don’t look back. I know it’s fishy not to, all things considering. I mean, I did dry hump his stiff cock through his pants and get off to it but-
I’m not fricking helping the buzz underneath my skin.
“No… I’m not doin’ that,” he drones, his voice husky with concentration. “But you guys can take the truck. I’ll keep Bunny company. She still hasn’t practiced for tonight.”
Whining internally and reaching up to open the cabinet of cups, flashes of his electric symmetry and dark hair between my legs rattle my spine.
“Wait, you’ll really let us take the truck?” Duse asks.
He’s cutting open my back with his eyes. It has me stiffly bringing a glass down to the countertop, manually breathing through the part in my lips and praying to Jesus that my horny mind stops manifesting images of his death persona hunting me through the crowd.
“Just don’t get pulled over. You don’t have a license.”
Filling the glass with filtered water from the pitcher we keep in the fridge, the keys jingling quietly drop my heart to my butt.
I’m horrified to be alone with him now.
There’s this magnetic pull that seems to crush all logic. It turns the lights off for anything scary or concerning, so that I no longer see the red flags. I just feel him. I feel how alive he makes me; how functional my body becomes.
With him, I don’t sink through the earth.
That’s not love, right? Or is it?
Isn’t love unconditional? When you meet the darkest, most deranged pieces of someone, but don’t build their entire character off it because they’re just pieces. They’re fragments of the whole being. Not who they are.
A cold flood on my hand snaps me out of the blur I didn’t mean to get sucked into, my focus clearing and jerking down to the water overflowing and puddling around the glass.
“You’re so messy,” he whispers over my shoulder.
My soul lurches from my body, accidentally slamming the pitcher down and smacking my other hand in the puddle.
Water splashes up my arm and smatters my chest, gripping the countertop with my afraid eyes attached to the peeling backsplash.
“What did you do to her?” Gwen accuses.
The abruptness coils my blood into smoke, whipping my head back to Razor languidly backing off me with a lazy smile, his eyes falling down my frame before flicking over to Gwen.
“Me? Why don’t you ask Bunny what she did?” He stops straight, stashing his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants, and turns a sharp smile to me. “What’d you do, baby girl?”
They’re all staring at me, encouraging the bugs I’m bloated with to gnaw on my muscles and chitter obnoxious hums that vibrate my shell.
Wiping my hand off on my pajama shorts, a hard swallow bulges down my throat, pivoting to face the triple threat on my nervous system. “I did nothing.” My thumbs flick outward, my brows twitching anxiously.
The heat is sinking through my deteriorating flesh. It’s too stuffy to breathe and the glances Duse and Gwen are oscillating over the staring contest I’m having with Razor are making the back door look really nice right now.
But running off doesn’t help. I’m learning that.
“So…” Razor steps forward, tugging his big hands from his pockets with a sarcastic smile. “A detective’s number just, hm, I don’t know, spawned into your pretty fucking hands?”
Gwen gasps and Duse’s eyes grow so wide I can see the expression in my pulsing peripheral.
I stand my ground. Even though I’m about to combust. And I take a step closer, becoming furious with the fact that I’m not mad at him for this display of arrogance.
I’m pissed that he’s reinforcing my spine. And I’m livid that I want to do nothing other than mount his disgustingly trim waist and taste the haughtiness on his tongue for my own greed.
He hikes a brow at my silent bravery, giving me a sliver of a smile that he knows works like magic.
Besides right now. It’s aching me. But it’s not making me fall back.
“No, Razor,” I rasp, sticking a firm forefinger his way. “Maybe if you would have asked me, you’d know the truth. But why make it simple? Why would anything in this fucking house be simple?”
Some more gasps come from the left side of me and Razor drops his cockiness, his dark lashes framing the shock in his eyes to give me a picture I’ll hold on to forever.
I’m not presumptuous. And I usually don’t have a desire to spit out a curse word. But the cutting edge of that variety of vocabulary is how I feel in this moment.
And it delivered exactly how I needed it to.
The kitchen’s silent now. Which gives me a moment to process the sound of betrayal that came from the girls.
My brows furrow, turning to them still sitting in the heaviness. “What would it matter if I talked to a cop?”
“Why would you wanna? Do you really wanna go back-”
Duse spins around and cups her hand over Gwen’s mouth, the loud slap muffling her last word and cutting her off.
“Back to bed.” Holding her hand firmly against Gwen’s lips, Duse twists a smile back to me, trying to gaslight me into not digging around for what Gwen almost slipped up to. “We’re going back to bed for a bit.”
Thrumming in place, my stomach knots and my breathing catalyzes, watching Duse and Gwen rush out of their seats and scamper to their bedroom split off from the kitchen.
Gnossienne is pervading me. Any other time, I’d sink and choke and let the secrecy break me down; allow them to have superiority over me simply because I’m designed to be prey. But Razor’s influence is shifting me into a different breed; an animal that has its own spot in the food chain.
Not quite prey. Not quite predator. It’s something divergent that I cannot make sense of just yet.
“Bunny…” Razor takes a cautious step toward me, loosely sticking his hands out like he’s coming for my waist.
“Don’t,” I shake my head.
He stops a foot away, dunking his brows over the torment riddling his eyes. “Why was he in your tent?”
Do you really believe you deserve an honest answer?
My shoulders lift with another deep breath, my chest dropping with the attitude I almost unleashed on him. “I don’t know. That’s what I’d love to find out.”