Page 71 of Live for Me

“That’s how you get through this kind of thing? Just drink until you don’t really have to experience it?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and motioned for the same waitress to come back. I finished off whatever was in my glass and passed it off to her before she walked away.

I’d watched Trista do this through Jersey’s camera when he first found her in a bar. She’d glided around an entire room like it was her own house and she’d never been more comfortable. She touched everyone who spoke to her. She smiled at everyone. She laughed at everything.

“You dance?” the new man asked while he handed me yet another drink.

“Nobody’s dancing,” I said and looked to the dance floor another time.

“It only takes one person to get it started in a place like this,” he said. “What kind of music do you like?”

“Probably not your kind.”

“If you’re the one doing the dancing, you get to decide the music,” he chuckled.

“You won’t also be dancing?”

“Are you always this difficult?”

“I think it’s actually a personality trait at this point,” I said and looked around the room again, because Utah would absolutely sayyes, I was always this difficult.

“Come with me,” he said and smiled while he grabbed my hand.

How I prevented myself from screaming bloody fucking murder was a miracle all on its own.

I always imagined if this exact scenario happened again, I would be screaming by now. I’d be nearly ripping my arm right out of its socket to get my hand free. I’d use every ounce of my weight to fight back this time. Some instinct was supposed to take over to tell me how to prevent this from happening another time. But none of that occurred.

He pulled me toward the weird jukebox contraption, and I stood there quietly chugging my entire drink while he looked through the music available on it. Once he’d decided on something, he had my hand in his again, put his beer bottle on a table as we walked by it, and he turned to face me when we were the only two people in the middle of that dance floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

utah

Well.

The end of me would certainly fucking begin with this girl.

The last thing I’d expected out of this bar night of hers was to bring her to one, only for her to let some other guy rub his dick all over her ass under the guise of dancing. For someone who’d been thoroughly unable to even so much as walk straight in her overwhelming drunkenness, she sure had perfect control of the way her hips swayed in rhythm with the wrong fucking man’s body. If I could figure out a way to block him from view, this would be the spectacle of a lifetime. I’d sit here and watch her move that way for the rest of my days, if there hadn’t been someone else’s obviously stiffening cock disrupting the entire image.

But I stayed where I was and just watched.

I watched his hands on Memphis’ hips. I watched them shift up and down the outside of her thighs every so often. I watched one roam across the bare skin of her stomach. It stopped on the little revolver that hung from her naval for a long while. Then that handed started to shift south so slowly I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t directed all my focus squarely on that fucking hand. By the time I watched his thumb hook itself inside the top of her jeans, I’d already imagined the forty-seven ways that I intended to remove that hand from his body. But Memphis pushed his hand off and turned back to face him. I even smirked, thinking I was about to witness her slap the shit right out of him.

Except she put her arms around his neck and laced her fingers behind his head. Then I watchedbothhis fucking hands creep into the back pockets of her jeans. He said something to her. She dropped her head back to laugh. He was right there to say something directly into her ear a moment later. And whatever he’d said froze her movements. She tried to take the tiniest step back. The laughter had stopped. The smile was gone.

My whole body was reacting to the scene without any part of my head thinking it through. I was shifting through the crowd of people as quickly as I could move to intercept them at the door. He had her hand again and he was taking her toward the exit, but she wasn’t fighting him. She wasn’t screaming at him to stop. She was terrified, she was panicking, and she was looking for me.

I interrupted his path to the door by placing my body right in front of it and waiting for them to get closer. Memphis hadn’t even noticed me yet. She was scanning the entire bar as they walked, looking where she thought she’d left me. Somewhere in the middle of her eyes darting around the room, they finally landed on me when the man leading her stopped right in front of me.

“Whatever this is, angel, it’s over now.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m not talking to you,” I said, still without bothering to look at him.

“You know this guy?” he asked Memphis when he shifted just enough to look at her.

She just barely nodded her head. “Yeah.”

I chuckled at that.

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