Page 12 of For Fillies and Monsters

But I also don’t like disappointing people, and I know if I reject him here and now, Dale’s fragile, drunk happiness will burst.

If she cries I don’t know how I will handle it.

So he continues to pull me, and I continue to let him.

We reach the door, a draft of cool air hits my face, but my back burns anew. I turn around, making sure Dale is still following, and to find the source of that ever annoying heat. It doesn’t always happen when someone looks at me,thank Godor I’d be a pile of ashes at this point. But it happens often, and at the most random times—has for several years now—and I have no way of explaining it. Like my intuition is screaming at me, but about what?

Spotting Dale, I trace her features, just to make sure she’s still safe, and note her face growing more weary and tired with each step. I need to get her to a bed, and fast. I move to turn back around, satisfied that she’s still bumping along behind me, albeit slowly, when I freeze.

A pair of dark eyes brand their way through me like a hot iron against exposed flesh, causing a ripple of shivers to snake down my back. I suck in a sharp breath, my eyes glued to his across the room, the familiar wave of heat bursting into an inferno across my skin. Like he’s the lighter and I’m the kindling, a light breeze of fate fanning the forest fire potential between us.

I know I should look away—let this seemingly familiar and yet completely new feeling pass by without acknowledgment. It’ll be safer that way.

But I know if I do, I will regret it.

His eyes flick down, and I instantly know he’s looking at Nathan’s grip on my hand. I want to pull away, I want to push him out of view, but I can’t; I’m frozen. Even if I wasn’t drunk, I know I would be rooted to this moment, to this eclectic current zipping over my skin, from a look.

A single look.

I can’t make out the features of his face, or the shape of his body. He is covered in dark clothing from head to toe—black t-shirt, dark jeans, and a black cowboy hat that shadows his face from the dim lights streaking across the room. Even in the darkness I can tell he’s muscular and solid, the fabric of his shirt and jeans clinging to the ridges of his trim muscles like water over astone. He looks carved from the shadows—dark and dangerous—and that sends a thrill of excitement racing to my core. I am hot and ready, and I don’t even know what his face looks like.

It is more a feeling, a magnitude. And I’m hooked.

I gulp and feel Nathan tugging at my hand again. The stranger’s eyes flick down once more at where he is gripping me, and I can see the whites of his eyes disappear, like he’s closed them. He leans deeply into the shadows of the room, their dark arms swallowing their equally dark companion, and only when the rotating strobe light returns to his place among them, do I see his eyes glittering at me once more.

And even from here, even with only seconds of light with each pass, I can see he is pissed.I can feel it.His body is coiled tight, holding the quivering monster beneath at bay with a blanket of flimsy fabric.

I rub my thighs together, the alcohol, and my predisposition to fucked up men, making me wet. His dark eyes note that movement too, and his head tips. A small lock of dark hair dropping over his face, but he has pushed it back beneath his hat within the next pass of the strobing lights.

I feel frozen in time, my breathing all but ice in my lungs, the music a distant thrum in my veins. Time could be speeding past me, or halted all together and I wouldn’t know—wouldn’t care. All I know is that heat that has haunted my days and nights for as long as I can remember feels more potent than ever. And I’d do anything to be consumed by it completely; consumed by the man who has the power to make me want to risk running into a burning barn just to see what might lie inside.

I shift my legs again, desperate for any kind of friction to lessen the building ache in my pussy. The light passes his shadows again, and I catch a flash of white teeth—more a snarl than a smile, but it makes me suck in a sharp breath all the same.With the next pass of light, I crane my neck, ready to catch another glimpse of him, like a drug addict looking for my next hit, but his form doesn’t fill out the shadows the way it did only moments before.

I hold my breath, waiting for the light to tilt by three more times before the tugging on my arm becomes too much for me to ignore, and the sound of Dale’s voice filters into my haze once more.

I want to go talk to him. I want to find him and see just how hot his skin feels beside mine.

But the longer I stand here, the cooler my skin becomes—nearly chilled. It’s obvious he’s gone.

And I feel irrationally empty.

THREE

STETSON

February 14th, 2014

He’s chasing me.Not in a fun,normal father-daughtergame kind of way. But in aif I catch you I will kill youkind of way. Our familial relationship is not made of love and laughter, but rather built on frantic, wild heartbeats, followed by murderous, thundering feet falls. It is the gut-wrenching music that makes up my entire existence—this sprint for my life. By now, it should feel normal; I have been doing it since I can remember walking. But instead, each time, it feels like a little more of me dies.

And maybe it does.

I can feel him getting closer, his breath hot and heavy with the tang of whiskey and cigarette smoke clinging to my nostrils like poisonous gas. Just smelling it makes me want to vomit everywhere, but I have to fight through it, I have to keep moving.

Keep running.

I reach the front door of the beautiful log cabin my mom promised would be my safe place, and rip the door nearly from its hinges. It rattles and bangs angrily against the side of the house, the sound mixing like a drum with the murderous symphony around me. I can’t slow down, not even for the door that was a promise to protect me from evil.

Because it hadn’t, and neither had my mom.

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