Page 47 of Liar Byrd
He nods, though he doesn’t turn around. “If you’d found my bike dirty?”
I clear my throat, remembering his promise to fuck me on it. “I wouldn’t have cleaned it.”
“Shame.”
“Excuse me?” I ask, positive I didn’t hear what I thought I did.
He twists around to meet my gaze before he says in a louder voice, “I said it’s a shame.”
I think he’s flirting with me, and I don’t know what to say back. Before the compound, I spent all my time trying to save my mom from predators. After the compound? I’m trying to savemyself from the same. Flirting never entered the picture for me, and I never thought it would.
When I don’t respond, he chuckles and returns to his cleaning.
My eyes fix on his hand. He has numbers tattooed on his knuckles. I want to ask what they mean, but I keep thinking of why he would thank me for cleaning his bike in one breath and threaten to fuck me on it the next.
“You ready for that ride?”
I jump, startled at his question.
Swallowing, I tell myself to stop being so pathetic. “Where do you ride?”
He shrugs. “Anywhere I want. There’s a dirt track nearby.”
“Why do I need to know about the dirt track?”
He turns around, smiling. “'Cause I heard the disapproval of all this dirt loud and clear.”
“Can I help?”
“Doing that shit of a job, am I?”
I bite my lip and shift from foot to foot. "No, I just thought you might need some help.”
And if I’m doing something, I’m not thinking.
“You need a hobby.”
I flinch. It’s just words, and words shouldn’t hurt as much as those four words do.
Because he’s right.
Idoneed a hobby.
It’s not normal to go looking for things to clean to stop thinking about rapist cult leaders. What exactly is the cleaning doing? It’s not like I can scrub away the memory of my past, as much as I wish I could.
I slip away. I’m walking back into the house when I hear Makhi curse.
“Jessica!”
I pause for a beat, then continue, his muttered, “Fuck!” chasing me inside.
“I need you to go into town to collect the groceries.”
Nance might as well have asked me to climb to the roof of this house and step off it. I’d have reacted the same way.
No,thisterrifies me more.
I was busy scrubbing the entryway floors before she arrived, and getting marble clean requires elbow grease. It’s become one of my favorite jobs because all I think about is getting the next bit of floor sparkling before I move onto the next.
