Page 30 of The Woman in the Hollow
“Who. Who I’d seen in the woods.”
“It certainly looked like a who,” he said, leading me over to a stack of hay bales and sitting down on one.
Feeling like I had no choice, I sat beside him, hating how I was aware of every inch of our bodies that brushed, how I could feel the heat of him through his suit, chasing the chill on my skin and in my bones away.
“Because it was. I saw it. I… touched him with my shoe. He was… squishy. Like a human. Well, like most humans,” I said, glancing at Dante’s strong, hard body.
“I think maybe the low light and the spookiness of the woods made it seem that way. But it wasn’t a person, Hazel.”
His head was turned toward me, his voice was confident, but he still wasn’t looking at me.
“Dante, itwas. Is he still there? I’ll show you.” Two days passed; I imagined the smell of decomposition would lead us right to him.
Did my stomach flip at the idea of that? Sure. But I would do whatever it took to find him, to give the man the dignity of being discovered, picked up, and given a proper funeral. There were probably people out there who were looking for him, who missed him, who deserved to know what happened to him—no matter how horrific.
Dante’s hand slapped down on my thigh when I went to stand. It wasn’t a hard touch; he wasn’t holding me in place. But just the feel of his hand on my leg was enough to keep me completely immobilized.
It was insane to be thinking of anything else at a moment like this, but I couldn’t help but notice how big his hand was, howit completely covered my thigh. Or how high his placement was. Just another couple of inches and I could feel those big fingers press between my thigh—
No.
God.
What was wrong with me?
I shook off the thoughts.
But there was no reasoning with the ache deep in my core in response to that line of thinking.
“It’s not there, babe,” Dante said, fingers massaging my thigh. It was beyond distracting.
“Wait. What?”
“When Dom and I looked it over, what seemed like a real person at first turned out to just be a really well-done prop. A movie prop, as it turned out. Once we realized it wasn’t a body, we started calling around. It was one of my cousins. He was trying to fuck with Dom. But he got you by accident.”
“Dante, I was there with the body. I know what I saw.”
Right?
I mean, it had been dark. I just had my headlamp. And Ihadbeen completely freaked out and panicked. But I’d seen his open eyes, his parted mouth, the moisture still gathered there. That said, could that have just been… glue or nail polish, or something else meant to make the area look wet?
The squishy feel of him—surely there were ways for a designer to make a mannequin feel that way.
Something in me still rejected the idea.
But if both Dante and Domenico said it was just a prop, who was I to say otherwise? I mean, they’d been the ones to move the thing. Surely they would know better than me that it was fake.
“I’m sorry you were so scared, Hazel,” he said, hand massaging again. “My cousin got a talking-to.”
“I’m… I’m sorry I overreacted.” Feeling suddenly incredibly embarrassed, I got to my feet, ignoring the way my body objected to the distance between the two of us.
“Hey, don’t be sorry,” Dante said, stepping in front of me, surprising me enough to make me glance up. This time, he was looking right at me. “It was a valid response.”
To a real body, sure.
I should have investigated harder.
I should have been more logical.
