Page 79 of The Night Shift
“You knew we wouldn’t find anyone here,” she continues. “You just wanted to get me here, in my room, all alone.”
I realize that our foreheads are still touching. I think I smile. “I always want to get you all alone…”
Unimpressed, she simply pushes her fingers deeper into my wound. JesusFUCK. Pain webs my body like a fine mesh. My stomach feels like it's being ripped apart and sewn back together, clumsily, over and over. “You’re putting…way too much faith in my intellectual capabilities, Hollister. I’m not that smart. Especially not around…you.”
Her fingers rip out of my wound. The room spins. She wraps her fingers around my throat. Soft and warm and coated with my blood.
I can’t think. Can’t move. Can’t speak.
Holly Moore has her hands wrapped around my neck. Her bare hands are aroundmyneck. I’ve dreamed about this moment for months. Fantasized about it in the shower even.
Holly Moore is choking me.
I feel a deep tingling at the base of my stomach.
“I’m going to make you regret the day you ever crossed paths with me.” She presses the tips of her fingers harder against my windpipe and I feel a sharp stabbing pain in my neck, in my chest, like my lungs are about to explode. A growing pressure accumulates in my balls, pushing and pushing, wanting,needingto get out. My balls tighten, the liquid heat in my belly threatening to spill out. Fucking hell, my pants can’t get any tighter. It gets harder to breathe and I can’t decide if it’s due to her fingers wrapped around my throat or my desperate need to come because of it.
And then it lessens.
The tightness around my throat, the pressure down below. Holly’s eyes soften, the anger fading away. Her grip around my throat eases, and I gasp, air flooding my lungs like a life raft. The crazy in her eyes is gone, replaced by a form of emptiness. Like someone’s just flicked off a light switch inside her brain. The slightest flicker of unease passes over her face. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.
Pain throbs through my gut and a drop of blood seeps through my ripped apart sutures trickling down my abdomen. Leaning heavily against the wall, I slump onto the edge of her bedside table, sweat stinging my eyes as I push my curls back.
I say Holly’s name once. Twice. Three times. No response.
Twisting my neck, I follow her gaze to a spot on her bedside table and — oh.
It’s a photo frame. The one I borrowed the last time I was here.Happy Holly.I frown. How the fuck is it back again?
She reaches for the frame, her hand trembling slightly. My blood is still on her fingers, some of it smearing onto the glass of the frame as she picks it up, holding it close. Her focus remains fixed on the photo, a complex mix of emotions flitting across her face. Fear, anger, grief. Raw and exposed. Like a nerve laid bare. “Th-this wasn’t here before,” she mutters.
“I know.”
She cuts me a glare. “What?”
“I was here the other night.” I’m starting to think making me bleed is her go-to method to get me to confess everything. “I saw this picture and took it back home. I-I don’t know how it’s…back here again.”
I expect her to get angry again. Or at the very least she could start choking me again. But nothing.
There’s a small pause. Her eyes wander back to the frame. She looks like she’s tearing up. Her grip around the edges tightens. Not as a display of aggression, but more like a safetynet. Something to hold on to keep herself from drifting away. A long pause stretches between us. Holly takes a deep breath, then exhales. She shakes her head a little and turns to face me with poignant eyes. “You need to leave.”
Everything hurts. “No.”
She sighs.
“Holly, I can’t leave. I’m bleeding.”
She has the nerve to look bored as if I stabbed myself and then decided to mutilate the wound for funsies. She unzips her fanny pack and pulls out her suture kit, dropping it on my lap. “There. Fix it on the way home.”
Swallowing hard, I grab the metal box and push myself to my feet, one hand still pressing against the tiny bleeding cut. “I looked her up. The girl from the picture…” I refrain from saying her name, unsure if it could possibly be a sore subject for Holly. A trigger.
Holly’s eyes stab into mine, a raw mix of pain and fury. “Excuse me?”
“The man who assaulted her…he was released two days before you received your first message…Nate Lawson.”
She shakes her head, wiping a few tears off her face, smearing a bit of my blood across her cheeks in the process. In any other situation, the sight would have been enough to make me come in my pants. But not right now. Right now, I hate it. I hate watching her cry. I hate myself for making her cry. “You need to leave,” she says. “Get out.”
“I want to help you.”
