Page 11 of Nasty
Kiss her.
I put a stop to the urgent voice in my head immediately. She wasn’t ready for any of that. Didn’t want it. I was a piece of shit, but I wasn’t going to try and comfort a woman who didn’t want to be comforted, just because it hurtmeto see her so freaked out.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking,” she said slowly. “The things that guy drew...”
Graphic.
Demeaning.
Terrible.
“He wanted to do those things to me,” she continued. “He wanted…me. Why would he hire you to murder me if he was so…”
“In love with you?” I bit the end of my tongue. Why the fuck couldn’t I keep my goddamn mouth shut?
She grimaced, sucking in an uneven breath. “Why would he want me dead, if he was so into me?” The question cost her dearly, I could tell. She was frightened and ready to bolt, and saying things like that clearly made her skin crawl.
“I have no idea,” I told her. I didn’t tell her what I suspected: that there had probably been another man down in that bunker at some point. That there was every chance those drawingshadn’tbeen inked by the dead man on the cot. I huffed, closing my eyes. “Lie down, Sera.”
“I don’t want to lie down.”
“Just fucking do it.”
She sat there for a moment. I knew her well enough to know she was trying to think of a colorful way to tell me to go fuck myself. But then she sank back beside me, her hair spilling around her head like a halo of jet-black ink against the pure white of the bed sheets. “This is a bad dream,” she said. “I keep waiting to wake up, but the seconds keep on ticking by and I’m still stuck here, wondering when the fuck it’s all going to end.”
“Itwillend,” I told her. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“How do you know?” She turned her head so that she was facing me, her question mirrored in the troubled expression on her face. “You can’t know that, Fix.”
Fuck, she was beautiful. I curled my hands into fists, pressing them down into the comforter. “I do know it, because I’m here with you. And if you’re with me, nothing bad’s going to happen to you. I won’t allow it.”
Her mouth turned up into a tight, unhappy smile. “You’re gonna protect me if someone comes after me?”
“I’ll fucking destroy anyone who dares to try. I won’t take you back to Seattle, if that’s truly what you want, but you have to promise me something. You have to promise you’re not going to go off the deep end and do anything stupid in order to find this guy.I’m going to make sure you’re safe at all times. You’re my only priority. My entire focus is on you and keeping you alive. Butyouhave to keep you alive, too.”
“I do know some Muay Thai. I can protect myself if I need to.” She smiled a woefully sad smile. “Iwillprotect myself. My life’s been so normal for a long time now. I just don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do through any of this. I want to bury my head in the sand and move on, pretend like none of it’s happening, but I can’t. If I do that, I’m always going to be looking over my shoulder, wondering if the guy behind me in Starbucks is going to grab me and throw me into the back of his dirty rape van. That’s no life, Fix. I feel like I’ve been violated. Those drawings were so specific. I mean, who does that? Who’d draw a woman they didn’t know in a bunch of porn positions, just to get off?”
“You’d be surprised. Guys can be fucking disgusting.”
“You followed me. You watched me in Seattle, and now you say you’re attracted to me. How am I supposed to know…” She swallowed. “How am I supposed to know that you’re not like that, too?”
Her question was the hard-soled heel of a boot pressing down against my neck. God. She was fucking right. Whoever drew those pictures of her was obsessed with her in a very dangerous, fucked up way. I’d crossed a line when I was in Seattle. I’d allowed myself to do it, not believing that I’d ever even come face to face with her, but I had been wrong. Telling her that I was attracted to her back in the cabin on Butcher’s Mountain, explaining that I had been for some time, had been really fucking hard. In my head, I’d convinced myself I’d never have to tell her that. But I needed for her to believe I meant her no ill will, and in order to do that I’d had to tell her the truth.
Now, here was a guy who’d also developed a crush on her from afar, and had been drawing sick, evil pictures of her while he no doubt jerked off, who was also probably the guy who’d paid to have her killed in the first place, and I was expecting her to be able to tell the difference between me and him.
The comparison made me sick to my stomach, but I understood how she felt. I didn’t blame her for questioning absolutely everything. It simply made her smart. I was going to show her that there was a difference between me and this fucking guy, though. I was going to make it so damned obvious that she would never doubt me or my intentions again.
Rolling onto my side, I flared my nostrils, staring into her eyes. I reached into my pocket, and I pulled out her phone. I hadn’t given it back to her after we’d discovered the body. I typed three numbers into the keypad and I handed it back to her now. She looked down at it and frowned.
“You want me to call 911?"
“You can if you want to. I won’t stop you. I won’t run. You can tell the cops everything.”
Her hands shook as she held her phone. “They’ll arrest you. You’ll go to prison, Fix. You’ll never see the light of day again.”
“I’d rather die in fucking jail than have you think I was some monster who pursued you because he was sick in the head.”
She looked at me, and then looked down at the three digits blazing on the screen of her phone. Her finger hovered over the green ‘send call’ button. “You’re not serious?” she said.
