Page 49 of Riot House
The clock on my phone updates: seven fifty-three p.m.
If I had my laptop, I could be watching re-runs of The Office right now. I could be doing some of my homework. I could spend five hours spiraling down a YouTube hole, watching videos about rescue dogs finding their furrever homes, and Adam Driver, and Timothée Chalamet, and fifteen hundred movie trailers promoting films I’m never likely to watch.
Hurling myself back onto my bed, I close my eyes, stacking my hands on top of my stomach. “God, this is so fucking stupid,” I mutter.
Vrrrn Vrrrrrrrnn. Vrrrn Vrrrrrrrnn.
I’m so startled by the powerful vibration that buzzes my ribcage that I nearly fling my phone out of my hands. My ears are full of the sound of rushing blood as I check to see who the message is from.
WREN: Don’t disappoint me.
And that’s all it takes. Suddenly, I’m livid. Just who the fuck does he think he is? Don’t disappointhim? He’s not my father. In actual fact, he’s no one to me. I owe him nothing. I definitely don’t have to worry about making him fucking happy. He can kiss my fucking ass.
Launching myself off the bed, I grab my hoody off the back of the door, jamming my arms angrily into the sleeves as I fly out of my room and down the hall, toward the cleaning closet by the bathrooms. I’m muttering under my breath like a crazy person when I reach the closet door, not caring if anyone hears the very colorful and highly offensive curse words that tumble out of my mouth.
The inside of the closet reeks of bleach and must. I breathe through my mouth as I flip over a steel mop bucket, standing on its dented base so I can reach the lip of the crawl space that leads to the attic. Curse my short ass; without Carina here to give me a boost, it takes three failed attempts before I manage to jump high enough to pull myself up using my upper body strength. I graze my knuckles and scrape my back in my haste to drag myself through the crawl space, telling myself that my hurry is all about my simmering rage and not my claustrophobia.
Finally, I reach the other side, huffing and puffing and spitting wads of dust out of my mouth, still cursing like a sailor. I slide from the crawl space without a lick of grace, landing with a hollow thud on the ancient, splintered floorboards of the attic.
“Wow. It’s like watching a fully grown, fully clothed person emerge from a birthing canal.” The voice, emanating coolly from the other side of the attic, doesn’t sound all that impressed by the miracle of birth. Rather, he sounds quite put out by it. I sit up, slapping the sleeves of my hoody, whipping up a cloud of dust that makes me cough.
“Fuck…you…Jacobi…”It’s all I can manage around the hacking and spluttering. A glass of water appears directly in front of my face. A glass. A real one. Cut crystal, with a pretty flower design etched into its surface. Where the fuck did he get this kind of aglassup here? Stunned, I look up, prepared to tell him that I’m not drinking out of a receptacle that’s been packed away in a travel chest for the past three decades, but then I see the thick pile of very new, very luxurious looking blankets on the floor, and the basket, and the wine, and thehundredsof candles that have been placed on top of every available surface, their flames flickering and waving as they work industriously to drive back the dark, and the words turn to ash on my tongue.
“What the fuck is—” I finally look up at Wren, my tongue suddenly seems too big for my mouth. Holy hell, he looks incredible. His hair’s perfectly messy, tumbling into his face. Black shirt, with actual buttons down the front, the top button of which is unfastened. His sleeves have been cuffed to his elbows, exposing muscled forearms. His jeans are faded and frayed at the heel, and the denim smells distinctly of laundry detergent. I know, because he’s standing so close to me that his knee is right in front of my face. Not that I’m smelling his freakingknee. That would be weird.
Wren smirks down at me, and an unbearable ache swells in my chest, all the way up to the base of my throat. I can’t fuckingbreathearound it. “What the fuck isthis?” he asks, finishing my sentence for me. “This is what a Friday night attic date looks like. No need to look so horrified. I didn’t bring any weapons with me.”
“I wishIhad,” I growl. “You’re delusional. You know that, right? This isnota date.”
Wren spins around, holding the glass to his lips and draining the water inside. I force my eyes to the ground, mortified by the fact that I don’twantto look away. He walks back to the cozy set-up he’s arranged, sinking heavily to the floor. He faces me, lounging back onto the blankets, toying with the glass in one hand. “What would you call it, then?” he asks. “Maybe…a war council? You wanna go to war with me, Little E?”
“I just want you to leave me alone. Is that so much to ask?”
Wren huffs down his nose, his gaze wandering around our cluttered, curious surroundings. “You don’t really want that, though, do you.” He states it—a raw, undeniable fact. “You daydream about my mouth on yours all the time. I canseeit playing out in your head. It’s quite the show. You imagine what it would be like, trapped in a dark room with me, my hot breath in your ear, my sweat on your tongue, my dick rubbing up against your cunt, and you can barely sit still. And when you really lose yourself, you let your mind off its leash and you fantasize about what it would be like to have me actuallyinsideyou. You sit so very still, beautiful Elodie. So, so still. You don’t move a muscle, not even a twitch. You stare straight ahead, you don’t even dare to breathe, but I see your white knuckles and your pulse hammering away in the hollow of your throat. The way your eyelids shutter. The red shame that colors your cheeks when you’re done with me in your head.” He picks up the bottle of wine next to him and rips out the cork, holding the mouth of it to his lips. “It’s the most distracting, arousing, incensing thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.” He drinks, just as deeply as when he just polished off the water a second ago. This time I force myself to make eye contact as he swallows once, twice, three times.
When he sets the bottle down, I get to my feet and slowly walk toward him. “You know what?” I whisper.
“What?” he whispers back.
“I wish I could pick up that bottle and smash it over your fucking head, Jacobi.”
“What’s stopping you?” He fires back the taunt so quickly, he must have known I was picturing that, too.
“Because I’m not insane. I don’t just go around assaulting people because I feel like it. I’m not a slave to my compulsions.”
“Shame.” Wren lets his head fall back; he looks up at me with a lazy, self-assuredness that makes me so angry I want to cry. “If you were, we’d have dispensed with this bullshit and fucked already.”
I curl my lip up at him. “Is that all you care about? Fucking me? If I gave in and let you have me, would you finally grow bored and move on to your next victim?”
“No.” He says it without surprise or condemnation. “I won’t ever be done with you. Just as you’ll never offer yourself up to me just to get me to leave you alone, sweet girl.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not sweet.”
He laughs. “That’s the part I like the best. When was your last tetanus shot?”
“What?”
He points the bottle of wine at me. At my feet, specifically. “You forgot your shoes, Stillwater. I did my best, but it’s far from clean up here. You’re also bleeding from your hand.”
