Page 275 of Ominous: Part 1
“I love driving.” I hear the smile in his words, and it makes me feel like smiling, too. “We’ll do all of that,” he promises. “What do you want to do downtown?”
My chest is heaving, my pulse still beats throughout my entire body. But as I think through his question, I’m not on the balcony. I’m not jumping over the side. I’m not splatting on the concrete.
“A bar,” I say.
He smiles. I feel his lips curving into the shape of it, high along my forehead. “A bar?” he repeats.
Somewhere in the room, away from the bed, Dominic snorts.He didn’t run either.“And what would you like to do at a bar? Watch everyone else get drunk?” He tries for teasing, but there’s a shakiness to his words betraying his nerves.
I don’t open my eyes, but I force a false lightness, too. “You don’t have fake IDs? I thought it was a rich boy thing.”
“What kind of movies have you been watching?” Dom counters, incredulous.
Eli drops his head and runs the tip of his nose over the back of my neck.
Goosebumps form along my arms.
“She doesn’t watch movies,” he says, and I think of our failed attempt to watch one on the couch. My face grows hotter. “She reads books.” He kisses me again, over my top vertebrae. A shiver runs down my spine, once only damp with sweat. “Don’t you, baby girl?”
I nod but don’t speak.
“Well, I don’t know what books you’re reading but fake IDs are hard to come by…” Dom trails off, then adds, with a dawning awareness, “Wait.” He snaps his fingers. “There’s that place, Eli. The one we went to. Before…”
Eli tightens his hold on me. “Yes. We’ll go to a bar. We’ll get drinks,” he tells me, gently steering the conversation away from what I think is Winslet.
In the silence, I realize my pulse isn’t shaking my chest anymore. I don’t feel as if my body jolts with every beat.
I relax, marginally, in Eli’s arms.
“You can get drunk,” he keeps talking. “Do whatever you want. We’ll spend all day in the ocean, all night following you around. Driving, if you want.”
Dominic laughs again, but he doesn’t argue.
Eli’s fingers slip through my mass of hair, massaging my scalp. Panic recedes, little by little, with his touch and his words.
“We won’t smoke any weed,” he promises, and my teeth show this time, when I smile. Another kiss planted on top of my head, almost like a compulsion. Like he couldn’t stop himself even if he tried. “We’ll jump the waves, you can push Dominic under. I’ll hold him there for you until you tell me to stop.”
My heart slows, even though I know I should be a little nervous for Dominic with those words. I just don’t have room to feel anything or think anything. All I can do is hold onto the sound of his voice.
Then, ten minutes or two or one hour later, everything slips into darkness, and I’m happy in it.
* * *
When I slowly come to,eyes fuzzy from being caught in that gray space between waking and sleeping, I realize there’s a crick in my neck.
It isn’t excruciating, but I feel the precursor to pain. It’ll hurt to move.
There’s only darkness when I manage to get my eyes pried open, full of what feels like sand as I blink, and blink again, and some more.
My mouth is stuck to something, wetness down the side of my chin that I realize with a sudden surge of embarrassment is drool.
With the realization is another.
I’m stuck to Eli.
I shift slightly, trying to get more comfortable, my fingers pressed against firm, soft skin.
But I nearly jump out of my own when Eli’s quiet voice, so close to my ear, says, “Hi.”
