Page 283 of Ominous: Part 1
I arch a brow her away, neck-and-neck with the Dodge. The air is cool and loud streaming through our windows, and, in the nighttime, the highway looks like a stretch of endless possibilities. A place where this doesn’t have to be only a dream, a blip in time.
A place I can keep this girl beside me, her warm hand beneath mine.
“You want me to?”
Dom slaps his palms on either of our seats, sitting in the middle again in the back, and he says, “Fuck yeah she wants you to, don’t you, E?”
“Do it,” she says, speaking around the unlit cigarette. “You’ll win, right?”
I roll my eyes.Of course I’ll fucking win.
Sighing, gauging our speed—forty over the limit as is—I flash my lights, too.
Together, me and Orange drop down to the limit. We’re going from a roll, because even I’m not rebellious enough to stop dead in the middle of a highway and race from a stop.
“Do you need me to move my hand?” Eden whispers, our eyes locking in the dark of the car for a split second. She snatches the cigarette from her mouth, clenched tight in her black painted fingers.
It would be easier, if she moved her hand.
But the feel of it beneath mine, remembering when we had sex in the car… “No,” I tell her. “Do not move.”
Her lips curve upward as she leans her head back against the seat, reaching for the hem of her skirt and pulling it up, over her calves, above her knees. Just enough to show me the lower half of her thighs, spread wide on my leather seats. It’s sexy, with that fucking cigarette between her fingers, too.
My heart flutters, and a flush of warmth coils in my gut, but the Neon is honking its horn, a short sound. Once. Twice.
I’m ready on the third one, knowing they had the advantage because they’re the one starting the race.
With my fingers over Eden’s, we shift when I redline, once, then again, and even Dominic is quiet as we hear the turbo from the SRT-4 spooling over the growl of the Infiniti’s engine, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s too late.
We’re fifty over again, fuckingflyingdown the highway, and no shitty American engine, turbo or not, is going to rocket them past me now, at least not for several long seconds.
Eden is laughing her head off, it’s a beautiful fucking sound even if it is a little drugged, and she’s beaming at me when I finally switch lanes and slow down enough, I won’t get my car taken for street racing.
“That was too easy,” Dominic says, but I hear the wonder in his voice.
“You try it sometime,” I tell him, my eyes on his in the rearview.
He flips me the bird, but he’s got a smile on his face, and he doesn’t say anything else. I glance at Eden, winking at her. “There’s a lighter in the console.”
She runs her tongue over the underside of her top teeth, looking at me like she wants to fuck me. But after a moment, she puts the cigarette back in her mouth, grabs the lighter, sparks up, and starts to smoke in my car.
* * *
The hotel isin Acid City.
A middle-of-nowhere plot of Virginia probablyhaunted by sheer virtue of the fact there’re very few live humans here. The Gore-Booth Hotel is set upon a hill, a sprawling building of white with a red roof. My engine whines as we head up, and up, and up, no headlights in the rear view, because I’m sure Jasper, as good as he may be with cars, isn’t as fast I am.
“What do we think?” Eden asks. Her voice is soft, but I feel the tension of her fingers beneath my hand. She’s leaned forward in her seat, taking in the circular driveway, a fountain in the center lit with a yellow glow, but not currently running. It’s a little eerie.
She scans the four-story building, and I can see in her eyes she’s imagining the two rooms she booked on the way here from her phone. Two, despite the fact I told her to get three.
“Three? That’s… that’s a waste of money.”
I wanted to argue, considering I have a lot of money to waste, but I just shut my mouth and let her do what she wanted. We’ll see how she feels about rooming with someone else, when the someone else in question isn’t allowed to kiss her shoulder and put their hands on her tonight.
I grind my fingers against the wheel and decide to forgo the archway where the sliding glass doors beckon to the weakly lit lobby. I can’t see much but pale yellow lighting beyond the doors, but we already have reservations, so I head to the back of the building, for customer parking.
