He moves closer with a grin, gently wiping me clean with the warm, damp cloth. “Did I hurt you?” he asks, his voice softer now.
I shake my head. “It was perfect,” I say, regaining my voice. “Give me a minute,” I say, walking to the bathroom to hide myself.
When I return ready to fire up my questions, I find him in my bed instead, lying on his back, half under the covers with one arm tucked behind his head like everything in the world is fine.
I walk to the edge of the bed, pick up a shirt, and throw it over me. “What are you doing?”
“Resting,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “You should try it.”
“You’re not just going to lay there and pretend everything is… I don’t know… fine?!”
He opens one eye. “Everything is not fine?”
“Not even one fucking tiny bit,” I snap, my voice shaking with a fury I can no longer contain.
Fifty-Seven
NOW | JAX
Matt glances over. “You good?”
“Fine.”
I am not fine. Everything around me is normal: the sounds, the smells, the low-grade misery. Everything is the same, but I feel different.
I’m hyper-aware of every fucking shift of my denim. Every time my jeans drag across me, my whole body lights up. My cock hasn’t relaxed since I left the shop. It’s a constant, throbbing reminder of the choice I made.
I reach for a glass on the top shelf and immediately regret it, not with pain but with a sensitivity so acute it knocks half a breath out of me. The fabric pulls when I stretch and my whole body locks up. I set the glass down hard.
Matt watches me. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
Good question. Should I tell him I let my father sterilize me this morning so I don’t accidentally knock up the woman I love and hand a kid over to the evil hole under this city? Or that I can’t move two inches without getting hard like a goddamn teenager? Yeah. That’ll go over great.
I grab the whiskey bottle instead and take a long pull.
“Just tired,” I mutter.
Matt snorts. “Yeah. You look real tired.”
I ignore him and flex my hand behind the bar. The seam in my palm warms.
Out of nowhere, the lights fucking die, one second the room’s lit and the next it’s black. Not cozy-dark, underground dark.
Someone swears. “What the hell was that?”
“Well that’s fuckin’ ominous,” another voice says.
A chair scrapes.
“I’m on it,” Matt says from my left.
I don’t answer because my palm is burning, and I know this isn’t the wiring, or the generator or even the grid. It’s me.
From the back, someone laughs—a nervous, trying-too-hard sound. “Yo… this that haunted-bar shit you warned me about?”
“Man,” another guy says, “I told you this place is cursed.”
“Shut the fuck up,” someone rasps.
