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If I didn’t get him, I started to shake and shiver.
How could I be a fucking princess if the dude I was supposed to usurp owned my world, owned me—the very essence of me.
One of his arms hung limply over the seat. His suit was askew, the hundred-dollar tie he wore undone and akimbo. His shirt was unbuttoned, showing the planes of his muscular chest just lightly dusted with hair. Narrowing my eyes, I regarded him further, realizing he was drunk. This was only the second time I’d seen him drunk.
“It was great,” I replied, trying to keep my tone warm. He nodded, his head falling deeper into the leather. “But,” I added, gently turning my gaze out the window. “I didn’t like how they kept playing ‘Blue Christmas’ over and over again. It felt kind of lazy by the band.” I desperately wanted to turn and see what his reaction was, but I kept my gaze fixated outside on the rolling, tinted black picture.
I wasn’t sure what the meaning behind “Blue Christmas” was for him, just that it would hurt. I wanted him to hurt badly, wanted him to feel a little bit of what I was feeling at that moment.
I heard the leather creak and knew he’d sat up. “I didn’t hear that song.” His liqueur-warm tone had gone cold, and that made me warm.
I shrugged and kept watching the window. Women in jackets lined with fur with boots up to their knees walked hand in hand with men in suits and nice wool pea coats along seasonally decorated windows. The windows were bright, dazzling, lighting up fake, fluffy snow. Wonderfully dressed men kissed other wonderfully dressed men beneath the dazzling lights. The people and their shoes smashed into the real snow. The ugly snow. The snow turned gray by reality.
“Maybe you were busy,” I said.
A few hours after Nikolai dropped me off at my room and walked a stumbling Beast back to his, I pulled out the journal, too emotionally exhausted to sleep. You know when you’re overtired and can’t sleep? You’re exhausted, fatigued, and your body needs to sleep, but you’ve reached the point of no return. That was me, but instead of sleep, it was my feelings.
Why do I keep letting this happen to me?
Why did I keep giving up parts of myself to this man? It was like people who anthropomorphize animals. They only have themselves to blame when the dog bites a leg. It’s in the dog’s nature. We’re the psychos who brought wolves into our homes in the first place. The dog doesn’t feel guilty; we just want to see guilt in those big round eyes. We want a reason for all the madness.
A reason for why our legs hurt all the time.
Taking the weathered leather journal, I walked to the blind spot. I pulled two plush blankets over my legs and wrapped another around my body. Before opening the journal, my gaze drifted over to the window. The sun was starting to rise, the white world waking up. Cold. Gray. Snow had settled on the sill, light, like dust, declaring how untouched it was.
I stared outside as snow fell and wondered. The sun burned such a bright white, I wondered if the sky had caught on fire and the snow was actually cinder. My fingers drifted south, beneath the thin satin of my underwear. The pads of my fingers felt along the newly growing hair, soft yet prickly, like pushing against the ends of a feather—another reminder that even though it felt like it, time did not stop here. My hair was growing past the Brazilian wax.
I wondered what the Beast would think of my hair.
Before getting taken, it was the one thing I afforded myself, the one luxury in my cheap life. I waxed religiously. Legs, arms, vagina—everything got waxed. I waxed so much and so often that the hair grew back less and less. I’d been waxing since high school, since the day Alex Wesley pointed at my unshaved legs and said, “Gross.”
Amidst Papa’s peeling plaster, it was a luxury I made myself afford.
Beast would probably pay for laser hair removal. Sighing, I turned back to the journal. I remembered that Sofia had wanted to run away with Alessio, before Emilio started fucking things up.
Anyway, even though I knew it never happened (how could it, with Gabby alive and kicking?), I couldn’t help but wish Sofia would tell me a different story, as if I could open the journal and her inked pen would somehow circumvent history. I slid my finger into the journal, flipping to continue where’d I left off last.
There was just one line on the page.
One single line.
When I do not give Emilio what he wants, he takes it.
There were wet splotches on the page. I ran my fingers over the puc
kering of the paper, imagining Sofia’s tears. The anger coursing through me surprised me. I remembered what Gabby had told me: if Emilio was Gabby’s brother, that meant he was also Sofia’s son. Why would she name her son after Emilio?
Finger still on the rippled paper, I heard the nearly nonexistent creak of the floorboard, letting me know I had a visitor approaching.
My head snapped to the door.
There wasn’t enough time to put the journal completely away. Quickly I shoved it under the pile of blankets and ran over to the bed, darting under the covers. Just as I pulled the covers up to my chin, the door creaked open, slowly revealing the body of the person in the doorway.
Naked.
Familiar.
Wanting.
