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A slow, predatory smile spreads across his face. He hooks his finger, using his grip on my pussy to pull me closer to him as he drops his head, lowering his voice. “I don’t want your hymen, Ayla.”
“No?” The husky voice barely sounds like it belongs to me. “Then what do you want?”
The blue section of his right iris seems to flare brighter somehow even as his pupils dilate, the black circles expanding and eating up the light.
“Everything.”
Then he buries his face in my hair and takes another long, deep breath.
I close my eyes, feeling like my whole world is spinning out of control. He keeps breathing me in, and I’m certain that with one more deep inhale, I’ll vanish completely, subsumed entirely by him.
“Why was someone shooting at you?” I manage to choke out. “Who wanted to kill you?”
I’m not sure what I’m trying to accomplish by blurting out the question, but the words make him freeze. I feel his body go stiff against mine, then he drags his hand out of my pants, smearing a line of sticky arousal over my lower belly.
This time, he does step away from me, and I nearly fall over from the sudden loss of his body holding me up.
“No one.”
His voice is dark, angry.
And before I can call him out as a fucking hypocrite for feeding me such an obvious lie of his own, he turns on his heel and stalks away, his leather boots eerily quiet on the ancient linoleum floor.
I stare after him, my chest rising and falling hard with jerky breaths. Then I slide down to the floor until my ass hits the tiles with a thud.
For months, years, I’ve tried to put that night behind me. I’ve tried to reframe it in my mind in a way I could comprehend, in a way I could live with.
I’ve tried to bury it.
Maybe I should’ve known better though.
The past never dies.
Chapter 5
Should’ve fucking stayed home, Ayla. Learned your goddamn lesson, didn’t you?
I grimace in irritation at myself as I grab a bottle of Grey Goose and start mixing a martini, working deftly one-handed. I didn’t bother wearing my prosthesis tonight, even though I usually get better tips when I do.
My arm has been aching worse than usual lately, sharp jabs of pain shooting through the phantom limb, as if my body has somehow been reminded of what it lost by Marcus’s sudden appearance in my life.
Of the piece of me I’ll never get back.
I grab the cold metal container and shake it rhythmically, trying to shove memories of what happened yesterday at the library out of my mind.
I’m not sure how long I spent sitting on the floor in the stacks like that, my clit still throbbing occasionally from the aftershocks of the orgasm that tore through me. But it was long enough that when the librarian finally wandered upstairs to return books to the shelves, he looked both concerned and suspicious as he asked if I was okay.
Probably worried I was a junkie sneaking into a quiet part of the library to shoot up or something.
I left without the book I came for. Honestly, I didn’t feel like reading at all after that. Instead, I went home and turned on both the TV and the radio, trying to fill my apartment with enough noise to drown out my thoughts.
And today, unlike yesterday, I didn’t have the luxury of deciding whether or not to leave my apartment. Not if I want to keep paying rent on said apartment anyway.
Duke’s gets busiest on the weekends, but even though it’s a Wednesday night, it’s been steady ever since I got here at eight.
I’ll take it. I need the tip money, and even more than that, I need to keep myself distracted. After my encounter with Marcus at the library, the dreams I had last night were… fucked up.
I woke up on the heels of another orgasm, my own hand grabbing my breast so hard that my fingernails left five little crescent-shaped gouges in my skin.
