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Skids
“Thanks, Reaper.” I type in the code and swing the gate open so I can take the bags from him. Phoebe is scared inside and I don’t want to leave her alone for long. I want to get back inside, but Reaper seems to have questions.
“Who is it?” he asks, nodding his head towards the house.
I have half a mind to ignore him and pretend he didn’t ask, but Pres will probably tell him anyway if he asks. Pres is the one that sent Reaper to get Phoebe’s stuff from her hotel room when I told him she’s going to be staying for at least the night. “Her name is Phoebe. She works at BIBO.”
He looks to the side and bites into his bottom lip as he thinks over it, then shakes his head. “I dinnae remember names that well.”
“She has blue hair.” It’s the most immediately recognizable thing about her, and when I mention it, his eyes light up.
“Oh aye! She seems sweet! What the hell is she doing here?”
While Reaper is confused about how Phoebe got here, I’m trying to picture him inside BIBO and struggling. He’s tattooed all over like Pres, but he has a nose ring and a bar in his tongue that I can see when he speaks. BIBO is fancy and it’s for rich people. Reaper probably looks like stereotypical white trash to those rich people any time he’s in there.
And Pres talks about him being an empty psychopath, but a true psychopath wouldn’t be concerned about someone just because they’re ‘sweet’. The video of him saving Emily when two guys broke into Pres’s house to hurt her definitely checked some of the psycho boxes- he dispatched those guys with the ease of someone that’s done that shit before. What he’s saying now doesn’t mesh with the idea of him being a person that lacks empathy to the extent Pres has led me to believe.
“Don’t you worry about it,” I answer, giving up on the idea of being able to accurately picture Reaper anywhere outside the clubhouse. I don’t fit in anywhere either, so I understand. “Thanks again.”
“Not a problem.” He heads back to his bike and I click the gate shut again before going into the house.
Phoebe isn’t where I left her. She panicked as soon as she saw someone coming up the road, and I’m not sure whether she’s hiding or not. I drop her bags by the couch and wait a few seconds for her to reappear, but when she doesn’t, I figure I’m going to have to seek her out.
Going to my computer, I switch the camera view to the interior of the house and my eyes scan over the monitors. Bedroom, bathroom, hallway- no Phoebe. The entire upstairs is empty. She's not on the main floor either. I finally find her curled up in a corner in the basement, arms wrapped around her legs again like she’s got to protect herself from an immediate threat.
Fuck. I need her to tell me who I’m looking for and what they did so I can kill them. Every time she freaks out like this it makes me sick to my stomach and fills my blood with rage.Someoneout there hurt this young woman, and my hands have been clean for too long. I’ll find the sickest joy in murdering the bastard slowly, feeding back to him every ounce of pain and fear he’s made her feel.
I’ve only known her for a couple hours, and already he’s wracked up quite a debt. I’ve got a good memory and plenty of downtime to sort out how exactly the prick will suffer. Once she finally confesses, I’ll already have a full-fledged plan in place. I’ll handle her problem and get rid of the anger I’ve been holding in for far too long. I expelled most of it when I killed my father, but since then, some has returned.
Especially now that I have a girl in my house that’s got obvious trauma that even Reaper noticed is undeserved. Somebody’s going to pay for it. But before I get too deep into my plotting, I need to take care of Phoebe and drag her back to reality again.
I grab a blunt and a lighter from my desk and go downstairs, stopping only a foot from where she’s crouched. "Phoebe, have you smoked pot before?"
Her head snaps up and she pins me with a glare. "Why?"
Because I'm going to kill you if you say yes. What the fuck do you think?"Does it make you more paranoid?"
Phoebe’s expression softens as her gaze falls to what I’ve got in my hand. "No. It actually helps a lot with my anxiety, but only certain kinds."
"This is an Indica strain- good for anxiety. It's called Northern Lights. It's gonna help you relax and make you really fucking hungry." I put the joint between my lips and light it, taking a big, deep inhale before I hold it up to her mouth. "I need you to inhale like you're drowning and the only way to get oxygen is through this blunt."
Her eyes go from my hand in front of her face back up to me. "What if I'd rather drown?"
Sadness worms through me as I realize she may be so scared she’d rather be dead. "Then I need you to breathe in like this is a straw and you're trying to inhale the ocean."
Phoebe's lips wrap around it and she does what I asked for. She breathes deep down into her lungs until her belly looks swollen, with her focus on me the entire time, Then her eyes fall closed as her heart pounds against her chest, visibly counting out ten heartbeats before she opens her mouth and lets the smoke roll out slowly without even the slightest exhale to push it faster.
As the moments drift by us and we pass the blunt back and forth, I end up sitting beside her with my back against the wall, watching as her legs straighten out and her shoulders slump, and her face relaxes like she just got… well, stoned. And she's so pretty like this that my first thought is that I should kiss her or touch her, hug her and hold her or something. She’s just too far away from me, even sitting right next to me.
She's really warm, actually. I can feel her body heat rolling off her and moving into me. "Who was it?" she whispers, but this is somereallygood weed and I never smoke anymore so I'm also just as stoned as she is. I have no idea what she’s talking about. "Who was it?" she repeats.
Fuck, what is she saying? "What?"
"Who was it?"
I hit the blunt again to smooth the frustration rising inside me. "Phoebe, I don't understand the question. You keep saying the same thing and I don't get it. Who was who?"
"At the door, er… at the gate. Who was it?"
