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“Here.” I shuck off my jacket and throw it at her. “Put this on.”
Predictably, she doesn't. The woman refuses to listen to me even when I'm trying to save her sweet little ass from hypothermia.
“Need me to do it for you?”
Shaking her head, she lays the jacket over her knees and pulls it up to her chin. It's an image that momentarily stuns me. Bundled in my clothing like she's swaddled in my bedcovers, I'm assaulted with fantasies of finding other, more intimate, ways of warming her up. Ways that would include her being dressed in my clothing only after I'd completed the job.
“Are you planning on keeping me here all night?” Thea asks, her voice fractured from shivering but in no way lacking her usual spark.
I shoot her a glare of feigned contempt, then shift the car into gear and roll us out of my parents’ driveway.
Set into seventy-plus acres of agriculture and forestry, the farm is segregated from the rest of the town by sprawling fields and thick woodland. Thea would have had to walk over two miles along the country roads to get home tonight.
“Why didn't you drive your rental tonight?” I ask.
“The engine wouldn't start.”
“So you chose to walk all the way here in that dress and those goddamn heels with no coat, in the middle of the fucking winter?”
She flinches at the bite in my tone, then shrugs. “Your mama was expecting me. I didn't want to let her down.”
I roll my eyes. This fucking woman. “I think she would have understood, Althea.”
In fact, if Mama knew the risk Thea had taken to come to the party tonight, she'd pitch an absolute fit. Thea bristles at the use of her full name. She hates it, and that's exactly why I used it—to see her features tick and the burst of angry flames burning in her eyes in that way they do when she's irritated.
Good, I think. If she still has the cognitive ability to feel annoyance, then she's probably not hypothermic. Still, though, I reach across her with one hand as I drive, tucking the coat tighter in around her body.
The frailness of her figure doesn't go unnoticed. There's nothing to her anymore. During the time that she's been gone, she's lost those gentle curves and soft edges that I would fantasize about as a teenager, wishing I could touch them. Then, she went and left me before I could. And now there's nothing left for me to touch even if I wanted to.
Shaking my head, I turn my attention back to the moonlit road ahead.
“What's your problem?” she asks.
“You need to eat more.”
I hear rather than see the roll of her eyes. “So people keep saying.”
“Maybe you should start listening, then.”
“I would if I didn't want to work again,” she snarks.
I scoff. “That's bullshit.”
“Because you know so much about the film industry?”
“I know enough.” I frown, fingers tightening around the steering wheel. “Things are changing. You don't have to be stick thin to be successful anymore.”
“You really do live in your own little world, huh?” She laughs, and it's this dark, hollow sound that sends shivers down my spine. “Attitudes are changing toward unrealistic beauty standards, sure—at least on the surface, anyway. But I guarantee there isn't a woman in the world who hasn't felt pressure to change the way that she looks at some point in her life. Hell, every image you see on social media is edited to meet those standards we're supposedly moving away from. In the world I live in, you don't get a call back for a job unless all your edges are sharp and you've got an iron deficiency problem.”
Ice burns in my veins, toxic and rageful. Resentment at the world for forcing girls like my seventeen-year-old sister to think they're not good enough, to use filters on their photographs that contort their faces into someone unrecognizable.
It's the first time I've ever really considered that all of Clover's social media photographs are of a woman who doesn't look anything like her. Higher cheekbones, a streamlined nose, longer eyelashes, fuller lips. These fucking filters are changing everything about what makes her who she is.
“I don't get it.” I shake my head, my knuckles white as I grip the gear stick and shift into fourth. “I'd much rather sleep with a woman who has curves and stretch marks and dimples in her ass than one so frail I'd be scared of breaking them.”
“God, you're such a man.” There's that laugh again—the bitter, sinister one that has no trace of sincere happiness in it at all. “I'm sure this comes as quite the shock, Cole, but not everything is about what makes a woman more fuckable for you. It's not about being attractive enough to be deemed worthy of the male gaze, or whatever. It's about what sells. And like it or not, no matter how much society may pretend otherwise, what sells is the ideal life. Money, beauty and a figure gained by eating only eight hundred calories a day.”
The hypocrisy of her words makes me laugh. “Don't you feel guilty? You're as much to blame as the rest of them.”
