AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“How dare you!” she spat at him.
“I was worried,” he said, his voice low and raspy. “What are youdoinghere?”
“You have some nerve.”
“I don’t get it, Quinn. You cut me off, but you’ll come to a sex club with total strangers, where people don’t give a rat’s ass about you or what you’re going through?” He brought his hand to the top of his head and blew a breath hard out his mouth.
“Okay, number one: It’s not asexclub. And they may not give a damn about my personal issues, but they don’t want anything from me either.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve demanded sooo much from you. I get it. I care, and that scares the hell out of you, doesn’t it?”
“You know,” she said, ignoring his question, pointing back and forth angrily between them, “This isn’t a Thing. Between us. It’s not a relationship. I had one of those—for twenty years. It vanished.” She snapped her fingers mid-air. “And so did half of myself. So you’ll have to forgive me for not wanting to kiss or cuddle or to hold your fucking hand. Besides, you ofallpeople are not relationship material.”
He backed up, blinking in surprise. “You’re right. But even if I were, I wouldn’t want you to have to hold my fucking hand.”
And then he turned and walked off.
She watched his back, but he didn’t turn around. Some part of her wanted him to see her going back into the club, wanted to hurt him more than she already had with her words.
Because somehow it seemed safer for hurt and anger to grow between them than the other feelings she was fighting.
Alex was near the desk when she re-entered. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m so sorry about that.”
“No problem. We were keeping an eye on you.” He tipped his head toward the closed-circuit monitor with its view of the now empty sidewalk outside.
“Thanks. Is Octavia still around?”
“She went up to her office to take a quick call. She said she would be right down, but let me text her . . .”
“No, no, that’s okay. I just wanted to apologize. Can you tell her for me?”
“Sure thing,” Alex said, turning to his phone, which was buzzing like mad. He read a text and looked up, barely. “I gotta go—the winch isn’t working right. Someone could get hurt.”
Last time she was here, a man had been suspended from the ceiling in a cage. She appreciated Alex’s worry about the winch.
As he headed toward the open space, he turned back. “I’ll tell her for you as soon as I’m done fixing it. Don’t worry. Seriously, it’s all good.”
She nodded awkwardly, tried to smile. As she raised her hand to give him a small wave, the wax pinched.
In the dressing room bathroom, she twisted around to see her back in the mirror and picked it off, chunk by chunk. Jonathan had ruined this for her.
On top of wrenching the necklace and following her here—because how else could he have found her?—he had ruinedthis; he had ruined her escape.
She left the club through the dressing room exit, emerging from the second door under the building’s tall, wide staircase.
It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him how he’d found her, but there really couldn’t be any other explanation—he must have been out, caught sight of her walking from the train, and followed her uptown. She shook her head as she turned toward Penn Station.
The air was still and heavy as she walked, but a feathery sensation tickled her with an eerie chill, and goose bumps rose on her arms.
He approached from the shadows cast by the tall staircase of a neighboring building and blocked her path.
Damn it, why couldn’t he just leave heralone?
Her fists clenched again, and she looked up—
It wasn’t him.
