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Now I cackle out a laugh, wondering what my customers would think if they saw that I’m exactly what Mama said I was before she died.
“You’re going to turn out exactly like me, Connie,” Mama O’Connor had slurred from her deathbed, the air in her bedroom hazy with cigarette smoke, that perpetually half-empty glass of Bushmills Irish whiskey on her bedside table refracting the sunlight and focusing it into my eyes as if everything in Mama’s room was glaring at me, blaming me, hating me . . . and reminding me to hate myself when Mama was no longer around to remind me first-hand. “You turned down the only marriage proposal you’re ever going to get. You had one chance and you blew it. Now you’re going to die alone. Just like me. It’s your fate, just like it was mine. And you can’t fight fate, Connie. That’s why it’s called fate. It’s meant to be. Sorry, kiddo. That’s just how the cookie crumbles for us O’Connor women.”
“That’s just how the cookie crumbles,” I say out loud in that lilting sing-song tone that I think is how demons in horror movies talk to little girls when asking them to murder their families and then burn the house down. “Ohmygod, that’s what I should have named the store!How the Cookie Crumbles! That sounds like a cool name for a trendy coffee house and bakery.” I slam my hands on the steering wheel, a sudden bout of childish rage almost choking the breath out of me. “Except no, you decided to call the storeConnie’s Confectionslike some pretentious prissy. Who the hell even knows what the wordconfectionmeans? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Just like Mama said.”
Childish tears well up in my eyes, blurring my vision enough that I miss my exit and have to take the next exit, which turnsout to be backed up because of construction. Now I’m stuck in a one-lane traffic jam that’s moving slower than cookie dough, and suddenly I’m spiraling down to those dark depths of despair, where all I can hear is Mama’s voice reminding me that I can’t fight fate, can’t defeat destiny, can’t change how the cookie crumbles.
By the time I get through the construction zone I want to pee again. Way too much coffee this morning. I wassoexcited for Valentine’s Day,solooking forward to making these big deliveries and getting some much-needed cash to help keep the repo-man away from my truck, keep the landlord-man away from my store, keep the anxiety at bay long enough to get through another day.
Except I’m going to be late, and I cannot afford to be late. Today’s three deliveries are to the flagship locations of Bloom Foods, the Boston area’s largest grocery-store chain. It’s my first big order with Bloom, and I cannot screw it up. They usually don’t bother with small suppliers like me, but somehow I managed to convince one of the Bloom corporate buyers to give me a shot, and I have to make sure everything is absolutely totally completely perfect with these first orders.
“Shouldn’t have gone to the prison first,” I mutter angrily as I screech into a gas station and tumble out of the car, pulling my pink hoodie over my mussed-up hair as I hurry inside and head towards the restrooms near the back.
Of course, it’s a one-person restroom and there’s already three women waiting in line outside the closed door. I want to go so bad that my thighs are tight together so I don’t dribble down my legs, but I’m wearing thick black sweat pants and you know what, a few drops won’t show on the cloth if I pee myself a little.
“Stay closed, pussy,” I whisper urgently as I turn my big ass around and march back out the way I came. “You’ve stayedclosed for twenty-five years, and you can damn well stay closed a few more hours.”
Of course, I know women don’t pee from their vaginas, and although I’m still a virgin, that doesn’t mean my pussy has been “closed” in any physical sense.
“It’s just a metaphor,” I say out loud as I burst out of the gas-station doors and pull my hood back on to shield myself from the blistery Boston wind. “My pussy has been closed for business. That’s what I meant. Closed for business. We just aren’t open yet.”
I almost smile when I realize I’m talking to my vagina about being closed for customers, but then I gasp and stop when I see the back of my truck and notice that it’s most certainlynotclosed.
In fact, it’s being opened right now.
Opened from the inside.
My heart almost escapes through my throat when my truck’s shutter slides up enough to reveal a dangerous-looking man in an orange jumpsuit that’s streaked with dark drying blood.
Immediately my frenzied mind connects the dots. Frantically I look around the gas station lot, but I’m parked off to the side, away from the pumps out front, and there’s nobody else here. So I turn and start to run towards the front, knowing I need to get to the front door, get inside to safety where I can call the police and report that there’s an escaped convict in my cookie truck!
But just as my legs start to move, I realize I’m not getting anywhere.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Connie,” comes a gravelly growl from bloodcurdlingly close to my hoodie-covered ear as a terrifyingly strong arm goes around my waist and a paw-sized palm covers my mouth. Suddenly my cookie-dough-streaked sneakers are lifted clean off the ground, and I realize with horror that I’m being carried back to my truck like a sack of sugar.“Nah, you don’t get to go anywhere from now on unless I say so, Connie. Because you’re mine now. You belong to me. You’re mine, Connie. Do you understand? You’re fuckingmine!”
3
XAVIER
Mine.
My brain doesn’t understand what I’m doing, but my body sure as fuck does. Because when I saw Connie turn the corner and head back towards her truck way sooner than I expected, my body sprung into decisive action, moving without instructions from my brain.
Of course, my brain now catches up and agrees with my instinctive act to capture this sweet-smelling hoodie-wrapped bundle of curves that my dick seems to have already decided belongs to us. Because although at first I’d decided to get out of this truck at the first stop and make a run for it, we’re at a gas-station off the Turnpike, and I’m sure as hell not going to hitch a ride with anyone in my orange jumpsuit. Can’t run around naked in this fucking New England weather either, which means I’d have to car-jack someone anyway.
So why not her?
Especially since she already saw me pulling up the shutter of her delivery truck, was already running back inside to sound the alarm.
Which means she’s already a dead woman, whispers the grim realization that comes down as a cold command from my brain, a ruthlessly rational order that makes my body tighten with an equally ruthless but totally irrational sense of ownership, a perverted need to possess, a choking desire to claim.
Claim as my own.
Right fucking now.
“Stop that shit right fucking now!” I snarl as some part of Connie’s writhing thrashing flailing body frees itself from my grasp and hits me on the nose, making my eyes water, making my rage rise. “I will break your neck like a peppermint stick, Connie. I’ve done it before, and I have no problem doing it again, doing it a hundred times again. Because there’s no way I’m going back to prison, and there’s no way you’re going to survive the next three fucking seconds unless you do exactly what I say, when I say, how I say. Got it?”
Now we’re at the truck, and with a quick sweep of my gaze to make sure nobody’s seen us, I haul Connie into the back. Then, still clamping my palm over her mouth, I hold her tight against my body with my elbow, freeing up my other hand just long enough to pull down the truck’s shutter.
