I’m stopped by the feeling of fingers slipping into the top of my waistband, between the strip of my g-string and my skin, preventing me from walking away.
“Wait,” he murmurs. His hand is hot, but the hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck rise as if I’m cold. I shiver.
“Let go of me, Elias,” I say behind me, not willing to see the look on his face. His hand lingers for a moment, then slides a quarter inch to the left, his knuckles dragging hot on my skin. He slips his hand out, slowly, finally, and I walk to our front door without looking back.
SEVEN
Elias
I am morethan ashamed to admit that the minute Mia stepped out of the apartment, I stomped to my bedroom and tore off my pants and boxers. Then I stopped and tried to collect myself. I paced back and forth, muttered, “don’t do this Elias” over and over again.
Then I said “fuck it”, gripped myself so hard it was almost painful, gave myself exactly three strokes, then came all over my hand. Like I was a thirteen-year-old boy and not a grown-ass thirty-two-year-old man.
I sink to the ground. I was doing okay, considering the tits and the tight nipples and the hips and the strip of skin under the crop top and the hair and the lip gloss and the way she practically moaned my name. I shoved that all down real hard. It was the feeling of the soft skin of her hip that did me in. Or maybe it was the feeling of the silky ribbon of her g-string on the pads of my fingers. Or maybe it was a combination of both.
Wrong, I think, knocking the back of my head against the door.Bad.Creepy. And now, I’m in here, covered in my own semen, while she’s out there looking like sex incarnate, ready to rub that lip gloss all over some strange dick.
And she says she needs help. She needs no fucking help while looking like that. People—man, woman, or otherwise—will gravitate towards her like moths to a flame. And she’ll fucking burn them to a crisp. The thought of this makes me die a little. I start pacing my room. I want to go make sure she’s okay. I want to see her again. I should’ve found out where she was going. Wait, I can text her. But no, no. Remember? Bad. Creepy. Give her the space she asked for. You promised Leo you’d step back. You lost all rights to her when you did that. Fuck.Fuck.
I go to the bathroom to clean myself up. There’s nothing else for me to do but to sit on the couch and wait until she gets home safely. That is, if she comes home at all.
When you’re a teacher, you have to wake up so fucking early that you get to know the general time in the morning based on the way the light shines through the window. I jolt awake on the couch, look around, and I know on a deep, cellular level that I have about thirty minutes until school starts. I try to check the time on my phone, but it’s dead.
She didn’t come home. I fell asleep on the couch all night, which is right in front of the door to our apartment, and she never came through it. I stand up to go check her bedroom, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and her door is still wide open. She didn’t come home. Fuck.Fuck.
I quickly shift into autopilot after seeing the time on the oven in our kitchen. I have to be out of the apartment in five minutes flat if I want to make it to work in time to pick up my first class. I take a piss, brush my teeth, splash water on my face. I throw on some clothes, and I’m out the door. No time for coffee today. Maybe I’ll make it to school in time to stop by Mia’s classroom.
But of course, the bus is delayed. I pull out my phone to send Mia a text, but I forgot it’s dead. By the time I walk into the school building, my first class, fourth grade, is already lined up outside the gym waiting for me. I shoot what I hope is an apologetic look to their teacher, who waves me off, and I quickly usher the class into the gym.
I dump the huge net bag of basketballs into the middle of the gym, tell the class to go for it, and go to my office to plug my phone in. I’d shoot Mia a text now, but I know for a fact that if she’s teaching right now, she won’t be looking at her phone until her first prep or her lunch, whichever comes first. I look at the schedule hanging above my desk. I have Mia’s class next period. I can talk to her then. If she’s not dead in a ditch or chopped up into tiny little pieces and scattered around a serial killer’s basement. I manage to make it to the end of the period by shooting hoops and fucking around with the kids.
Fifty minutes pass, and the fourth grade teacher comes to pick up her class. I don’t even bother to pick up the basketballs that are scattered around the gym, because I’m just going to let Mia’s class play with them anyway. I stand by the door to my gym, tapping my foot and waiting for Mia to turn the corner.
When she finally does, I see red.
Her hair is messy, the waves all over the place and looking like they’ve been combed out or slept on or tossed around. She has last night’s makeup smudged around her eyes. She’s still wearing the pants and the heels from last night, but she’s not wearing that fucking nightmare of a crop top anymore. Her tiny frame is currently swimming in a white t-shirt that is three sizes too big for her. The kind of white t-shirt that a guy would wear as an undershirt.
Mia sees me, or maybe sees my rage, and her cheeks turn pink. She turns around to her class and tells them to go inside. Then, she has the audacity to hand me a piece of paper and say, “I brought you the outline for the Olympics unit, so you know what to teach?—”
She’s interrupted by me grabbing the sheet and ripping it in half. “Do not fucking tell me you did the walk of fucking shame from some dude’s apartment straight to school this morning. Do not fucking tell me you’re wearing his shirt right now,” I growl, a deadly whisper that only she can hear.
Her eyes widen in shock. I think I’m even more shocked than she is. I don’t think I’ve ever been this enraged in my life. I think I now know what a caveman feels like.
“Excuse you?!” she whisper-screams back at me.
That snaps me out of it. I take a deep breath, several in a row, rubbing my face with my hands.Jesus, Elias. “I waited up for you,” I manage instead, my voice more or less under control. I still search her neck, the bits of her collarbone that peek out through the shirt, for evidence, for marks, anything.
“I told you not to do that,” she hisses.
“I just wanted to make sure you were safe,” I plead, feeling desperate now, and also confused at all the emotions I cannot possibly be feeling at one time.
Her eyes soften a bit at that. “I’m fine. Please take a look at the unit outline that you just ripped in half like a psychopath. We can figure out how to incorporate P.E. into it… another time.” She turns to go.
“Mia, wait,” I want to stop her but don’t want to touch her. Something in my voice makes her turn around. “Did you…” I try. “What happened last night?” I whisper instead.
She looks at me, blue eyes fierce. “None of your business,” she tells me, and turns and walks away.
I’ll admit that I feel something crack inside me. More like a teeny weeny fissure, I tell myself, but still.
