“I’m not sure you can handle me,” I say. I can feel Hannigan’s eyes breathing down my neck, so no slipping of a drug. I could make a fuss and stab her, but I’d have a gun on me in a millisecond.
There is only one way. Transit. Transit is always the most vulnerable moment; we have to leave together.
“I can handle you quite fine, the problem is, you haven’t signed this,” she says, slamming a folder from her purse onto the table.
I sigh, one last round of Ella it is. Because Ella would never do certain things.
“Strike out clauses five, six point one to six point three, eight, fourteen entirely, nineteen point five, and twenty point nine,” I say without opening the folder, because Ella would never do certain things.
“You remembered them?” she asks as she eyes me, and I know I am giving away too much.
“No, there is a Post-it above your head where I read it off,” I snap at her.
“I’ll spank you with twenty for that,” she says. I would’ve said the very same, but today I have to play submissive brat.
“If I sign,” I add.
“You will,” she says as she strikes out the clauses I have told her to. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I am not an object. Use the damn term girlfriend.”
A look to kill shoots at me. I wonder how far I can push her.
I don’t even know why I said it, but I have this desire in me to test how far I can push her before she snaps.
“I won’t take you anywhere public,” Lilian says.
“Hell no,” I say, soaking in my triumph. “But no hiding from family and friends.”
“You will hide freely from my family, and what friends?” she says, and I see so much of myself in her. Only that my family is dead. But if they’d still be alive, everyone would run from them.
My father, the aggressive alcoholic, wanna-be drug lord who killed my mother and beat me half to death, raped me, and abused us. Hell, no. And what friends? I don’t have friends with a lifestylelike mine.
“You can relate. Why?” Lilian asks, and I realize how closely she’s observing me and how good she is at reading people.
I almost blurt out what I had just thought about before I catch myself. Ella. Still Ella.
“Why do you think I came to America?”
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid,I curse in my mind.
We stare into others' eyes for a moment. She has these intense ice-blue eyes that remind me of a Husky and are, honestly, slightly creepy if they didn’t draw me in like that.
“Here,” she says, turns the contract, and hands me the pen. “Sign.”
I don’t remove my eyes from hers as I take the pen. Our fingers touch, and a gasp escapes my mouth as a small electric shock shoots through my finger. Not physically, but energetically.
My core prickles the very moment, and I am instantly scared of myself. I rip my hand away.
My chest heaves up and down.
I know she watches me.
This can’t happen.
I can’t.
She can’t.
