The alcohol clouding her senses didn’t allow her to realize I was naked.
“It didn’t go as planned.”
“Thank you for apologizing.”
Her hands moved over my shirtless torso, fingers spreading across my back.
Jolie was calm now, nothing like the fearful mess I’d seen earlier. She must have found my mother’s truckload of Xanax with that wine. I guess she was close by, after all.The kitchen.She was in the kitchen the whole damn time as I searched for her outside.
She’d drank the wine that my mother kept hidden, possibly the pills, too. Not fair, not sharing. . . because I needed fucking both due to the high anxiety Woodrow filled our fucking head with.
I placed a kiss just off Jolie’s lips. Keen to explore her, taste her, discover what it was about this fucking girl that kept me in the fucking dark. I suckled the fullness, taking her into my mouth.
She reared back, taking her perfect fucking lips away from me. Her eyes met mine, and her fingers brushed my chest, searching for the beat beneath her tips. Searching for a sign I had a fucking heart after what she’d seen me do today.
But I doubted she’d find one.
“I wasn’t apologizing, Jolie.”
Her tired brown eyes sprung wide, spinning like flying saucers in the darkness. Her earsprickled at the coldness in my voice.
“Did you find my momma’s special juice?”Definitely.My shard ran down her ugly pajamas—my mother’s hand-me-downs.
I stopped at her shorts. With her legs still hiked on mine, my little weapon rubbed over the notch near her hole. I moved back and forth, trying to figure out what it was about this part of the body that made girls moan differently. Judging from the look in Jolie’s glossed eyes, it was fear.
“Hell, I think you should go to bed.” Her hazed words slurred into my ears, dread heavy in her trembling voice. The sound was just as fucking irritating as my father’s phone, still fucking buzzing like a bee, high on acid, in the corner of the room.
Jolie couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear anything but the darkness in my tone as I planted my words into her ears. And that darkness prevented her from looking over and noticing the glow of the small device, too.
“I’m happy here. You shouldn’t have ran, doll.”
Her hands tried to push me away, and I let her believe that she had the tiniest bit of control as I drifted away. My laugh chilled the air as she struggled to sit, clutching the blankets and her head, as her first ever drink-induced migraine awoke before her senses.
“I think you should go to bed,” she repeated. “I don’t want to have to tell your father about this when he gets home.”
Did she really think she could threaten me? She couldn’t.
And was she really that out of it that she didn’t hear my father getting home and fighting with me for the last hour?
Fuck, I wanted to thank God that she’d made this so easy for me. . . and then she gave me a reason that this would be harder than I thought.
She dragged herself backwards, but I caught her, done with giving her any sense of authority. I pulled her by the leg—long and muscular and sexy as fuck—to gift the same generosity of a threat.
“Don’t run off, little doll. It’s because you did that earlier that I’m so angry. I wouldn’t want to hurt you any more than I have to.”
My words stilled her. Her eyes focused on me, on my nakedness, before they dropped to her own leg—scratched and bleeding, red trailing over the sheets.
Her eyes blinked twice, taking in the image of her bleeding skin and the shard I was dragging against it. Flashbacks of what I’d done to my mother flooded her, and that flood came spraying from her wide eyes.
“Stop,” silent words hit me in the face, but I didn’t feel them. I felt nothing but angry determination to prove to her she belonged to me.
I smeared away the blood on her skin, revealing a single letter—H—my claim on her forever.
“Oh, fuck.” She took in what I’d done, barely making out the initial.
I pulled her closer, and she panicked. “Stop.” Again, there was no sound, but the shape her mouth pulled had me knowing what she wanted. She wanted this over.
“Stop,” I repeated, with actual sounding words as I leered in closer, pushing her down into the mattress. “Stop fucking telling me what to do. Stop fucking pretending that you have any say in what is going to happen to you. You don’t.” I laughed. “Stop feeling, Jolie. It will hurt a lot fucking less. Trust me.”
