The ‘please’ gets to me a little, I’m not going to lie. I’m not usually suckered in by other people’s emotions, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who says ‘please’ very often.
I don’t say anything, which is as much assent as I’m going to give him.
Colm stares at me for a few more minutes before making an angry huffing sound, like a bull waiting to charge. He pulls on his shirt with jerky, rage-fueled movements and then reaches for my arm, like he’s going to drag me with him, before stopping short.
“Let’s go,” is all he says in the end, turning around and expecting me to follow.
Which I do. Because why wouldn’t I? At this point, anyway.
Everything that’s happened since I met him has been far more interesting than the weeks preceding it. I’m down for the ride if he is.
And if I walk unnecessarily close behind him down the hallway, not touching him but occasionally blowing on his ear to make him flinch, well. That’s our little secret.
Chapter Five
Colm
Fallow doesn’t say a damn word the entire time. We get out of the house and trudge around to find one of the SUVs that’s not currently being used, all to the soundtrack of the fucking foxes. The noise makes him look blissed out all over again, although that may just be the bliss he seems to get from pissing me off at every possible opportunity.
Once I have the right keys in hand and open the door on a white Ford Explorer, I’m expecting him to get in the passenger seat, but when I look around, he’s all the way over by the cages. He’s leaning down, looking through the wire and making heavy eye contact with a fox that’s clearly evaluating whether she wants to let him pet her, or scream in his face.
I know the feeling.
“Hey, Patrick Bateman, let’s get a move on,” I shout.
He doesn’t move for a minute, and then eventually straightens up. Slowly, though. Making it clear he’s on his own timetable, not mine.
As if I’d ever doubt that. I’ve known him for less than 24 hours, and I can already tell he doesn’t do a damn thing he doesn’t want to.
“Comparing me to such a shitty serial killer is just rude, you know,” he says and he trudges toward me through the mud. “At least call me after one of the greats. “H.H. Holmes, or something.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t hot.”
The words are out of my mouth quickly—too quickly—and he’s already looking at me with his head cocked to the side before I realize I want to take them back. The amount of personal information I managed to reveal with that single slipped sentence is disconcerting.
I’m waiting for some snide remark to hit me, but he stays silent, just smiling wickedly at me like I’m bare-ass naked in front of him.
Somehow, that’s even worse.
I turn to get in the car, finally, but he starts yapping again.
“Whatever you say, lover.”
Adrenaline and anger hit me like a sharp smack, and it’s an act of great self-control that I don’t grab him and shove him against the car before telling him to get the fuck out of my face.
I tell myself I don’t do it because I’m being respectful of his bodily autonomy—you can be a criminal and a murderer but still have ethics, after all—and not the fear that the action would somehow end with me on the ground, face down while he straddles me and presses his knife in to my throat again. And if he makes me come in my pants one more time today, he’ll never let me live it down.
“Don’t call me that,” I growl. “Especially not in front of the guys. People might get the wrong idea.”
His eyebrows raise, faux-innocence shining on his face.
“Oh? Well, what would the right idea be?”
Fallow reaches down to adjust himself as he says it. It’s not the first time he’s done this to me, and it’s hit me like a rush of arousal every single goddamn time.
I don’t look. I’m not looking.
This is over, whatever it was.
