“Scarlett?”
“Yes?”
“Stop talking.”
She does. And I take a few moments to file her words away where I can stew on them later. But for now, I just need to get her out of the house before I fuck her into next week.
“Get ready,” I say.
“For?”
“I’m taking ye out tonight.”
Eight
Scarlett
If the roadto hell is paved with good intentions, then I must be headed straight for heaven.
There isn’ta single part of me that has ever felt bad for fucking over a man. Some say you’ve got to be cruel to be kind.
I say you’ve got to be cruel to survive.
I don’t owe anyone anything. Especially Rory.
But when I dart glances over at him, driving me through the streets of Boston like he actually gives a fuck, I want to go for a long run. Over a bed of Legos.
If I punish myself, then I feel better.
But I can’t punish myself, because I’m trapped in this car now and all I can smell is him. He’s clean, like the ocean. He’s cool and mint flavored and olive-skinned and his body is all Alpha, and I keep checking him out when I don’t mean to.
His body is hard, but he isn’t hard like me. He’s open. Lazily draping his hand over the wheel and leaning back in his seat, his tee shirt stretching across his chest. He’s a tee shirt and jeans guy. A dimples guy. A jokes guy. A punch-you-in-the-face on Thursday nights guy.
He’s too many things. Tall and casual and funny and green-eyed.
And I am only one thing and it’s not his girlfriend.
But it doesn’t matter.
I made up my mind, and I’m no quitter. I tried to warn him away, but if he isn’t smart enough to listen, I can’t take responsibility for that.
I’m a wrecking ball, and you don’t fuck with a wrecking ball.
He fucked with me and now he’s going to help me, and I’m going to use him, and in the end it will ruin him.
It wasn’t supposed to be this easy. And it’s only for Rory’s own good that I’m going to teach him this lesson. Because after everything I’ve already said and done to him, he shouldn’t trust me.
But he took me back into his life just like that.
And do you know what happens to people who give out second chances like Halloween candy? They get fucked over.
I’m not a toaster, and I can’t be rewired. You can’t plug me into the wall and get a connection where there was none before. Because this is how I was programmed. From birth, I was wrong. Those symptoms my mother used to bitch and moan about? They weren’t symptoms. They were lifelong afflictions.
I don’t have feelings for people or objects or places or sentimental longing for old memories. While most people have an emotional capacity that rises and falls in relation to the object or person, I was not plagued with such a hindrance.
My mother knew I was wrong and she couldn’t have wrong in our family. She put me through the works. Blood tests and speech tests and ink blots and diagrams of reptilian brains. At first, it was a learning disorder. Then a social disorder. Communication disorder, perhaps. The word spectrum was tossed around, which my mother quickly put the kibosh on…. because those types of disorders didn’t live on the upper East Side. Brooklyn, maybe. But not in her home.
I told her once that I didn’t feel anything. That I was just a flat line. And I stayed flat forever. She told me never to speak of such nonsense again and then sent me to boarding school for a year.
