“Yeah. I guess I am.” We stared at each other for so long it started to become uncomfortable. My body shouldn’t be feeling hot, so hot that I felt a trickle of sweat trail down between my breasts.
His eyes were hard, dark. Intense. “You’re in shock.”
Maybe I was. But I had never felt as clearheaded as I did right now.
And me feeling like I was burning alive had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the man standing just feet from me.
“Why did you bring me here?” I was fidgeting as I ran my hands up and down my thighs, picked at an invisible thread at the hem of the dress, and kept shifting on my feet, the clack-clack of my heels sounding deafening.
He didn’t respond as he turned and poured himself a drink. He held his arm out and tipped the bottle in my direction, and I found myself nodding before clearing my throat and asking him for a drink too, even though alcohol was the last thing I needed right now.
Once the glass was filled, he turned and walked back to me, holding it out, our fingers brushing as I took it with a shaky hand. I didn’t miss how his eyes tracked the movement as I tightened my fingers around the smoothness of the glass in hopes I could gather my control. He didn’t stop following my movements with his eyes as I brought the rim to my mouth and took a long drink.
That numbness faded and the fear and anxiety coursed through me so forcefully I drowned in the liquor, inhaling it without realizing, the acidic burn of it settling in my belly like a stone in the pit of my stomach.
He didn’t show any emotion as he brought his own vodka to his mouth and took a long, slow drink. He swallowed it so smoothly it could have been water for all I knew. Then he turned and headed to the bar for a refill.
The silence stretched on, the loudest thing I’d ever heard. I stood there in the center of his lavish, expensive apartment, holding a glass of vodka and wearing another man’s blood on me like an accessory.
“I brought you here because it’s the only place they can’t touch you. It’s the only place you’re truly safe right now.”
His words had my heart lodging in my throat. I said nothing as I finished off my alcohol, the burn already making a warm, pleasure-numbing path through my veins, my eyes watering, but I blinked it back before the tears slid down my cheeks.
He turned around to face me, drinking his second glass and watching me over the rim.
“Why would they want to hurt me?” My voice was too low, too thin. I was terrified, not just about what had happened back at that bar—with that man—but what Leonid had meant by his parting words.
Your weakness.
But most of all, the most suffocating reason why I was terrified was because as I stood across from Arlo, all I felt was the need to go to him, to press my body against his and let our darknesses coexist.
“Why would I be on a man like that’s radar?” Those words were whispered, and still Arlo didn’t speak even though I knew he heard me. But I didn’t need him to say the words to know the answer to the question I asked. Yet again I kept firing them at him, now more than ever wanting him to lie—to deny—what I said, what I felt.
“It’s my fault,” he finally said, but there was no guilt in his voice. There was… nothing. He tipped back his glass to finish off his vodka before setting it on the bar behind him. “I shouldn’t have let him see my reaction.” The last part was said almost as if he spoke to himself.
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” I admitted softly before finishing off my liquor as well. I coughed, covering my mouth with the back of my hand as the burn settled in deep. It was fire down my throat and coalescing in my belly. It was a light-headedness that made the situation a little less dreadful.
I turned from Arlo and walked toward the windows, the glass starting at the floor and going all the way to the ceiling foot after foot above me, nothing but skyscrapers and twinkling lights as far as the eye could see. Down below, there was nothing but red and white lights moving back and forth. Did the people there know the world they lived in? Did they know the evil men behind the designer suits and gentle smiles? Did they know death was right in front of them, and they opened their arms to embrace it like a warm friend?
I could see Arlo coming to stand behind me in the reflection of the glass, but I couldn’t find it in me to feel any kind of fear. And although there was this awareness inside me that this man was dangerous, I never felt that his violence or aggression would ever be directed toward me. It was illogical. It was fucking stupid.