“I think I’m gonna try to talk to her. You never know, she may be up for a date.”
“Dude, you saw the way Emo looked at us,” Garrett says warningly. “He won’t let you near her.”
Roy shrugs, dropping a twenty-dollar bill on top of the bar. “He doesn’t own her.”
Before either of them can utter another word, I grip the back of Roy’s neck and slam his face down on the bar.
There are a few gasps, a couple of screams, and chairs scraping across the floor, but I ignore it all as I hold Roy right where I want him. He struggles to push himself up, but I press against his neck, making sure his face stays in the bloody mess on the wood from his broken nose. I step closer and put my face beside his.
“You don’t fuckin’ go near her,” I growl. “You don’t talk to her. You don’t look at her. You don’t so much as think about her. You fuckin’ got me?”
A hand grabs my arm. “Jesus Christ, Emo. What in the hell are you doing?”
I yank my arm away from JW, lift up Roy’s head, and slam it back down.
“Do you fuckin’ hear me?” I hiss. “Answer, or the next thing I break will be your goddamn arms, and I won’t stop there.”
“Yes!” he shouts nasally.
“Good.” I push off from his neck, and his face slides in the blood a couple of inches. “Now get the fuck out.”
As soon as my hand releases his neck, he jerks back and off the stool. I shoot Garrett a glare and watch as he scrambles off his stool as well. Neither looks at me as they practically run out the door.
“You wanna tell me what in the hell that was about?” Trouble demands.
I keep my back to him and try to slow down my heart rate. Dropping my head, I pull in several deep breaths, the anger still coursing through me heating my face.
“Emo,” Trouble growls.
“I didn’t like the way he was fuckin’ looking at her,” I snap and spin around. “He’s got no right looking at her. He’s got no right talking about her. He should’ve minded his own damn business.”
He steps closer. JW stands off to the side, his hands shoved in his pockets.
“What was he saying?”
I hiss out a breath. “He was going to talk to her. Ask her out.”
Trouble sighs, angrily raking a hand through his hair. He turns to the side, glancing at our table before turning back.
“Look. It’s obvious she’s not ready for anything like that. She won’t be for a long time. But there’s no way Roy could have known that. You couldn’t have talked to him instead of fucking up his face?”
“No,” I grate out.
Trouble growls in frustration. I don’t give a fuck. Unless Rella says it’s okay, there’s not one goddamn person getting close to her, and that asshole Roy thought he was.
“Fuck, you’re such an asshole sometimes, you know that?”
My glower lets him know I don’t give a fuck what he thinks.
“She doesn’t need to see that shit. She’s already been through enough.”
It’s those words that get through to me. My anger changes direction, aimed straight at myself.
“Shit,” I mutter, looking over Trouble’s shoulder at Rella. Her head is turned our way, her thumb at her mouth as she chews her nail. The worried look in her eyes kills me, but it’s the lack of fear that has the air whooshing from my lungs.
I give Trouble a tight nod, letting him know I agree. It pisses me off, because I know I’ll go off the rails again if another fucker decides he’s interested in Rella. It enrages me that I can’t control myself when my mind goes black. And that’s all I felt when I heard Roy talking about approaching her. All I could picture was him tarnishing her. Putting his unworthy hands on her. His lips touching hers. My thoughts turned to even darker visions of him forcing himself on her.
In the back of my mind, I recognize that’s likely insane. Roy is a decent person. Always respectful, never doing anything he shouldn’t. He came to Malus years ago with his mom, Stephanie. She was out at a bar one night with her friends, celebrating a promotion at work, when a coworker roofied her. He raped her in the broom closet of the bar. The guy wore a condom and gloves, so there was no evidence he was the one who did it. Only her memory of it. With the lack of evidence, the bastard went free. Two weeks after the verdict, the stupid fuck was bragging about the rape, how he got away with it. A friend of a friend of JW’s overheard. He may have thought he got away with it, but the gravestone with his name on it says otherwise.