“Go?” I ask.
“Home. I need to go home, Ty… Tyson. This is my stuff, so it comes with me because I have to go.” She huffs and blows a lock of hair away from her eye.
What?
I take the bag from her once again and this time I toss it out of reach. It lands by the stove.
15
Ivy
His expression drops when I tell him I have to leave and for some reason, my heart chooses to drop, too. Why? Maybe because of the way he stares at me, eyes working like he’s reading a math question written across my face.
He took my bag and tossed it and now he licks his lips behind his teeth, before saying, “You are home. Your home is with me.”
He’s gone rigid, like he’s decided to dig his heels in on the issue.
Fuzz. I was afraid of this.
“I… have a job. A family. An apartment. A car.” I bite my lip briefly. “Well, a car that’s got broken door handles, a broken window, broken windshield, and it’s smushed into a tree, but it’s my car and I –” For some reason, I let that hang. The look on his face is making it difficult to speak.
After an endless moment, he speaks in a scary deep voice, his eyebrows up high. “Have a boyfriend?”
I say nothing. How will I reason with him that this just won’t work? He can’t just keep me.
He gives me a hard stare and leans forward, aggression rolling off him. “If any man who thinks he’s entitled to you comes near you, I’ll rip his throat out with my teeth.”
I jerk back. Oh my God.
He keeps snapping. “We’ll go to town. We’ll stop and get your pills from that car, but then we will come back here, and I’ll make this home better. For you.”
I open my mouth to speak, but something about the look on his face has my heart stampeding in my chest. Not because I’m scared that he’ll hurt me. He’s angry, it’s clear, but more because he looks not just angry but also so… distraught.
I reach for my sad-looking Uggs, which… surprise… I somehow expected to be worse. Thankfully, I sprayed them with protectant spray before I wore them for the first time yesterday.
Yesterday, when things were so different. Yesterday, when I was excited to put on new boots. Yesterday, before I lost $200 to Megan’s scammy quasi-cousin. Yesterday, before I had to flee from a cabin figuring I had to leave to avoid sexual assault and then left and found myself in a car sliding down a muddy embankment or something, and being chased by the werewolf I hit with my car.
Werewolf. Still blowing my mind that this is who I’m with right now. Yesterday, when I thought a lot of the stuff Aunt Nelle talked about was nothing more than harmless fantasy.
And then what transpired after that? My face burns with the memories of all the dirty unprotected sex I’ve been having. In a cabin in the woods. With a stranger. A werewolf stranger!
Aunt Nelle, rest her soul, would be nodding knowingly right now, I think. An “I told you so” all over her face, but smiling instead of being snide about it because she was never snide about anything. She’d be tickled pink, I think.
I always thought she was a little kooky; but wasn’t really sure if she told me all her stories as a bunch of parable cautionary tales or if she was romanticizing those stories wishing she lived in a world where she could interact with all those things she talked about. Vampires. Witches. Werewolves. Fae. She looked me right in the eye on my sixth birthday and told me I had a ‘fae’ look to me.
“You believe in fairies, Ivy?”
“Like Tinkerbell?” I’d asked.
“You have a fae look to you. Sometimes I swear, Ivy girl, that the stork switched you with our Ivy. That you’re a little fairy who has been dropped off here for now. Maybe my fortune teller was right when she told me about your future. You’re gonna have a magical life, my girl.”
“Tinkerbell was really tiny in Peter Pan, Auntie Nelle. I’m not that tiny.”
She winked and smirked at me like we had a secret. She was always whispering to me about her fortune teller. I had chalked it up to nonsense.
Now, though, I was wondering about it.
I lose my balance while getting my second boot on, stumble and wind up in Tyson’s arms. He’s looking down at me with piercing eyes. He looks angry. I find that I hate it. I feel like crying.
“You don’t need this.” He gestures to my purse that’s hanging over my shoulder.
“Of course I do. It’s my purse! Can you take me where I can call to get my car towed out of there, please? I need to get home.”