The Imperfections

“Let him outside, would you?” I tell her before heading to the kitchen.

I don’t feel like lingering downstairs tonight. I’m tired and I still have to deal with her before I can go to bed. I leave her and Scout in the living room so I can go pour a cup full of dry food into his bowl, and I only give him a few minutes outside to do his business before calling him back in.

I was off today, so I had a chance to take him outside for a while earlier, otherwise I’d feel worse about it.

Alyssa hangs back while I lock up and bring the dog back inside, then she looks at me cautiously when her gaze catches mine. I don’t say anything, just nod for her to go up the stairs, and then I follow her to my bedroom.

Alyssa stands by the bed awkwardly, like she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do.

“Take off your dress,” I tell her as I close the door.

She hesitates for only a second, then gathers the girly material and pulls it off over her head. I do a double take as I undress myself, seeing she’s not wearing a bra underneath. Her panties are in her hand, picked up off the floorboard of my truck, so she’s completely naked now and has the cheek to look bashful about it.

“You’re not going to lock my clothes away again, are you?” she asks as she folds the dress so it doesn’t wrinkle.

“Are you my prisoner?”

“I don’t know,” she mutters, carrying the folded garment over and putting it on top of my locked chest. “Am I?”

“Probably should be after what you pulled back there.”

Instead of digging in, her cheeks turn a deeper shade of pink and she avoids looking at me. “I’m sorry. I was mad at you, but I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Accused me of fathering a child that was conceived before I even met you? No, I don’t suppose you should have done that.”

“We can still undo it,” she says, finally meeting my gaze. “She knows I was there on a date with someone else, so we can tell her I didn’t appreciate being treated like a hook-up and I only said that to scare you, for some kind of revenge. Make it sound like I was being spiteful.”

“You were being spiteful.”

“Well, you should stop talking about me like dating me would be the worst thing in the world,” she snaps back. “If you didn’t keep hurting my feelings, I wouldn’t get so mad at you.”

“Getting mad at me is one thing. Angrily blurting things to Bri is another.” Walking over to her side of the bed, I hold her gaze and tell her, “I don’t think I have to remind you that’s exactly what I showed up in your house that first night to prevent.”

Wariness in her gaze, she takes a small step back. “No, you don’t have to remind me.”

“Doesn’t matter how mad you get, Alyssa—you have to keep your mouth shut about things Bri can’t know. That’s the whole gist of our arrangement. You only continue to draw breath because I thought I could trust you to do that.”

She dims a little, but I don’t know which part it’s in response to—the reminder that I’m capable of taking a life, or the thought of me not trusting her anymore.

I want to know. It shouldn’t even matter to me right now what her opinion of me is because she just proved herself more dangerous than I’ve thought she had the capacity to be since I brought her here the first time, but now I’m tangled up. Now I’m not as singularly focused on making sure she can’t make any more trouble as I was that first night—now I also care about her. Now I also want to know how she feels about me.

That’s bad. I know that’s bad. I don’t need sharp instincts to surmise that much. That gives her power over me she shouldn’t have, and even though I don’t think she meant to, she just gave herself a little more when she told my sister she’s carrying my goddamn baby.

Nothing about this can be clean now.

Deep down in the most ruthless pit of my gut, the thought surfaces that I made a mistake letting her live that first night. I could’ve finished it all right then and no one would’ve been able to tie me to it.

Now things are different. It’s not just my liking of the girl and my reluctance to hurt her; other people are involved. Bri, Dirk—two people right there know there’s something between us now, and that’s assuming Alyssa hasn’t also told her sister, maybe even her mom. Hell, for all I know she’s mentioned me to her niece or nephew. Bri could tell Theo, even though I told her not to. Dirk could even now be talking to his friends or guys he works with in the kitchen, telling them I interrupted his date and stole Alyssa away.