“Yeah. Got it.” He gives me a grin and sits on the edge of the bed. “I’m not fucking stupid,” he says and disconnects the phone, sets it on the nightstand. He never stops looking at me.
He’s not the one in the suit. The one who grabbed me. Punched me. He’s wearing a yellow T-shirt stretched too tight over his beer belly. It’s got a stain on it. Tomato sauce I think. Or blood. Mine, maybe.
When he leans in toward me, I press my back into the mattress.
“You up, pretty girl?” he asks.
I don’t react and try to pull away when he reaches out a hand and presses a fat finger into my temple. I suck in a breath and he smiles, digging deeper. Warm blood slides over my ear. He’s opened a cut. I guess it happened when the suited man punched me.
“That’s for puking on me,” he says.
He rubs his finger on his shirt and my first guess was right. The stain I saw was tomato sauce because blood is much darker.
I look up at my hands, tug at my arms to test the handcuffs that are linked through the headboard.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man says, standing. He’s tall. Really tall. And the way he looks, the way his eyes travel over my chest, my belly, my legs, it scares me.
“What do you want with me?” I croak. My voice isn’t working, my throat is dry and I know I did vomit on him. I taste it.
He shrugs a shoulder, turns his attention to the TV and switches it on.
“Nothin’ much,” he mutters. “You ain’t my type.” He sits back down on the bed and is wholly engrossed in the channels he’s flipping through. A pistol is tucked into the back of his jeans. “I like tits,” he adds on, picking up his coke and slurping loudly.
I try to pull myself up to a seat, but my head throbs with the effort and when he turns and grabs hold of my ankle, I freeze.
“Where you goin’? Ain’t nowhere you need to be.”
I guess he’s not as inattentive as I assumed.
“Where am I?”
He releases my leg, returns to flipping TV channels. Settles on a black and white cartoon. I feel like I’m caught in some time warp. Like this place is stuck in the past. A glance at the window tells me it must be nighttime, or I’d see sunshine coming around the curtains, I think. I listen, but either the room is soundproof, which I doubt, or there’s absolutely no traffic outside.
“Where am I?” I ask again, a little louder this time as I manage to sit up a little, drawing my bound hands in front of me.
“Quiet.”
“Can’t follow the cartoon?” I ask.
He mutes the TV and turns to me and I realize how stupid that was.
“Want me to shut you up, pretty girl? I can do that right good and I’d like it,” he says, getting up, walking around to my side. I cringe when he grabs my ankle and tugs me so I’m lying back down.
“I told you you ain’t goin’ nowhere, didn’t I?”
I stare up at him, unable to answer.
“I asked you a question,” he says, leaning his big face close, his stale breath on me.
“Yes,” I say. “I just wanted—”
“Don’t matter what you want. It matters what I want and I want you to shut the fuck up. Understand, cunt?”
I swallow. Nod my head.
He nods his, straightens, looks at me again, his eyes moving from head to toe. I watch his hand move toward me, toward that sliver of naked belly where my sweater has risen up. I make a sound when his fingers touch my skin, and when his hand fists the waistband of my jeans, I scream.
The door opens, slams against the wall and lets in a gust of cold wind. We both turn. Suit man is standing there minus his jacket. He looks pissed. Two others, these from the back of the car, flank him.
“Don’t fucking touch her, fucking imbecile. You know the rules.”
The man curls his hand tighter around the handful of material, lifting my hips off the bed. Although he’s bigger than the man at the door, when the one at the door takes a step into the room, he backs off, releasing me.
“I just want her to shut the fuck up so I can watch TV.”
The leaner man looks at me. “You think you can shut the fuck up so he can watch his cartoon?”
I nod.
“There,” he says to the big guy. “She says she’ll shut up.”
“What if she don’t?”
The man cocks his head to the side, looks at me. “I’ll let you stick your dick in her big mouth. That’d shut her up, wouldn’t it?”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
When I shift my gaze away from him, I see the swell at the crotch of the fat one’s pants.