The smirk on his face suddenly disappears and the seriousness that replaces it makes my heart stutter.
“Seeing you broken and hurting and sad is like having someone stick a fucking knife in my chest. I don’t like it. So, if pissing you off removes that look from your face like your entire world is imploding and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, good. Get your ass moving, and let’s go. We got all the important stuff packed up. Time’s a-wasting.”
His fingers drop from my chin and I stare in a daze as he starts walking away from me towards the front door.
What in the shit just happened here?
I shake my head and clear my thoughts, refusing to think about the things Eric just said to me. Or the way he completely understood exactly what I needed when I was in the middle of my comatose breakdown on the couch.
“WAIT!” I suddenly shout, deciding to focus on something else at this moment in time instead of standing here like an idiot analyzing why in the hell this guy who barely knows me, knows me and gets me. “I need Flounder. I can’t leave without Flounder.”
Racing across the room and into the kitchen, I stop in the doorway and look frantically around at my ten fish tanks set up on the counters.
“Which one is Flounder?” Eric asks from right behind me.
“All of them,” I state, moving farther into the room and bending down to stare into one of the tanks.
“Uh, what?” he asks.
I sigh and point at one of the blue-and-yellow fish swimming right by the front of the glass, with a few more lookalikes swimming right behind him.
“That’s Flounder One, that’s Flounder Two, that’s Flounder Three, that’s—”
“Ariel, you can’t take ten fish tanks with you,” he interjects.
I wrap my arms around the tank and wail at the top of my lungs.
“NOOOOOOOOOOO, my precious!”
Eric laughs and presses his hand to the small of my back.
“All right, Gollum. We’ll put them all in one of the smaller tanks and take that, all right?”
“Get your hand off of me before I saw it off with a rusty steak knife,” I growl, looking back over my shoulder at him.
“There she is. There’s little miss sunshine,” he says with smile.
I reluctantly drop my arms from around the tank and take a step back, watching Eric quickly get to work. He carefully scoops each and every teeny-tiny fish from all ten tanks using my aquarium net, transferring them into the smallest, one-and-a-half gallon, octagon-shaped one. When he’s finished, I lift the tank from the counter and hug it to my chest, quietly apologizing to the Flounders and promising I’ll get them better living conditions as soon as possible.
I move through my house towards the front door, ignoring the water that sloshes out of the top of the tank and down the front of me as my feet stutter. I start to feel tears prickling the backs of my eyes, knowing that I’m walking out of my home, leaving behind so many of my beautiful things, and that I might never be able to step foot in here again.
“Would now be a bad time to ask if I can touch your ass?” Eric suddenly says as he stops next to me. “Nothing crazy or anything, just a little squeeze to see if feels as amazing as it looks.”
My tears immediately subside and I lift my chin.
“Eat. Shit.”
I hear him chuckle as I stomp away from him and out the front door, pausing on the front porch when I find all four deputies standing there waiting for me.
“This won’t be the last you see of me, dicknose. I will find you and I will rip your—”
“Okay, we’re leaving now!” Eric says in a chipper voice, resting his hands on my shoulders and gently pushing me to move down the steps and towards my friends and their boyfriends, all huddled together in the driveway, waiting for us.
“Will you stop fucking interrupting me?!” I complain as we walk.
“Did you really want to be tased when you’re holding a two-gallon tank of water that has splashed all down your shirt?”
He has a point, but still.
Asshole.
He continues steering me down the driveway with his hands on my shoulders until we stop next to a white Chevy Tahoe that was backed in. He opens the passenger door.
“What are you doing? Whose car is this?” I ask as Cindy and Belle move up next to me, both of them sharing a worried look.
“I told you this was a bad idea. She’s going to kill us,” Cindy mutters under her breath.
“Did you know that you’re more likely to be murdered by someone you know?” Belle asks her. “Out of the fourteen thousand nine hundred and thirty-one murders in the last year, over sixty percent of those people were killed by someone like a friend or a relative.”