Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2)

by Laurelin Paige

  “Nah,” he says. “I’m not the grasshopper.”

  “You’re the ant? Preparing for the future?” I look over at him. I should probably be scared, but I’m actually curious. “Would you share?”

  He looks out the window. “I’m not the ant or the grasshopper,” he says.

  “You can’t be neither.”

  “I can.”

  “No, you can’t. You either plan and think ahead, or you don’t.”

  “Maybe I’m the winter, bringing all the hell,” he says. “The winter nobody ever wants to see coming, but here I am.”

  With a little shiver, I put my eyes back on the road. “Do you really think that?”’ I ask softly. Because it would be horrible if somebody thought that about themselves.

  “Drive,” he barks.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just drive.”

  We’re heading north. With a sick feeling, I realize this is the highway we took last time we were together. The one that heads out toward Big Moosehorn Park. Why is he bringing me back there?

  Oh God. Is he going to finish what he started?

  Maybe he thought about it and realized he should have drowned me that night. My foot lets up on the gas pedal. I could be driving myself to my own funeral.

  “I didn’t tell,” I whisper.

  The car is slowing down. “I know you didn’t.”

  “Then why…”

  “Because. Because this is how things are going to happen. When I say jump, you jump. When I say drive, you motherfucking drive. That’s how it is between us now.”

  “For how long?” I hate how small my voice sounds when it comes out. I hate how I always knew he’d come back, knew it wasn’t over.

  His gaze is dark with promise. He looks older than he did that night somehow. Less of a mystery, more of a promise. “Forever, Brooke. I let you live that night, and now you’re in my debt. Understand? You’re mine.”

  A chill comes over me, and at the same time, the heat of anger in my neck, my face. Not because of the threat of it, but because of the truth. He connected us that night in a dark, sick way.

  He made me lie to everyone I love. Made me his.

  Maybe it’s the anger making me feel brave, I don’t know, but I give him my worst fuck you look. The kind of look I reserve for when guys my age are being douchebags. The kind of look that puts people in their place. “I’ll never be yours,” I say.

  It doesn’t put him in his place.

  He turns to me with full-on intensity. There’s heat in his emerald eyes, but also a kind of wonder. And sadness, a little bit. I cringe as he reaches over and touches my hair again. “Too late,” he says.

  My pulse whooshes in my ears. “What are you going to do?”

  The question feels alive in the air between us. Alive with speculation, as if I’d asked more questions. Are you going to touch me? Kiss me?

  Are you going to kill me?

  He’s touching my hair. His hand brushes my shoulder, a ghost of a touch, but it feels electric, shivering over my body. Sweat trickles down my spine. My heart hammers in my chest like a wild thing under my stiff white school shirt.

  He seems to be thinking about the question. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to know.

  The Burger Benny sign looms up ahead, bright blue and yellow. Ever since that night, I get this weird mixture of feelings when I pass one of those signs, like when you remember a feeling from a dream and you don’t know what it is. All you know is that it connects to some deep part of you.

  I hate that we’re connected like that.

  He gestures with the gun at the exit for Burger Benny. “Get off there.”

  “I have to be home for dinner soon. They’re expecting me. They’ll be worried, and after last time, they won’t wait and see. If I don’t check in, they’ll call the police.”

  “That’s why you’re going to call and make up an excuse why you’re late.”

  “I can’t just do that.”

  “Okay. Then call and tell the truth. You’re driving your buddy around. The guy who killed Madsen.”

  My blood races. The more time I spend with him, the more trapped I feel. Telling them that would terrify them. And they wouldn’t be able to help. No one can help.

  “The guy you covered for,” he continues. “That’s who you’re with. You know what accessory after the fact is? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not something you want on your pretty, perfect record.”

  He pulls his hand away from my hair and opens my bag.

  “Hey!” I say.

  He fishes out my phone and hands it to me. “Make the call, little bird. Make it good.”

  We’re at a stop sign. I call the house number, getting voicemail, like I knew I would. I leave a message, saying that Chelsea and I are done with the museum but I’ll be later than expected because she wants my opinion on a prom dress at Macy’s.

  I feel his eyes on me as he takes the phone from me. “Chelsea,” he snorts. As if that’s stupid or something. He opens the back of it and pulls out the battery.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Three guesses.”

  I focus on the road. “What do you want?”

  “A burger. What are you going to have?”

  He says it like we’re a couple on a regular night, stepping out for a burger.

  But we’re not. I say nothing. He can pretend all he wants—I don’t have to participate.

  I catch sight of a cop car up ahead. My pulse speeds. I grip the steering wheel. We draw nearer to the cop. To the exit.

  My abductor doesn’t seem the least bit nervous. Casually, he reaches over and flips on the blinker, brushing my arm. A shiver goes through me.

  His voice is casual. “Would suck to be pulled over riding with the guy you covered for, wouldn’t it? After lying to your parents like that? Things would really look bad then.”

  When I glance over, he’s smiling that beautiful, devilish smile I remember so well from the first night. I feel like a fish, and this guy, he drove a hook deep into my gut. And he can pull it whenever he wants.

  It’s about more than the fact that he forced me to lie.

  It’s about how tightly he held me in the river that night—every muscle wet and straining with the refusal to let go.

  Nobody has ever expended that kind of intensity on me. Perverse as it seems, it was something real after all the fakeness of the party. After the fakeness of my entire life.

  The feeling of hating him and clinging on to him was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Like clinging to a leaky life raft even though it’s going to drown you.

  Clinging to your killer, that’s a powerful and horrible kind of intimacy. I used to think of intimacy as chocolates and roses and sweet whispered words. But it can be blood and violence and darkness, too. That’s something they don’t teach you in school.

  It drove a hook deep, deep into me.

  The sensation of him has lived under my skin for the past seven months. The feeling of his fingers digging into my shivering flesh. The way his wet shirtsleeves clung to his bulging biceps. The hard intensity of his gaze, fixed firmly on the moon, like he couldn’t bear looking down at me while he killed me. How severe and sure his grip became each time I struggled. The musical swash of the water against our bodies, a soundtrack to the most twisted dance ever.

  And then he let me live, even when I could ID him so easily.

  It felt like something beyond chocolates and roses and sweet whispered words. Something more genuine, somehow.

  It’s completely crazy—I know.

  And I can never tell anybody, not even Chelsea. That’s almost the worst part of it.

  “My treat,” he adds. Like this is a date.

  I veer into the drive-through lane, heart thudding.

  “Careful,” he commands. “Prom’s coming up. Saw the sign on the school. You going?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’ll decide what’s my business or no
t. You’re mine, and that includes you answering every single question I ask—with the truth. You do everything I say and tell me what I want to know, and I won’t hurt you, got it?”

  You’re mine. There’s this tightness in my belly. It’s not right. I hate you I hate you I hate you, I think at him, repeating it like that might make it true.

  “Now, are you going to this prom shit or not?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why not?”

  I look over at him, wondering how much he knows about prom. “I’m not old enough. It’s for seniors. I can go if a senior asks me, but…”

  “But what? No one asked you?”

  He sounds a little indignant about that, and it makes me smile.

  I think about Zach’s fumbling kisses at the party last month. I’d liked him for so long, but his kisses had seemed as fake as my sweet-sixteen party. Kissing me like a prereq to some blow-off course he has to take. The way he touched me felt like the air-kiss version of touching. Like he wasn’t really there.

  Maybe I wasn’t really there.

  Zach asked me to go to prom with him and another couple, but I lied and said my parents thought sixteen was too young for prom, and that I’d promised to go to the movies with Chelsea. Then I’d asked Chelsea to go to the movies, just to make the lie true. Zach is the perfect boyfriend in every way, but everything with him feels empty.

  Ever since the night of my sweet-sixteen party, nothing has felt real. Except the man in my passenger seat. He feels real.

  “Let’s get the usual,” he says when we get up to the speaker thing. “Order two of the usual.” He has the gun out of sight, but it’s still there.

  I glare at him. “We don’t have a usual.”

  He lowers his voice. “Order. The. Usual.”

  Chapter 8

  Stone

  Brooke orders two burger combos with Cokes. The burger combo—that’s what I got her last time. I know better than to think it’s a big deal that she remembered our usual.

  I make her drive back to Big Moosehorn Park. I show her where to drive and the parking area I want us at.

  We get out of her SUV. It’s a nice enough set of wheels—a Lincoln Navigator. Red like cherries.

  It’s a warm night for April, but the ground is still cool and damp. I lead her to a grassy bluff a ways off the trail, near a few large trees. It overlooks the river where we were that night. No doubt she remembers that, too. “Here.”

  She looks confused.

  “Wait,” I say, laying out my leather jacket. “The ground is still a little wet.”

  “I'm not sitting on your jacket.”

  I give her a look. That’s not how this goes. I know she understands that, even if she fights me sometimes.

  She sits.

  I settle in beside her.

  I eat my burger, but that’s not what this is about. It’s more about watching her eat. About doing the things from last time. Messed up, I know. I try not to think about it too hard.

  It’s been a fuck of a month. Grayson got convicted. They’re moving him to a prison out of state—far away from us. They won’t let him have visitors or even communicate with the outside world. I’d lay down my life to protect him, but now I can’t even see him.

  We’re all going crazy. Sometimes I can barely sleep.

  The worse things are, the more I think about that night with her last September.

  To escape the worry and the rage, just for a moment. To lose myself in that good feeling I had with her.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about fucking her, too. I’d be lying if I didn’t think about how it felt to hold her in the river that night. The way she trembled, this girl I had total control over. I could destroy her or save her. I could kill her or fuck her or do anything at all.

  She didn’t tell.

  She kept our secret.

  I was fairly sure she would. Still. It got me in a way that’s hard to explain.

  And I needed a hit of her again.

  We questioned a guy at the old lumber mill in West Franklin today. He was a guy from the basement days. It was a miracle we tracked him down. We felt sure he knew who engineered the frame-up of Grayson, that he could give us something we could use.

  The motherfucker wouldn’t talk. I told him I’d run him through the wood chipper if he wouldn’t give me something.

  He didn’t believe me, of course. Kept saying he didn’t know who was behind it. So I made my guys hoist him up. I started feeding him in, hand first. He blurted out a few nicknames and then shut up. Done talking. I suppose he knew he was dead either way.

  So I put him through.

  They didn’t want me to do it like that. Too messy. And with all the safety features wood chippers have these days, it’s also a real pain in the ass compared to just shooting him in the head, but when I say something, I follow through. That’s important to me.

  Let them have the high ground. I can be the psycho they need me to be. I left them back at the Bradford to bitch about me. Too angry. Out of control. You have to let people bitch about you when you’re the leader.

  Doesn’t matter.

  They’re safe. That’s what matters.

  Then I found myself driving to her. I told myself I’d just watch her from the car. She gets done with her last class at three fifteen on Wednesdays, and I thought I’d drive by her fancy girls’ school.

  They hang banners from the roof to show the world what the girls are up to, and this month the banners say prom season. Prom is a kind of dance, according to Wikipedia.

  Then I followed her to the museum. I wanted to know what she was doing in there, and I thought to slip in, but I don’t know how the fuck you blend in at a museum—you have to know something about a place to blend into it.

  So I hung around in the garage until she got back. I told myself all I’d do was make sure she got out of there okay. Wouldn’t want any predators to get at her.

  Yeah. Too late for that now.

  Even her hate feels good. I’ll never be yours. I replay it in my head. That glare as she said it. Her fear, her hate, her friction. I shouldn’t get off on it, I know. That’s how twisted up I am.

  “So did Detective Rivera follow up? Is he giving you any more trouble?”

  Her eyes snap to mine. “How do you know about him?”

  “I’m a bad guy. It’s my job to know about the cops.”

  She fishes through her bag of fries, taking out a slim, crispy one. Maybe she likes crispy ones. “He didn’t believe me.”

  “But he didn’t go at you again?”

  “No. My mom kind of ran him off.”

  “Your parents protecting you. That’s good.”

  She nods, seeming sad.

  “So they’re leaving it?”

  “Is that why you wanted to see me?” she asks. “To make sure you’re home free?”

  I can see the hope in her eyes. She wants that to be the reason I’ve grabbed her up and not something bad. She doesn’t get it; everything with me is bad. “I’m asking the questions. Are they leaving it?”

  “I have to go to a shrink. But she doesn’t ask me about it directly.”

  “And you won’t tell her.”

  “I said I wouldn’t,” she snaps. “I’m good for my word.”

  I nod. I like that. Keeping our word is something we have in common, but I don’t say it.

  “I never tell her anything.”

  “You should tell her how you feel, if you feel upset.”

  “Just leave it,” she says, echoing me.

  “What else? Everything back to normal otherwise?”

  She drags another burnt french fry through the blob of ketchup she squeezed out into the side of her fries bag. If I’d known she likes them crispy, I would’ve ordered them like that and taken a look to make sure they did it right. “Pretty much. Except for self-defense classes.”

  “You’re taking self-defense?”

  She shrugs. “The shrink thinks it would be good.�
��

  “Is it?”

  She eats the fry. “It’s exercise, I guess.”

  “Show me. Can you hit? Did they teach you to hit?”

  She pushes a fry into her mouth and looks at me suspiciously.

  “I’ll give you pointers,” I add.

  “No, thanks.”

  “It’s not like you can hurt me.”

  “You want me to hit you? So you can give me pointers? Practice self-defense with the person who’s the whole reason…” She doesn’t have to finish the sentence.

  “The whole reason you need to defend yourself? Who the fuck better to practice against, right?”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “C’mon.” I stand. “Give me your best move.”

  She just gazes up at me. The new highlights in her hair catch the setting sun, and there’s a light dusting of freckles on her nose. She looks like an angel.

  “Come on. Up.” I want to see this. More than that, I want her to touch me. Doesn’t matter whether that touch comes with pleasure. I’m more used to pain anyway.

  “I can go home if I hit you? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “If you knock me down.”

  I wait. I can tell she’s considering it. She knows I mean what I say. She wipes her fingers on her napkin, tucks the napkin into the greasy bag, and stands, eyes wary. She’s suspicious.

  “Let’s see whatcha got.”

  I’m expecting something half-assed, but she comes out with a big roundhouse. I slap it away.

  “That’s what they’re teaching you? To try something like that?” I grin. “I don’t know about these classes.”

  She looks wild and angry and kind of beautiful. “You think it’s funny? Go to hell. You made me lie to everyone.” She kicks me, hitting my knee.

  “Ow,” I say, laughing.

  Suddenly she’s like a little windmill, a flurry of hits and kicks. “I could barely sleep! And he knew!” Hit, kick, hit, kick. She’s landing them. I’m laughing, surprised more than anything. “Everyone looks at me like I’m…” She hits again.

  “Fuck!” I say, holding her off. “Okay!”

  She doesn’t stop. She’s dead serious, going at me like a wild banshee. She actually connects a few times.

  “Okay, okay.” I grab her, get her under control. She’s crying by the time I pin her to a tree. I have her arms trapped against her shoulders. She’s breathing hard, frightened.