I see you, I want to say, and then I feel like an asshole. Of course I see her. I’m fucking stalking her. Carjacking her.
I’m not the person she wants to see her.
She sighs. “I don’t even know what it would be. What would I like? It feels like there isn’t even a me, like Brooke Carson doesn’t exist. I’m a prop as much as the dress and the necklace. A networking opportunity like the spa day.”
“What about your friends?” I know she has plenty of them, far more than the ones her parents make her keep. They walk around the city in fuzzy boots and overlarge sunglasses, giggling like they don’t have a care in the world.
“They’ll probably get me something. We’re planning to go out this weekend. Maybe they’ll get me eyeshadow or a new clutch.” She shakes her head. “Chelsea will find something fun, though. You probably think I’m ridiculous. Poor little rich girl, with all the expensive gifts.”
Maybe I would have thought that, before I knew her. That first night, when all I had been able to see was a pretty dress and wide eyes. “Did you know that birds have different meanings?” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“The cardinal, for example. It symbolizes truth and beauty. And the crane. It represents integrity. Honor.”
“Which one would you be?” she asks, almost cautious.
“Me?” I consider a moment. “The eagle, maybe. Freedom. And pride.”
“And a bald head?” she asks, a teasing lilt in that voice.
Her teasing note does something strange in my chest. I feel energized, suddenly. Too large for my body. She trusts me enough to play.
We’re stopped at a light. I look over. “I’m not that old,” I growl.
“Older than me.”
That sobers me up quick. I’m older than her, both in years and in spirit. I lived an entire lifetime before I stepped foot outside that basement. “Older than you,” I agree softly.
She gives me a curious look. “What bird would I be?”
I pull the broken bird from my pocket and hold it out. Her breath hitches. She takes it and runs her fingers over the wood.
“What is this?” she asks, holding the little thing in her palm.
“What does it look like?” I say, too harsh. “It’s a hummingbird.”
“You made it?”
I shrug, heart hammering inside my agonizingly painful rib cage. I spent the past twelve hours at the mercy of guys who wouldn’t blink to see me dead, but somehow the stakes feel higher right now.
She looks into my eyes. “It’s beautiful.” She reaches over, touches my arm, sending ripples of warmth through me.
I shrug, like it’s nothing, like her words and her gentle touch don’t do things inside me. Like I’m not dying a little from it. I can force myself on her, the way I did through the phone, but it’s another thing when she reaches for me. It’s more raw somehow.
“What does it mean?” she asks softly.
“The hummingbird symbolizes movement. Change.”
“Oh,” she says, more a shape of her pretty lips than a sound. She takes her hand from my arm and touches the place where the end of the wing got bent. She tries to straighten it, but stops, seeing that will just break it more.
“In some Native American tribes, it means good luck if you see a hummingbird,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine. “What if the hummingbird is injured?”
“Then you nurse it back to health,” I say, my voice low. That isn’t part of any bird symbolism that I know about, but it’s the only answer I can give her. She’s still looking at me, and I can’t look away from her.
My lip throbs. My eye feels half-closed. No doubt I’m a sorry-ass sight, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she looks at me.
The traffic around us starts to move. The light has changed.
“Am I broken?” she whispers.
I take the little thing from her and set it on the small ledge by the speedometer. “Drive,” I tell her, not taking my eyes off her.
Her gaze returns to the road, her hands to the wheel.
She takes the left like I told her, heading for a long stretch of road out of the city. There are tears in her eyes, but I ignore them. There’s grief in her body, but I ignore that, too. Or maybe I’m not ignoring her. Maybe this is the only way I know how to make her feel better.
My hand returns to her thigh, pushing up her plaid skirt. Suddenly I’m touching skin. I thought she was wearing tights, but they’re thin socks. They go way up her leg, until they stop. She’s whisper-soft, like I’m in a dream.
“Oh God,” she whispers.
It’s as though she’s whispering what I’m feeling. Because her skin is unbelievably smooth. Warm. I watch her face in profile, the rise and fall of her chest.
“Stone,” she whispers.
“What? You want your leg back?”
“No,” she says.
My pulse races. No. She doesn’t want her leg back. I inch my hand farther up.
She turns to me. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.”
She stares at me a beat, wondering what kind of madman she’s with, maybe. “You don’t know?”
“Eyes on the road.”
She turns to the road.
“I don’t know a lot of things,” I say. “Like whether you’ve fucked. Have you been fucked, sweetheart?”
The line of her throat moves as she swallows.
“Have you?”
“No,” she says.
But she was kissed. She told me. It burns me up to think about other guys kissing her. Wanting her. Seeing her. I want to lock her up in a tower, like some kind of fairy-tale princess. I guess that makes me the dragon.
She turns back to the road. Says nothing. Drives.
“Have you been touched?” I move my hand higher. I feel her skin, alive with electricity under my rough calluses. “Like this? Anyone touch you like this?”
Her chest rises sharply. The air in the car seems to thicken. “Are you asking if I ever had a boyfriend?”
Right. Of course. I guess if you’re a good girl like Brooke, it’s your boyfriend or girlfriend who touches you. You don’t have the touching without the relationship. “Just answer the question. Have you?”
Her words, when they come, are wild, breathy. “Not like this.” She glances at me, and I feel her all through me just then. I feel her eyes burning into mine. “Not like this,” she says again, emphasizing the word. As though this—what’s happening with us right now—feels as amazing to her as it does to me.
I want to kiss her so bad it hurts. A physical ache in my chest worse than any broken bones inside there. I tighten my grip on her thigh. “Take the next left.”
She flips on her blinker, takes the turn.
This next stretch is a straightaway south out of town. She takes a breath like she does when she’s about to say something hard. I steel myself, sure she’s going to ask for me to stop touching her. Or to go home.
She turns to me. “Do you ever think about just driving?”
“Driving where?”
“Nowhere. Get in a car and drive forever. Or at least, you know, until you’re somewhere so far away that you’re just new. A new person with a new life.”
My gut twists a little, because that’s something you say when you’re unhappy. That’s what you dream about when you want to escape. I know the feeling well. “Do you want that?”
“Sometimes,” she says.
I think back to the basement. Us boys imagining all the things we’d do if we were free. Each of us with our own specific idea of how things would be. Knox imagined his own workshop full of robots and blinking lights and computers. Calder wanted to be on a mountaintop, seeing the sky all around. Nate wanted to be a doctor, a vet, and he would have his own farm, too. I didn’t imagine things for myself, though. I just thought of my guys, safe. Free.
“What would the new life be like?” I ask her.
She says nothing for a long time. So
long that I think she’s not planning on answering my stupid question at all. Then, in a voice that sounds small and strained, she says, “I don’t know.”
Chapter 13
Brooke
I shouldn’t cry in front of him. Nobody loves you when you cry, but I can’t help it, because I don’t know what the new life would be like. “I don’t know,” I say again, so pathetic.
“How would you want it to be?”
I shake my head. Stone is so free and wild, he can never understand. I get this intense rush of jealousy of him. It’s crazy, because he’s clearly in trouble. He’s a criminal. He’s beat up bad. But at least he knows what he wants. At least he’s free.
“You can’t just not know.”
“I can,” I say in a small voice.
“You don’t imagine it? Where you’d go? How it would be?” He sounds like he doesn’t believe me. I don’t know how to explain, and I want to explain. I want him to understand. I feel like he could. Crazy that, of all people, he could understand.
I decide to tell him the picture in my mind—it’s all I have for him. The most honest I can be.
“There was this plant in my room. A vine type of plant,” I say. “I was cleaning one day, and I put it in this box, and then I stuck something on top of the box and forgot about it. And then a while later, I found it again. It was mostly dead. It had grown all around, up and down the inside of the box, looking for light.”
Stone doesn’t interrupt me. He doesn’t complain that I’m off the subject like Mom would, or even Chelsea. It makes me feel good. He makes me feel good.
I continue, “It was trapped, and all it could find was the sides of the box. It didn’t know which way to grow. All it knew was the sides of the box.”
My life is the box. My parents. School. The friends who are picked out for me. I can’t imagine what I want outside of the box, can’t even imagine a garden.
He’s looking at me so strangely. “What happened?”
I put it in the sun, but it was too late. What leaves there were turned brown and then shriveled. “It died.”
He says nothing, but I feel turmoil in the air of the car.
“Maybe it’s stupid, but sometimes I feel like that plant,” I say. “I’m growing inside this box, growing in this completely wrong shape plants aren’t supposed to be in, because I can’t see the sun. It’s like I don’t know anything of what I want. I think I would know what I wanted if I was out of the box.”
“Because you feel trapped.”
“Yes,” I say, blood racing. “And sometimes I think, just drive. No more appearances to keep up. No more pressure. No more Detective Rivera asking questions.”
He squeezes my thigh, sending waves of feeling all through me. His fingers are so near the spot between my legs, it makes it feel hot, like I want him to touch me there. “Brooke.”
“What?” I turn to him.
His green eyes are soft and beautiful, even in that dark, scowling, beat-up face. And I get the sense that this is something important, something private he’s sharing. “You can’t do that,” he says. “You can’t drive away. You need to finish high school. Trust me—you want to be like a normal kid. You really, really do.”
“I kind of can’t believe you’re telling me that.” He’s a criminal. He doesn’t follow the rules. I can’t imagine him worrying about what some piece of paper, some diploma says. “You, of all people. I mean…”
“What?” he says roughly. “The outlaw with the busted lip?”
“You have a lot more than a busted lip, Stone.” I grin, but he doesn’t crack a smile. My amusement fades. “Did you not finish high school? Is that why you’re saying that? Do you regret it?”
He doesn’t want to answer. I can tell—I don’t know how. It’s as though I feel him, feel the current coming off him. Negative to my positive, repelling me.
“My box didn’t include high school,” he says. “Let’s put it like that.”
“You dropped out?”
He shifts his fingers, making me throb between my thighs. “I never went.”
I blink, almost distracted from the ache in my body. “How can you not go? There are laws about that.”
“Do I look like laws apply to me?” he growls, shifting his fingers again, sliding up his hand.
The car is going the speed limit, but my heart is racing a zillion miles an hour. I’m watching the road, but all my attention is on his hand. My breath feels ragged. I really want to push myself into his hand, but it doesn’t seem polite.
Classes start back up in less than an hour, but I feel like I’ve entered a different time zone where classes don’t matter. When I’m with Stone, I’m out of that box. I’m driving to nowhere and everywhere.
With Stone, I really am free.
I look down at his hand, swallow past the dryness in my mouth.
“You don’t want me to touch you?” he asks, low. There’s a challenge in his voice, as if he’s daring me to make him stop. And somehow I know he would stop, if I wanted that.
“No!” I say. “I mean, I do.”
“But not right there?”
“I don’t know,” I say, face flushed.
“Yeah, you do. I think you know.”
I look helplessly over at him.
“Say it, birthday girl,” he says. “Where do you want me to touch you?”
I swallow. “You can move your hand up.”
He lifts his hand off my thigh.
“That’s not what I meant!” I look over, and he’s giving me this half-smile that’s devilish and sexy, a man instead of all the boys I know, a five-o’clock shadow instead of pimples.
“No?” he asks, almost a drawl. “You said up. Isn’t that up?”
“Stop teasing. You know what I mean.” I take a deep breath because he’s going to make me spell it out. He’s going to keep pushing me and pushing me. “You can touch me.”
He puts his hand back where it was.
“Between the legs,” I whisper.
He inches his hand closer. Not at all close enough. “Like that?”
“You’re evil.”
“I am,” he says, kind of seriously. It makes me shudder—a good shudder.
“More.” I swallow, force myself to say it. “Touch my clit. Do what I did to myself on the phone.”
“Yeah?” He presses his fingers to the outside of my panties, and I let out a shallow breath.
“More,” I plead.
He curls his hand around me, grasping me between the legs. It’s a starburst of feeling. “Oh my God. Stone,” I gust out.
“You’re so wet, little bird. So wet.” He slides closer, whispering in my ear. “And you know how much I love hearing you say my name?” He begins to massage slightly.
I move with his magic hand. “How much?”
“A fuck of a lot.” He grabs the wheel with his other hand. “A whole fuck of a lot.”
“That’s a lot,” I breathe, made dumb by his touch.
His whisper in my ear is velvet. “You have no idea.” He pushes his fingers under my panties now, under that panel. I suck in air as he touches my clit. “I’m your fingers right here,” he says, sliding two fingers in small circles.
“Stone…” I say. “I’m trying to drive…”
“I’m your eyes on the road.” He reaches across me and puts the car on cruise control. “Remember what I said? I got you.” He pushes his fingers into me. “You ever have a cock in here?”
I squirm in the seat, shocked by the strange sensation of having him there. “No.”
“What about a toy?”
A squeak escapes me. Visions of Barbies and Tonka trunks flash through my mind. That’s not the kind of toy he means. “No!”
“Not even a vegetable?” he asks, his voice low with a casual curiosity. “Maybe a nice, thick zucchini. You could have put it back in the fridge before anyone noticed, no one knowing what you’d done with it.”
“I’ve never,” I say, breathless with my denial
.
“You must have fucked yourself. Put one finger inside. Two. Three. How many can you fit?”
“No, I—” Embarrassment turns my cheeks hot.
“You just touch your clit?”
God, how can he just say those words? None of the boys I’ve known talked like that to me. All the boys I’ve ever talked to go to Saint Matthew’s, the boys’ school we have dances and events with. Those boys ask to kiss me. They lean in from three feet away for a peck on the lips. They probably blush as much as I do during health class.
“Do you?” he asks again.
“Only that one time.” On the phone with him.
“Then what?” he demands softly.
“The pillow,” I choke out.
His fingers still, and he makes a sound, almost a groan. I’m starting to realize I can affect him as much as he’s affecting me. When he speaks, his voice has gone pure gravel. “That’s what you do, sweetheart? You put a pillow between your legs?”
I swear my face is going up in flames. It’s a good thing we’re on cruise control, because my legs are useless. My entire body is focused on what’s happening where his hand touches me. “And I just move my hips. Press my legs together.”
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Rub yourself until you come.”
My hips are already moving, like I’m in bed under the covers. Like it’s dark in my bedroom, the entire house asleep. Like I’m not in broad daylight behind the wheel of a moving vehicle with a man’s hand between my legs. “I can’t. Not here. Not like this.”
“Yes, here. Exactly like this.” His thumb brushes the sensitive place on me, as if to prove his point. And I can’t deny what’s happening. I’m sparking on the inside, light turned into sensation, the rest of my life a dark sky as the backdrop for this moment.
“Wait,” I say, almost afraid of what will happen next.
Afraid of what’s outside the box.
“No waiting,” he growls. “Look at the sign. Exit four twenty. You have one mile to come. By the time we reach four twenty-one, you’re going to be spilling your cum all over my fingers.”
I shiver at his words, making a soft sound of surrender. The cruise control is set to sixty. My brain moves sluggishly, all the blood rushing elsewhere. One minute to come. One minute. Sixty seconds. “It’s too soon.”
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 94
