Forthelastninety seconds, I’d been picturing the next fifteen years of my life.
Eight to ten if I got out on good behavior.
That was the typical sentence for second degree manslaughter, and the longer this Demitri fuck kept his hands on Scarlett, the harder it got to argue myself out of grabbing my butter knife and sawing through his neck.
He might not be the reason Rebecca lobbed a nine iron through my heart three years ago, but his blood was. His filthy fucking, sin-stained blood.
And I wanted his hands off of Scarlett.
Right. Fucking. Now.
His attention was on her, looking at her like a lovesick puppy and goading the vein in my forehead to pop.
He was a handsome fucker, and I hated him even more for it. As of ninety seconds ago, I decided that if someone came from shit, they deserved to look like it too. Not this tall, dark, and smirky bullshit that clearly did something for the woman of fire across the table.
A woman that I’d realized had gone eerily quiet now that I’d stopped pissing a circle around her in my head.
He’d made her laugh. Demitri made her vixen voice sing out loud when he brought up a story about her and her brother, and I was too busy wanting to steal her laughter back for myself to notice.
But I noticed now.
I noticed her silence.
I noticed how the sun sank in her green field eyes. How they’d darkened and dulled.
I also noticed the casual way she’d begun to stroke the knife next to her plate.
My pulse counted each time she ran the soft tips of her finger over the teeth of the blade meant to cut the bread at our table.
Demitri must have caught on, because his hand engulfed hers and put a stop to it, and I breathed a little easier.
“Hey.” He called to her in a voice dropped low by intimacy, and Scarlett looked right at him. “You okay?”
She shared his eye contact for a few staggering seconds.
Then she twisted to look at me.
Her hair was piled on top of her head today in a maroon mess, helping the sun spotlight her pretty face. The high slant of her cheeks were more pronounced, the pout of her cherry lips like a big red button that screamed ‘don’t touch’, but of-fucking-course I wanted to do it anyway.
I wanted to press it over and over again until it busted and shattered the knee-buckling temptation it held over me.
And her eyes. Fuck, I’d never seen them bigger.
Or lonelier.
She had those empty emeralds aimed right at me, rearranging my heart around my ribs as she blinked slowly for me—and don’t ask how the fuck I knew that basic function was for me. She’d been doing it all morning, staring at me with eyes intoxicated by a bad habit she was jonesing for another hit of.
She was a promise of ruin for both of us if she kept it up.
“We should get more drinks,” she stated without a note of inflection. “Skip the O.J. and share a bottle of bubbles.”
My teeth set against her benumbed request.
Not a fucking chance.
“No. We’re paying the check and leaving.”
She was shaking her head before I finished talking.