“I wasn’t sneaking on you. I’m here for Jess!”
“I’m not the kinda guy who’ll allow his girl to be snuck up on either. Fuck!”
“Laine?” Jess reaches across the bed and snags an oversized shirt to cover herself up. “Baby?” She pulls me down until I become her little spoon on the edge of the mattress. “What happened?”
I close my eyes at the sound of blankets moving. At the sound of footsteps on the floor. At clothes rustling.
Softly, Jess strokes her pointer finger over my forehead and folds her body around mine. “Tell me, Baby.”
“I had a nightmare.”
She nods. They come all the time now, so it’s not shocking anymore. Not a surprise. Just an unfortunate side effect of knowing Graham.
“We were in the club and he…” I shrug. Surprisingly, I think I’m desensitizing myself to what happened. Maybe Sonia is onto something; talk it out, speak of it so often, it becomes a recitation, an emotionless story, rather than something that hurts me. “He sold me. One thousand dollars per man.”
“Oh, Baby…”
“Graham made a fortune, and I lost count of how many men have touched me.”
“I want to kill him,” she growls in my ear. “I want to cut his fucking dick off and make him eat it.”
“I want to tell Ang I’m sorry for freaking on him.”
“You–” She stops. “Huh?” She leans up onto her elbow and glances over me until her long hair tickles my face. “Ang?”
“I panicked, so I need to tell him I’m sorry.”
“Okay… Well.” She reaches over to the bedside table and snatches up her cell. Swiping screens and entering the passcode, she passes me the cell that has a picture of me and Luc as her screensaver. “Text him, then he can wake up to something nice.”
I balance perilously on the edge of my sister’s bed and turn so we’re nose to nose. “He ran through flames to get to me.”
“Ang?”
I hold the cell between us. “Yeah. He had a gun that I didn’t know he owned, he was so scary and in control, then he picked me up and threw me around. He didn’t stop just because I cried. He just picked me up and carried me out.”
“You mean when the club was burning? The day that–” Her voice cracks.The day that Kane died.“Did you dream about that day? Did you dream about Ang?”
“No.” I squeeze my eyes closed and sigh when a tear escapes. “I dreamed of Graham. I dreamed of scary guns and bad things, but then I woke up and went to the bathroom, and while I was in there, I told myself to think of Ang. Of the gun. The fire. All really scary things. Worse when you put them together. But Ang saved me. He always saves me.”
She nods. You’d never know she was deep asleep a minute ago. “Ang is a good guy. He’ll always drive around cleaning our shit up.” She lets out a muted giggle. “How many times did we cruise in that damn Charger and shush each other so Luc and the other guys wouldn’t know what we were doing?”
“Even though they were across town, so shushing was pointless.”
She laughs. Tangling her legs with mine beneath the blankets, she strokes my hand. “Tell him his ban is lifted. Tell him you’re not mad at him.”
“I never said he was banned.” I frown. “And I didn’t say I was mad at him. He thinks I’m mad at him?”
She shrugs and goes back to stroking my face. “I bet he’d like a text either way.”
I unclasp my hands and check the time. “It’s nearly time to get up.”
She lets out a man-sized yawn. “What time is it?”
“Four-forty-five.”
She snorts. “That’snotalmost time to get up. I barely even slept yet.”
“You went to bed before I did. You’ve been in here for hours.” When she flashes a filthy smile, my face burns red. Somehow, Graham turned me into a virginal prude. “Ew. Hours? Ew!”