She hoisted herself up to sit beside me. “You sure you’re up to this?” She nodded to the pole.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Don’t I look up to it?”
“No,” she said bluntly. “Don’t get me wrong, I dig the hair and you’re still better than half the girls here, but you’re runnin’ on half a tank, babe. Understandable, considering what you went through. It’s heavy shit. You think this is the right place for you after…?”
“After I was kidnapped by my ex-employer and fed drugs while they did unseemly things to me for three weeks?” I finished for her, my voice sharp.
She didn’t flinch as I expected her to. Most people didn’t do well with being confronted by ugly reality, but Cadence looked like she’d seen enough ugly reality to be jaded by my world, which scared me slightly.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
I shrugged. “This is where I want to be. The only place I feel like I can be. As crappy as my old job used to be, when I was on stage, I had a sort of power, you know? Before I fucked myself up on drugs. I didn’t exactly love the reality of it, but being on stage is….” I searched for the word.
“Freeing?” she finished for me.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
She didn’t press, didn’t try to dig deeper and have a big heart-to-heart, which I fricking loved. “Okay then. That’s all I need to hear. You do what you gotta do.” She jumped back down onto the floor. “It’s good to have you back.”
I smiled at her. “It’s good to be back.”
It wasn’t.
It wasn’t good to be anywhere right now. But I figured if I faked it for long enough it would be.
“You,” a very masculine and very angry male voice echoed through the empty club.
Both Cadence and I whipped our heads to the red-faced, bald-headed, tattooed biker stomping boots in our direction.
“Angry male approaching is my cue to leave,” Cadence declared, leaving just as Gabriel made it to us.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he clipped.
I scowled at him. “Hello to you too.”
He snatched my arm and hoisted me to the floor, then began to drag me towards the door.
His hand on my bare arm immediately drenched my body in ice. The dirt came to the surface and I struggled to get free. “What are you doing?” I shouted. “Let me go.”
He kept dragging me. “I’m gettin’ you the fuck out of here and somewhere where I can shake some fuckin’ sense into you,” he growled, bursting through the double doors and into the parking lot.
I started to panic as the dirt became unbearable and his touch had my mind flickering between the parking lot and that room.
The room where I was covered in dirt. Nothing but dirt and ice.
“The man who is dragging me bodily is talking about sense?” I shrieked. I kept struggling against his grip. “Let me go,” I ordered.
Gabriel ignored me, just kept dragging me through the parking lot.
I didn’t notice anything except the way his hand on mine made the grime unbearable. It was creeping up my arm like a flesh-eating virus and it had to stop. I wrenched my hand from his grasp but it didn’t work, so I stopped, forcing him to stop too. It was either that or drag me. The look on his face might’ve been foreign, but I didn’t think he was about to drag my limp body on the ground through a parking lot.
“Let me go!” I screamed, unable to hold the panic and terror in anymore. Because the longer his touch remained on me, the longer I was in that place, in that room.
He did so immediately. My voice had been unrecognizable even to myself.
“You can’t touch me,” I said, my voice lower, hoarser. “I can’t have that.” I rubbed my arms in an effort to get it off. “I can’t have people touching me,” I muttered, trying desperately to escape that little room.
“Fuck,” he whispered, all rage gone from his voice. Only sorrow and regret was left. I felt him more than saw him step back.
I blinked and was back in the parking lot, looking at Gabriel put his hands to the back of his neck, his face tortured.
There was silence in that moment, enough of it for me to get my breath back, to convince myself that there was nothing under my skin.
His eyes burned into mine and he moved his foot an inch, then froze, as if he realized I needed the distance. “You’re safe, Becky,” he whispered, his hands clenched at his sides. “No one’s touching you. No one’s hurting you.”
I clung to his words like a life raft.
“I—” He took a breath. “Fuck, I didn’t mean to come in there like that. Do this to you.” His gaze flickered up my body. “I’m sorry, Becky. So fuckin’ sorry. I didn’t realize—”