She dragged her toe against the ground. “Um, okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
~hunter~
Paige sat down on my bed, looking around at the room. “Unicorns, huh?”
“It’s a rental,” I said. “It came furnished. It was like this when we got here, and my mom says we can’t change it. We probably won’t be here for that long, anyway. We never stay anyplace for too long.”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you moved around a lot. I could tell.”
Damn it. I didn’t like the fact that I was giving her information.
She still hadn’t made any moves to hurt me, though, and she hadn’t seemed too interested in snooping around our house.
She flopped back on the bed. “I wish I could say there was some cool reason that my parents can’t settle down, you know, like one of them being in the army or something, but… what can I say? My parents are just weird.”
“Weird?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “They’re really paranoid. They used to be famous, but like a jillion years ago, which no one even remembers, and now they want out of the spotlight, so whenever anyone recognizes them, we have to move. It’s extremely annoying.”
“Famous, huh? Anyone I’d know?”
She sat up, laughing. “They would kill me if I told you. Don’t worry about it.”
So why had she brought it up? I felt wary.
She didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about anything, though. She took in my room. “Actually, I like the pink. I think it really fits you.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I told my shoes.
She giggled. “That was a joke, Hunter. Do you laugh?”
I tried to smile. I found myself wanting to be able to laugh the way she did. She seemed so free and open. Alive. She wasn’t like anything in my world, which was all constant danger and fear.
She laughed again. “Oh my god. I’m hungry.”
“Uh… well, there’s food,” I said. “You want to go to the kitchen?”
“And leave the unicorns?”
I shrugged. “I can handle leaving them behind if you can.”
She grinned. “Hey. Was that a joke?”
I didn’t answer.
She got up off the bed and brushed past me. “You could use practice.”
I stiffened when she touched me. It occurred to me that I’d never really been touched by a girl, not really. Not since I was thirteen and Jamie Fletcher had shoved me because she was mad that I’d gotten the best test score in math class. And I didn’t think that counted.
Paige opened the door and went into the hall. “Which way’s the kitchen?”
I pointed. “That way.” I came out of the room too and shut the door behind me.
The door at the end of the hall opened, and Chance poked his head out. “Hunter? Is there someone here?” Then he saw Paige, and his eyebrows shot up.
I made a face at him. “Chance, this is Paige. She’s a friend from school.”
Chance shook his head. “You got to be kidding me.”
“Paige,” I said. “This is my brother Chance. He’s not usually this rude. Oh, wait, actually he is.”
Chance came out of his room and stared me down.
I folded my arms over my chest.
Chance smiled at Paige. “Nice to meet you, Paige. Could you give my brother and me a moment?”
She looked back and forth between us. “Um, sure?”
I gestured. “You can wait in the kitchen. I’ll be right there.”
“Okay.” She looked confused, but she was still smiling. She disappeared out of sight.
Chance grabbed me and pulled me back the hallway. His voice was an angry whisper. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I pushed him off. “Hanging out.”
“At our house? You crazy?”
“There some rule I’m not allowed to bring friends home?”
“Since when do you even have friends?”
“Look, she’s cool,” I said. “I think she is, anyway.”
Chance shook his head. “You’re going to get her killed.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, she’s not going to make it out of the kitchen.” I started back up the hall.
“I’m serious, Hunter, it’s not safe.”
“We’re only hanging out.” I turned my back on him and went into the kitchen, tensing myself to see her there with a machine gun pointed at my head.
Instead, she had her head in the refrigerator. “Is there stuff in here I shouldn’t eat?”
“Um… did you have something in mind?”
She peered around the refrigerator door. “Leftover pizza?”
“That’s cool,” I said.
She took the box out. “You want some?”
“Sure.” I took the box from her and set it on the counter. I got out a piece for her and one for me.
She trailed her fingers over the stove with one hand, holding the pizza with the other. “You probably think I’m really pushy, don’t you? I’m sorry. I’ve developed this severe case of being really outgoing. Probably because I hate feeling lonely and stupid, and if you act like you’re already friends with people, a lot of times they just go along with it.”
Huh. Interesting theory.
She turned to look at me. “Besides, you don’t really talk much.”
“Sorry,” I said. I munched on the pizza and tried to think of something to say.
“Hey, it’s okay.” She smiled. “You don’t have to talk.”
“No, I want to,” I said. “I guess I don’t really know what to talk about.”
She smiled. “Um… what are your hopes and dreams?”
I furrowed my brow.
She giggled.
I snorted. “Seriously?”
“Okay, that was stupid.” She chewed on her pizza. “So, your brother doesn’t like me, huh?”
“No, he does. I mean, he doesn’t know you… I don’t usually bring people home.”
She nodded. “I get that. I don’t bring people home either.” She sighed. “This is why I need a car. I keep trying to convince my parents of that.”
“Yeah, I could see how a car could be helpful in a situation like this.”
She stuffed the rest of the pizza into her mouth.
I took another bite of mine. “I, uh, I had a dream too.”
Her eyes got big. She stopped chewing for a second, and then she forced herself to swallow. “Like about me?”
“Yeah.”
“No way.”
I nodded.
She thought about it. “You think that means something?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What was I doing in your dream?”
“I don’t know. Standing there, mostly. What was I doing in yours?”
She blushed, looking down at the linoleum in the kitchen. “Stuff. Nothing important.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“You were just standing there too.” But she didn’t look in my eyes when she said it.
She wasn’t telling me something. But I was more convinced than ever that she didn’t mean me any harm. I believed that she was only a girl who’d had a dream. There wasn’t anything threatening about her.
“Um.” She took a deep breath. “I think I should probably go home.”
“O-okay,” I said. Hadn’t she just got here?
“Do you want to, like, do something tomorrow?”
“Do something?”
“Well, we could hang out in that diner thing a block away from the school, maybe? Or… I don’t know. Just because my parents don’t let people come to my house, and yours seems… awkward too.”
“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “Okay. Tomorrow.”
She dragged her teeth over her bottom lip again. “Tomorrow.”
* * *
There was a soft knock at my door. It was late at night. I pushed aside my covers and got out of bed, padding across my pink room to open the door.
“What?”
“Shh! You’ll wake up Dad.”
My dad was a notoriously light sleeper.
Chance leaned against the doorway. “Get dressed and come with me.”
“Why?” I whispered.
“You’ll see.”
So, my brother and I weren’t exactly close. He was seven years older than me, which meant that we didn’t really do any regular growing up stuff together. When I was a little kid, I tended to hero worship the guy, because he seemed so much cooler than me. Mom and Dad let him shoot guns as long as I could remember, and he always seemed tough and wise and serious.
Anyway, in the whole of our lives together, Chance and I had never really done much together on our own.
Certainly not with Chance initiating it. Certainly not sneaking out without my parents knowing.
Where the hell did he want to take me?
I got dressed and followed him out of the house.
We moved quietly, creeping through each room until we were outside in the cold, winter air.
Chance led me down to end of the driveway, where a cab was waiting.
We got in the back.
Chance leaned forward to give the cab driver an address. Then he leaned back and handed me a driver’s license. It looked exactly like the one I had—which was a fake—only it said that I was twenty-one years old.
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Where are we going?”
He smirked. “You’ll see.”
After a fifteen-minute drive, the cab pulled into the parking lot of a squat building with a big neon blinking sign that read, “Live! Nude! Girls!”
I turned to look at Chance. “A strip club?”
He paid the cab driver and got out of the car.
I got out too. “Seriously, man, why are we here?”
Chance waited for the cab to drive away. Then stepped closer to me. “You want a girl? I’ll get you a girl. But that little blond thing you brought home from school today? You ‘hang out’ with her, she’ll get chewed to pieces.”
I swallowed.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “Look, people like us, we don’t get to do shit like that. We don’t get to have high school girlfriends.”
“She’s not my—”
“Not yet,” said Chance. “And not ever, man. Come on.” He turned and headed for the door to the club.
I went after him, feeling sort of disgusted and sort of excited. What the hell was he getting me into? “Is this where you go every night?”
“Not every night,” said Chance. “Sometimes.” He hit a button on the door that looked like a doorbell.
There was a buzzing sound, and Chance opened the door.
We stepped inside. Inside, everything was smoky and lit with purple and blue lights. Bass-heavy music pulsed around us. There was a room with a bar and two stages. One was larger than the other.
There were girls on them.
One of them was already half undressed, and I couldn’t help but stare.
Chance nudged me. “Close your mouth and show the man your ID.”
What man? Oh, there was a guy at the door holding a flashlight. I handed him the drivers license Chance had given me.
The man barely looked at it before handing it back.
Chance steered me into the room, depositing me at one of the tables, where I had a view of both of the stages. I glanced up at both of the gyrating women, and then I looked down at the table. I wasn’t sure I liked this. I wasn’t sure that stripping was, you know, fair to women. I felt… wrong looking at them like that.
And I felt uncomfortable by my own body’s response to it as well.
I felt a little bit out of control, and I’d been taught that being out of control meant I was vulnerable.
“Stay here,” said Chance. “Someone comes by, you can order a beer if you want. Tell them to put it on my tab. They know who I am.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’m setting stuff up for you.”
“Setting what up?”
He took a deep breath and lowered his voice, which still wasn’t that low, because the music was kind of loud. “Look, they’re not crazy about people talking about it, okay? It’s not strictly legal, but I’m going to work something out.”
I was confused and a little angry. “What are you talking about?”
He snatched me by the chin and grinned at me. “I’m getting you laid, little brother.” And then he walked away.
I stood up. I was going to go after him, to tell him to not do that, to really not do that, but he was already going into a door that was marked, “Private.”
I sat back down.
Shit.
My brother Chance was going to buy me a prostitute.
And I didn’t want that at all.
The truth was, I’d never given sex that much thought.
All right, that wasn’t really true. I thought about sex, probably as much as any guy my age did, which was to say, a lot, but I always thought of it in a sort of abstract sense, not as something that might actually ever… happen to me.
I’d sort of resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to get to do that.
And I definitely hadn’t been thinking about… with Paige.
Because I just met her, and I didn’t know her, and I was mostly only interested because of that dream.
But then I thought about how tight her jeans had been, the way they’d clung the to curves of her thighs.
I gulped.
Okay, okay, but Paige aside, but all of this aside…
I didn’t want to have sex with a prostitute. Especially not the first time that I ever…
So, when Chance came back, I would just tell him that. I’d just explain it to him, and tell him thanks, but no thanks, and we could go home, and this could all be over.
I waited for him to come back.
A waitress came by and got my beer order.
She brought it back.
I sipped at it. Honestly, there really hadn’t been much beer drinking in my life either. A couple times, my parents had alcohol in the house, and they never minded if I wanted to try it, but they were always with the lecturing about not getting drunk and how alcohol made you vulnerable, etc., etc. Anyway, I didn’t think I’d ever had a full beer.
I wasn’t really fond of the way it tasted, anyway.
And I waited for Chance.
But it wasn’t Chance who came back to the table. Instead, it was a girl about my age. She had dark hair which she wore in ponytails. She was in a tiny skirt and an undersized sports-jersey-type shirt that left her belly button bare. She had a belly button piercing.
“You Hunter?” She smiled at me. Her voice was breathy and low.
I tried to speak, but nothing came out. I nodded.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“Uh…” I shook my head. “Look, there’s been a sort of, um, misunderstanding.”
She leaned close, bending over a little, and I could see down her shirt. “It’s okay. Chance sent me. I know all about you, and I promise to be gentle.”
I couldn’t talk again. I found myself simply staring at her, trying to find the words to explain that I didn’t want to do this.
Except it was difficult, because I’d begun to realize that there was a part of me that did want to do this.
But that was fucked up, right? A real man didn’t give in to temptation. I needed to fight against my urges and do the right thing. The right thing couldn’t be sleeping with a prostitute.
She wrapped her hand around mine and pulled me out of my chair.
And then… I let her lead me out of the room.
We went into the door marked, “Private,” and we walked down a long hallway.
She pulled me into a room that was all mirrors—mirrors on the walls, mirrors on the ceilings. There was a plush, backless couch along one of the walls.
She shut the
door after herself.
I shook my head again. “I… can’t—”
She put her fingers against my lips. “Shh. It’s okay.”
I backed away from her. “It’s not. Nothing about this is okay.”
She smiled at me. “Hey, would it make you feel better if you knew I didn’t do this very often?”
“Why would that make me feel better?” There. My voice. I could talk.
“I don’t, you know. It’s a big payday, but it can get really dicey. Chance said that you were his kid brother, and that you were a virgin, and…” She smiled. “I thought that sounded kind of fun.”
I grimaced. “Fun?”
She sauntered over to me and put her hands on my chest. “He said you were sweet, and you look sweet. You look adorable. You want to touch me?”
I shuddered, shutting my eyes. “No.”
Her hand on my cheek. Her fingers were cold. “Oh. You’re really freaked out, aren’t you?”
I opened my eyes. “I don’t want this. Chance did this. He didn’t ask me…”
Her hand trailed down my body. Her fingers splayed over my groin, cupping me. “It feels like you might kind of want this.”
I shut my eyes again. I told myself to move her hand.
I didn’t move her hand.
“Would it be better if you knew my name?” she whispered, her hand stroking me through my jeans. “It’s Amy. That’s my real name, not my stage name. What I want you to do is just relax, okay?” She unzipped me, and her hand darted inside my pants. “This is going to feel really nice. It’s not going to be bad.”
I choked.
She was touching me, and it was—no lie—pretty much the most awesome feeling I think I’d ever experienced. Ever.
But, this wasn’t… This wasn’t the way I wanted things. I didn’t want some strange woman that I’d never met to be putting her hands on me. It was too intimate, and I’d been taught to be guarded. There was no way I could relax with Amy—if that was even really her name.
Still.
I wasn’t stopping her.
She pushed me back onto the backless couch and knelt down in front of me, between my knees. Her hand was still on me, still moving.
Gasp Page 17