Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
"Yeah, maybe," he agreed. "So, you been gone for a while, what have you been up to?"
Five
- Journal Entry - 18th Birthday -
I caught Holden staring at me.
It was something he had done a lot the first year. Not in a creepy, predatory way. But in a way like he couldn't figure me out. Like I was a clock that refused to tick like he wanted. Like it bothered him.
After a while, though, we seemed to sort of come to an understanding about each other. He was there watching me evolve from the hurt, unsure girl who had shown up at his door.
He stopped looking at me like I didn't tick right.
So it was weird to catch him staring at me with that intensity again.
"What?" I asked, brow furrowing.
"Fresh as fallen fucking snow."
Now, this was a man prone to not saying much. But when he did speak, he usually spoke plainly and bluntly. He was not a flowery person. But those were oddly flowery words.
"What? Like I'm pale?" I asked, scrunching up my nose.
"Like you're a virgin, kid."
I was officially not a kid anymore. As of four a.m., I was—in the eyes of the law—a full-fledged adult. But I knew that compared to him, I was a kid. And he would likely always see me that way.
There was no denying the fact that those words directed right at me—along with the truth behind them—made a flush move across my chest, up my throat, over my cheeks.
Clearly, we'd never discussed sex.
He'd been a grown man and I a child, after all.
It was all kinds of inappropriate. It was the kind of gross stuff we were both in agreement was wrong with the world.
A part of me was more than a little worried that he was saying it now because I was legal, because he had those sorts of feelings about me. And, well, Holden had sort of become a stand-in uncle-figure for me, reminding me a lot of the uncles I had left behind, finding a sort of comfort in that type of relationship.
I never had anything even remotely resembling feelings for him.
The idea of him having them for me made my stomach churn.
"For fuck's sake," he growled, slamming a hand down on the table, making our bottles of water teeter and topple. "Don't look at me like that. I didn't mean it like that."
"How did you mean it then?" I demanded, crossing my arms over my nothing-there chest, feeling my pride sting just the tiniest bit. No, I didn't want him to be attracted to me, but he'd made it sound like such a thing was absolutely revolting. I'd worked hard to shake off any need for external validation, but I was pretty sure it was encoded into our DNA not to want to be thought of as disgusting.
"I mean it as... have you really given this shit thought?"
"What shit? The mission shit?" I asked, still feeling a little jolt in my stomach when I cursed, only ever having done so with friends in the past, never around my elders.
"Yeah."
"That's all I have been thinking about for two years. You know that. I wouldn't still be here if I wasn't."
"Clearly, you haven't given it as much thought as I have."
"How do you figure?"
"I walk in there one day, try to make some waves, save some girls, take out some shitheads. I get outnumbered. I get my ass kicked. That's what happens to me. You ever really stop to think how what might happen to me and what might happen to you are very different fucking things?"
The stomach dropping to my feet sensation was proof in and of itself that, no, I had not given that particular thing enough—or any—thought.
Why, I wasn't sure.
It should have been something at the forefront of my mind.
Human traffickers and the men who paid to use the women being trafficked were rapists. They raped. That was what they did. That was what they were capable of.
And if they got the better of me, that would be my fate too.
Of course it would.
A swirling sick feeling moved up my belly and throat, bile catching at the back of my tongue before I forced myself to swallow it back down, refusing to get sick.
I had to be harder than that.
I read a book once about a female field agent doing covert ops who used to always wear a pearl necklace. Except one pearl wasn't a pearl at all but a fatal dose of poison should she bite into the hardened shell it was safely encased in.
The book had claimed she had the precaution in case of capture, in case she was worried she might spill state secrets.
Suddenly, I knew better.
She wore it because she understood the kind of torture that could be inflicted on her was very different than the types typically inflicted upon men who were captured.