ZEKE
“Turn on some music.”
My response is to stare straight ahead through the windshield. The way I’ve been for the past hour. I don’t even glance up at the rearview mirror, where I know I’d find Mia glaring daggers straight through me.
“Hello? Did you go deaf? Music. It’s too quiet in here.”
Again, she gets nothing from me. My hands tighten around the wheel, and I can’t help but imagine them tightening around her slender neck. It’s bad enough I spend most of my waking moments reminding myself how dangerous it would be to give in to my craving for her. Why does she have to make it so much more difficult?
Then again, maybe I should thank her. Hating her is so much easier than wanting her.
Though the level of intensity is about the same.
She mutters something under her breath. “Zeke. I know you can hear me. I’m only asking you to put some music on… please.” She whispers the last part.
“Huh? Sorry, I guess I couldn’t hear you. It’s this funny problem I have. My ears don’t pick up when people are being rude little assholes.”
“I didn’t know it made me an asshole to want music in the car while we’re on our way to school.”
“You know damn well what I mean.” I finally take the chance of looking in the mirror, and I end up wishing I hadn’t. She’s wearing a skirt just barely long enough that her father didn’t tell her to get changed the second he saw her in it.
But it was short enough for him to pull me aside. “Make sure she doesn’t wear shit like that around school.” Right. Now I’m supposed to dress her in the morning. Why not put me on diaper duty while I’m at it?
Ordinarily, back at the compound, it would have been bad enough trying to function with her looking the way she does.
Now it’s so much worse because there’s nobody nearby. Nobody looking over my shoulder, nobody to report back to the boss that I spent a little too much time eyeing up his delicious little daughter. Her long legs were so smooth and tempting. I bet she feels like silk, though I wouldn’t dare put a finger on her. I haven’t even touched her arm or her hand since that night. I don’t trust myself.
She crosses one leg over the other, and my mouth goes dry. “Excuse me, Zeke? Would it be too much trouble to turn on the radio? I think the ride would be much more enjoyable with a little music.” Her sickeningly sweet voice carries a bitter edge that’s almost enough to make me laugh. She’s got an attitude on her, but then so do I.
“I think I can arrange that.” I touch a button on the wheel, and the radio flips on. “See? You treat somebody with respect, and you get respect.”
“Who are you? Mr. Rogers?” She gives me an epic eye roll before returning her attention to her phone, scrolling mindlessly through whatever social media platform she’s on at the moment. I only chuckle, focusing back on the road.
I’ve seen pictures of the condo we’re moving into, and I can’t pretend it’s not impressive. An entire family could live there comfortably-the bedrooms are enormous. I would have killed to have a room that big when I was a little kid, crammed into what was a little bigger than a closet with three cousins my grandparents were caring for along with me. Two sets of bunk beds were almost too much for the room to hold. I used to have to turn sideways to get between them.
On the surface, I’ve come a long way. And my job, while infuriating and harder than just about anything I’ve ever had to do, is a hell of a lot easier than digging ditches and walking for miles in both directions to get to a factory, both of which my grandfather did when he was my age. It’s something my dad always liked to remind me of whenever I would complain the way kids sometimes do. But that was before he started working for the boss-before our lives changed. Before I got pulled out of my grandparents’ house and into the Morelli family, too.
I don’t dig ditches, but I’ve dug more than a few holes, which I later filled with what was left of the people I was assigned to eliminate. I can’t help but wonder what my granddad would think of that.
“Can you change the station? Something a little less boring?”
I look at her in the mirror. “This is classic shit.”
“Classic?” Her nose wrinkles in disgust. “That’s just another word for ancient. Music from, like, the eighties.”
I know she’s doing this to fuck with me. I know she listens to stuff from so-called ancient times, too. She wants to start a fight, that is all. “This is the stuff I was brought up on. It’s good if you give it a chance.”
“I don’t feel like giving it a chance today. Just change the damn station.” I should know better than to try to make any kind of sense to her. We could be in a burning building, and she would bitch me out if I so much as offered to help get her to safety. All because it was coming from me.
It’s safer this way. I have to remember that. It’s better if she hates me because then she won’t throw herself at me like she did that night. How many times have I jerked off to the memory of her perfect body so close to mine? Right there for the taking. All I had to do was reach out and grab her, and that would’ve been the end of it. There would have been no way for me to stop myself once I got a hold of her. Once I knew what she felt like under my hands.
Instead, I’ve spent my nights obsessing over her. Fantasizing about what might have happened if I wasn’t so strong.
“Do you have all your classes scheduled?”
She glances up from the phone. “Why do you care?”
Is this what I have to look forward to for the next few months? “I care because it affects me. If you don’t have your shit together, your father will find a way to make that my fault.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with me the day you decided to get a septum piercing, either.” Needless to say, she took the nose ring out and never put it back in.
She flinches at the memory, and I can only imagine she remembers the way her father screamed the walls down. We both heard it from him that day. “I made sure he knew that was my fault. Don’t blame me for that.”
“I still had to hear about it. I don’t think I unclenched my ass for a week after that.”
I can tell she doesn’t want to giggle, but she does anyway. “Everything is scheduled. Not like I had anything to do with it.”
I shouldn’t keep talking about this, but I can’t help it. Not when I hear a disappointed note in her voice. “You didn’t know he was arranging for you to go to
Blackthorn, huh?”
She keeps her eyes on the phone. “It doesn’t matter.”
“So you don’t care that you didn’t get any say in where you go to school?”
Her head snaps up in time for me to catch sight of it in the mirror before focusing my attention back on the road.
“What are you trying to do?”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Are you trying to make me miserable? Save your breath, okay? I know how lucky I am. You don’t need to remind me.”
“That’s not what I was trying to do.”
“Right. Because you’ve never rubbed it in, how lucky I am. How I don’t have any room to complain about anything in my life.”
She’s got a good memory. I’ll give her that much. I have given her a lot of shit in the past when she’s being a brat and acting like it’s so painful and inconvenient having somebody devoted completely to making sure she’s safe. “I wasn’t trying to rub it in, either. And it does affect me since I’ll be following you around all over the place. Sue me for wanting to know if I was going to get to hear anything interesting.”
Her lips twitch a little like she’s trying not to smile. “It’s all pretty basic stuff, intro to this and that.”
“So long as you don’t expect me to do classwork for you.”
She finally sets down her phone. “Are you seriously going to come to my classes with me? Like, isn’t it enough to sit outside the room?”
“I don’t make the rules. I only follow them.”
“But that’s embarrassing. Isn’t it embarrassing to you?”