I opened my mouth to protest, but the second I did, his tongue touched mine, and he groaned. The contact produced a spark, an energy that radiated through my entire body, pooling between my legs.
King used a knee to spread my legs apart, then settled between them. Not once did he take his lips from mine as he rocked his erection against my core. My body hummed at the friction, and I moaned into his mouth. His hands flew to the back of my neck, pressing me up against him as he kissed me until I was dizzy.
It was an entirely new type of hunger.
With a deep, throaty growl, King abruptly ended the kiss. Sitting back on his knees, he reached down and ran the pad of his thumb across my cheek. He looked down at me as if he were seeing me for the very first time. His expression soft. His lips swollen from our kiss.
My chest heaved as I again tried to catch my breath. Without King lying on top of me to shield me from the cold rain, a chill ran down my body. My teeth began to chatter. His eyes drank me in as they skimmed over my face, then down the rest of my body. I could swear that it felt as if he were actually touching me, not just looking at me.
“Go,” King snapped, jumping to his feet like he’d been electrocuted.
“What?” I asked. I somehow managed to get to my knees, still holding up the now wet and heavy sweatpants, the draw string already pulled as tight as it would go.
“Just fucking go!” he roared, standing up fully.
He took a menacing step toward me. His sudden proximity forced me backwards. I stumbled over a rock and fell back onto my ass.
“That path will take you to the highway,” he said, pointing to the ground behind me. I turned and found the path, but when I turned back around, he was gone. The crunch of the brush under his boots faded quickly, swallowed by the sounds of the storm.
I was free.
But I was also truly alone. In the dark. And that clouded over the elation I should have felt.
My chest grew tight. I pressed my hands against my heart to try and physically tame it from leaping out of my body. Faster and faster it beat until I thought it would come to a screeching halt. Again, I couldn’t catch my breath.
Panic set in.
My vision blurred. The forest around me spun and spun until the foliage blended together into one big green and brown vortex, like staring up into the eye of a tornado.
I’d felt safer minutes earlier, staring into King’s hate-filled eyes.
I tried to get up. I sat up on my knees, but I slipped in the mud and fell forward onto my forearms. Unable to find the courage to try again, I turned onto my side and pressed my cheek into the mud, holding a hand over my exposed ear.
I needed to be invisible. I needed to disappear into the dark, and then just maybe the dark would disappear around me. I hugged my knees to my chest.
Twenty-four hours ago, I thought I would be set up in some biker’s bed by now, basking in the comfort of a roof over my head and food in my stomach. I wouldn’t have my dignity, but I hadn’t had the luxury of dignity since I woke up in the hospital. Instead, I was barefoot and cold in the middle of the woods. And as the moon disappeared behind dark storm clouds, I was enveloped in complete blackness.
I tucked my bare feet as close to my body as I could to keep the chill off my toes. My chattering teeth turned into a full body shake as the rain pummeled me. Each icy drop felt like a pin-prick into my skin.
Why the hell did he kiss me? Why the hell did I let him?
I was mad at myself. For not fighting him off, for liking it.
I’d done a lot of fucked up things in the last few months. Eating out of dumpsters. Sleeping in abandoned cars. But nothing I’d done left me more disgusted with myself then yielding to his kiss.
What was even more fucked up was, that more than anything, I’d hoped at any second the tall grass would rustle and he’d appear out of the brush to rescue me from the dark.
King wasn’t the rescuing type, I reminded myself.
He was the killing type.
My body shuddered. Still angry. Still scared. Still really fucking cold.
Still turned on.
In the light of day, it was easy to push things aside with the distraction of survival to keep me busy. But alone with only my own thoughts in the dark, I became more aware that without memories of the past, lessons lived and learned, I was a mere shell of a person.
I was a stranger to myself.
I was an alien, invading the body of a girl I didn’t know. I stole it from her, entirely by accident, a byproduct of a tragic event that wiped her from the earth and set me up in her place.
On nights like these, when the panic threatened to consume me, I talked to her out loud.