“Promise me,” he said, taking another step forward and whispering it in my ear. His breath tickled the sensitive spot on the side of my neck.
“I can’t,” I repeated, but he was starting to make my knees feel weak. For a brief moment, I thought maybe he would be able to make me promise. I felt like if he would just kiss me, if he would just do something to me, I would do whatever he said.
“If you promise,” he said, and his hands intertwined with mine, his thumbs moving over my knuckles. “I’ll give you something you want.”
I froze, every single nerve ending in my body on high alert. Everything flooded into sharp focus, every sense suddenly heightened. I could smell Colt’s scent, Axe deodorant with just the faintest trace of sweat, could feel his body heat through my thin sweater, could see the tiny scar on the top of his lip that didn’t diminish even one ounce of his attractiveness and instead just served to accentuate his smoldering bad boy look.
Time seemed to stop as I waited for him to speak, to move, to decide what was going to happen.
“Don’t you want to know what it is, Princess?” He was still whispering huskily into my ear, his breath brushing deliciously against my skin.
I nodded.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. My heart was throbbing so fast and hard in my chest and he was standing so close to me that I was sure he was going to be able to hear it, to feel it, betraying the effect he was having on my body.
“Say ‘yes’,” he instructed.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I want to know what you have that I want.”
Colt grinned wickedly. “What I have… that you want… is Declan’s address.” He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his phone, holding the screen out to me.
My cheeks burned with disappointment.
“What did you think I was talking about, Princess?” Colt asked innocently, like he knew exactly what it was I’d thought he’d been talking about.
“Let me see that,” I said, grabbing his phone out of his hand.
Declan Keene
102 Huckleberry Street, Apt 3D
Just seeing Declan’s name there, in black and white, filled me with a calmness I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
I closed my eyes.
Declan.
Finally.
Finally, I knew where he was.
“I’m going to see him tonight,” I declared. “Can you… can we write this down?”
Colt took the phone out my hands and shoved it back into his pocket. “I’ll print you out a copy when we get to the office.”
I nodded. I wanted to say ‘thank you’, but then I thought, screw that. He’d been teasing me, messing with my mind, getting off on it.
I hated that my body responded to his touch, his presence, his body. I couldn’t wait to get away from him. I would never tell Colt this, but I was hoping Declan would offer to let me to stay with him. And if not, all I had to do was buy my time until I got my first paycheck from Colt.
And then I could stay far away from him.
I had to.
He was making me feel things.
Uncomfortable things.
Things I couldn’t afford to feel.
Things that would only lead to pain.
When we got into the office, Colt immediately went into business mode, all traces of teasing and cockiness wiped from his voice.
“Here,” he said, placing a cell phone down and a ten dollar bill down on the desk in front of me.
I picked it up. “What’s this?”
“Your phone.”
“My phone?”
“Yes. You need a phone if you’re going to be working here. So that I can reach you.”
“Why can’t you just reach me on the office phone?” I picked up the cell and felt its lightness in my hand. It was a shiny new iPhone, gun-metal grey and beautiful. I’d never had a phone so nice. I’d had cell phones before -- tracphones and flip phones, the kind of phones that didn’t take pictures and charged for each text message, the kind of phones you had to buy prepaid cards in order to use, the kind of phones that would get broken if you so much as jostled them.
“I might need to get in touch with you after hours,” Colt said.
“Oh.” I ran my fingers over the smooth surface of the phone. “Okay. Well, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said, making it clear that he wasn’t doing me any favors. “It’s a company phone.”
I nodded. “And the ten dollars?”
“In case you want lunch.”
He sat me down at the computer and showed me how to start entering figures from vendor receipts into spreadsheets. I’d had computer classes in my group home that had taught me how to use all kinds of different programs -- Microsoft Office, Word, Powerpoint, even Quickbooks and Photoshop.
I caught on quickly, and after a few minutes, Colt left me to my own devices. I found the work soothing, the monotony of tapping away on the computer providing my normally racing mind with something to focus on.
Colt was out of the office most of the morning. Every so often I would hear him talking to Jessa as they passed by in the hallway outside, his voice low and gruff, hers loud and flirty.