Chapter 52 - Good Girl

Chapter 52: Chapter 52 - Good Girl

Jesse kept kissing her.

His mouth moved against hers slowly and deliberately, his tongue sliding past her lips while one hand stayed cupped around the curve of her ass. The other slipped up under the hem of her camisole and found the soft, heavy weight of her breast through the thin cotton of her bra.

Carrie made a broken sound into his mouth and pressed closer.

Every place he touched her lit up like a live wire. The heat that had started when he first squeezed her kept rolling through her in thicker and thicker waves, pooling low in her belly and between her thighs until her knees felt like they belonged to someone else. She’d been touched before. She’d had boyfriends, and a couple of mistakes she’d rather forget. None of them had ever made her body feel like this, as if every nerve she owned had been tuned to the exact pitch of his hands.

She slid her palms down his chest, over the hard plane of his stomach and lower.

Jesse broke the kiss and caught her wrist before her fingers reached his waistband.

"Not so fast, Carrie."

His voice was soft, almost conversational, but his grip was firm. Before she could argue, he turned her around so her back was to his chest and walked her the two steps to the wall until her palms pressed flat against it.

His hand cracked across her ass.

It was hard enough to sting and hard enough to jolt her forward with a startled gasp. The sting bloomed into heat almost instantly, spreading under her skin like warm water.

Then his mouth was at her ear.

"I thought you were about to storm out of here," he murmured. "Why are you still here?"

Carrie opened her mouth. Nothing useful came out.

His hands slid up under her camisole. He tugged the cups of her bra down and her breasts spilled free into his palms. He squeezed and kneaded, dragging his thumbs across her nipples until they tightened into aching points. At the same time he pressed forward, letting her feel the thick, heavy length of him through their clothes, settled firmly against her ass.

The sensations hit her all at once: his hands on her breasts, the hard heat of him behind her, the lingering sting where he’d spanked her. A helpless sound escaped her throat.

’God, he’s so big,’ Carrie thought.

"Why are you still here?" he asked again, low and close.

She tried to answer. What came out was a shaky moan and a scatter of half-formed words that didn’t mean anything.

His right hand left her breast and trailed down over her stomach, under the waistband of her skirt, until his fingers rested against the damp cotton of her panties. He traced one slow, unhurried circle there, and her hips rolled back against him before she could stop them.

"Since you don’t have an answer to my question," he whispered against the shell of her ear, "from now on, you don’t ask me any more questions. You got it?"

Her answer came out too soft and too slow.

The hand on her breast tightened, his fingers digging into the soft flesh until the pressure bordered on pain.

"You got it?"

"Yes. Yes, I’ve got it." The words tore out of her louder than she meant them to.

She felt him smile against her neck.

"Good girl."

The words went straight through her. Her eyes fluttered shut, and she leaned back against him, waiting for whatever came next.

Then she felt his hands begin to withdraw. The warmth of his palm slid away from her breast, and the fingers beneath her waistband started to ease back out. The solid heat of his chest was already starting to leave her back.

A wave of disappointment hit her so hard it almost hurt.

He was pulling away. He was going to leave her like this, pressed against the wall with her bra shoved down and her skirt askew and her whole body humming, and she was going to have to stand there and pretend she didn’t care.

"Please," she started. "Please don’t—"

Her phone rang.

It was buzzing in the pocket of her skirt, loud and insistent against her hip.

They both went still.

Carrie fumbled the phone out with shaking fingers and looked at the screen.

AILEEN.

She almost let it ring. She almost turned the phone face down and pretended she hadn’t seen it. But Aileen never called. Aileen texted forty times a day and sent voice memos of herself singing in the shower, and the only time she ever actually called was when something was wrong.

Carrie tugged her bra back up over her breasts, swiped to answer and pressed the phone to her ear.

"Aileen?"

For a moment there was only breathing on the other end. It was quick and shallow and wet, the kind of breathing that came from trying not to cry and failing.

"Car." Aileen’s voice cracked down the middle. "Car, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t open the door, I swear I didn’t, he just—"

Every bit of heat drained out of Carrie’s body at once.

"Aileen, what’s going on? Where are you? Are you okay? Aileen—"

There was a muffled scuffle on the line and a sharp cry from Aileen, as if someone had yanked the phone out of her hand.

Then a different voice came on. It was low and gravelly, and it slurred faintly at the edges.

"Hey, Red."

Carrie’s blood turned to ice.

Behind her, Jesse had gone completely still. He hadn’t stepped away. He stood close at her shoulder, close enough that the voice leaking from the phone reached him too.

"Angus," Carrie whispered.

"Good. You remember my name. I was starting to think you’d forgotten it, the way you hung up on me the last time we spoke." He chuckled, and there was nothing friendly in it. "You know, I sat with that for a while. I thought about it. Thought about how a little waitress gets the guts to tell me she’s done. To tell me. And I figured, if you’ve got the guts to walk away from our arrangement, then I’ve got to remind you why you made it."

"Angus, please—"

"So I came by to visit your sister." His voice dropped, almost gentle, which made it worse. "We’re having a nice time, me and Aileen. Catching up. I even brought her a present. Her favorite."

In the background, Carrie heard Aileen sobbing.

"Oxy," Angus said. "She used to love it, remember? Before you made her get clean. I figured she missed it. Figured I’d help her out."

Carrie’s knees gave way.

She would have hit the floor if Jesse hadn’t caught her arm. His hand closed around her elbow and held her upright against the wall, but she barely felt it.

Six months. It had taken Aileen six months of shaking and throwing up and screaming into pillows at three in the morning to get that poison out of her body. Carrie had sat beside her through every hour of it. She’d held her hair and cleaned up after her and slept on the bathroom floor so Aileen wouldn’t be alone.

And Angus knew all of that. He knew exactly where to put the knife.

"Please," Carrie said. Her voice came out as barely a whisper. "Please, Angus. Leave her alone. She’s clean. She’s been clean for a year. Please don’t do this to her. I’m begging you."

"Begging. Now that’s more like it." She could hear him smiling. "But you don’t need to beg, Red. You already know what to do. You just need to get your head right and get back to work."

"I’ll do it." The words fell out of her. "I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her. Please."

"See? That wasn’t so hard." His voice went cold. "But I want you to understand me. This is a warning. Next time you get it in your head to go independent on me, I won’t be leaving a present. I’ll be taking her with me. And you won’t see her again."

"Angus, wait—"

The line went dead.

Carrie stared at the phone.

The screen went dark in her hand, and her own reflection stared back at her: wide-eyed, flushed and disheveled, her bra half-crooked under her camisole. Five minutes ago she’d been pressed against this wall, so lost in what Jesse was doing to her that she’d forgotten she had a life outside this room.

Meanwhile, Angus had been in her apartment with her little sister.

The phone slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the floor.

The sound that came out of her didn’t sound human. It was low and ragged, something torn loose from deep in her chest. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up, her hands pressed over her mouth and her whole body shaking.

"He’s there," she choked out. "He’s in our apartment. He’s got her. He’s... he’s going to make her take it again, Jesse, after everything, after all of it, he’s going to..."

She couldn’t finish.

Jesse crouched down in front of her.

"Now is not the time to be weak. Let’s go get your sister," Jesse said.