Her laughter turns into sniffles and sobs. She leans her head against the passenger-side window. Hopeless.
“We’re gonna get you something to eat,” I say. “There’s a Burger Benny up at the next exit. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers, trancelike.
I’ll feed her before I kill her. It’s the most messed-up thing I’ve done in a long time.
I shove a caterer’s cap low over my head as I pull up behind the truck in the drive-through line. “I don’t have to tell you to act right when we go through here, do I? Do I need to remind you how many people will die if you don’t act right?”
She just watches me with this wounded, piercing look that’s a little bit hot. Her light brown eyes shine with tears.
Doesn’t matter how wide and brown her fucking eyes are, though. “Tell me you get it.”
“I get it.”
I stare at the lit-up menu. You’d think I’ve never ordered a fucking hamburger before. There was a time I hadn’t. I didn’t grow up with goddamn Happy Meals. The first time I experienced a drive-through, I was fifteen and fresh out of the basement after six years. Fresh from our violent escape.
I mostly remember the strangeness of it. How tinny and mechanical the voice on the other end of the machine sounded. Like a robot or something, rushing me to pick.
Back then I had this sense that I didn’t even belong in the world, as if it had spun on without me and I didn’t have a place. And that tinny voice, demanding my order, like a fist around my throat, the kind that leaves bruises the other boys pretend not to see.
“Burger combo,” I say because the fist never really eased up. Because she should know how it feels, taking what you can get. That’s all she’s doing now—taking what she gets.
“Would you like a drink with that?” the voice asks.
I consider asking what she wants, but that feels too personal. What kind of soda does she drink? Or maybe she’s too rich and fancy to drink soda.
“Two colas. Anything,” I say into the speaker, and then I drive forward before I get the total.
“Don’t I get to pick my last meal?” she asks, real quiet. She’s looking straight ahead, her face in profile.
I study her nose and her chin, the slope of her neck. I suddenly want to know what she smells like up close. I want to press my face into the vulnerable skin of her neck and breathe deep.
My body gets hot just thinking about it, and I hate that. I hate that feeling that rushes through me, that thickness in my dick. I hate that she makes me feel this way.
There’s a part of me that wants to tell her this isn’t her last meal, but I won’t do that. And anyway, she should find out what it’s like to scarf down what’s in front of you, knowing there might not be more. Knowing you might not be alive even if there is. I want her to understand where I’m coming from.
“You want to die hungry, die hungry,” I say.
The window slides open, and some punk kid reads the total without even looking up. I dig the cash out of my wallet and hand it over.
It’s when he’s passing back the change that he sees her. His eyes fasten on her tits, pushed together by that fussy dress.
“Ketchup?” he asks, voice pitched high.
“Yeah,” I growl because I don’t like the way this horndog’s looking at her. She’s just a fucking kid. Why’s he looking at her tits like that? And she’s in the passenger seat of my van. Mine.
Mine. The word comes out of nowhere, but it’s true.
She stays quiet, staring ahead. She might as well be a mannequin in a store window. All except for the tear tracks shining in the moonlight.
I grab the food and drinks when the punk hands them out, shove the stuff into her hands, and pull away. No one else gets to see her. It was stupid letting anyone see her, linking us together—a fucking witness. She knows I killed Madsen, and now that punk saw me with her, a daisy chain that leads to me in jail.
Even so, even knowing how dangerous she is, I’m mostly mad that another guy checked her out.
The van bounces on the speed bump, and she lets out a small sound of alarm, clutching the bag like it’s a damn roller-coaster bar. And then we’re on the freeway, heading back to the Big Moosehorn Park exit.
The ride smoothes out. “Open it,” I tell her.
Paper crinkles as she unpacks the food and holds it out like I might take it from her. Her hand looks small, especially holding the big wrapped burger. And she’s trembling.
Fuck. What am I doing with her? Why isn’t she dead?
“Eat it,” I tell her. I’m ruining her. That’s what I’m doing with her.
Her life was charmed—a pretty little rich girl at her sweet-sixteen party. Then she got a glimpse of me. Now she’s facing death or whatever the fuck I want to do to her. Which is a lot.
She’s this pure thing in my control, and I’m bloody and horny, and I want to devour her. I want to press my face to those pushed-up tits above the edge of that dress and fuck her hard and fast.
Skin smooth and pretty like an egg.
But here’s the thing about an egg: when you break it, you get everything you want, but then it’s not smooth or perfect anymore. It’s just this dead thing.
This is something I know a fuck of a lot about, let’s just say.
And yeah, you can put yourself back together, but you’re never right afterward, not really. You’re cracked and misshapen and definitely not smooth and nice like this girl.
There should be some smooth and nice things left in this world.
“I’m not—” Her voice cracks. “—hungry.”
I know she’s thinking about what I said, about her dying hungry. Maybe she’d rather go that way, all focused on it. People like to think they’d be prepared for death. They don’t want to be caught off guard. Me, I’ve always been the opposite. There’s no honor in death, no clean way to go. It’s always messy. Always painful.
Catch me by fucking surprise. Fight me.
I think it at her, as if she can hear. As if she’ll suddenly learn how to use my gun, to take it from me. But she can’t. She’s completely defenseless.
“Did I ask what you want to do?” I say, nice and soft. “Open the wrapper and eat.”
I only get to see the flash of her eyes, the light of anger, before she looks down. She puts the burger in her lap—I imagine it warming the tops of her thighs. She unfolds the paper slow—a small act of defiance.
It gets me hard, the way she’s fighting with the only weapons she has. The way her small hands fold around the messy burger and pick it up.
The way her mouth opens wide.
Chapter 3
Brooke
The burger tastes amazing, juicy and salty on my tongue. God, how long has it been since I had a burger? It feels like forever, those two strawberries a distant dream.
I don’t want him to see how good this is for me, how desperate I am. I want to swallow the entire burger, that’s how much I want this. Except then he’d know. I can feel him watching me, weighing me. I can feel his gaze on my skin like a brand, hot and possessive.
We’re going through woods now. Some kind of backwoods road.
I need to get away, form a plan, push back for once, but I don’t know how. Do I try to fight him? Or do I somehow smash through my window? Dive out of a moving vehicle and run? In a full-length gown?