he presses his body against mine again. His teeth dig into my ear. His cologne swirls around me – it’s sickly sweet, like cotton candy. Bile rises in my throat.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” he grunts, as he reaches down between us to undo his zipper and he’s right there he’s pressing against me I hate him I hate him he’s—
—and then Alec disappears.
32
Mackenzie
It happens so fast I think I’ve imagined it. The heat and the terror have sent me outside my body, or I’ve gone to the void in my head to keep myself sane, and in the void I no longer feel Alec’s snake coiling against my entrance.
But no, he’s gone. He’s no longer on top of me. But how—
I dare a glance behind me. Alec rolls in the sand ten feet from the other cars, his trousers around his ankles. He clutches his face. Blood covers his hands. Noah strides toward me. His arms go around my waist. He picks me up like I’m nothing and throws me over his shoulder.
“We’re leaving,” he barks at Alec. “Don’t follow us.”
Even though the jocks outnumber him, no one moves to stop Noah. Alec lets out a growl like a wild fucking beast, but all he can do kick a cloud of sand at us.
Noah nods once, then starts off across the desert.
He walks in silence. Each heavy tread of his boots jerks my body, but I don’t ask to be put down. I’m not strong enough. The full horror of what nearly happened hits me in a shudder. Tears slide from my eyes, but the desert wind blasts them away. By the time we can no longer see the cars, my skin feels flayed alive by it.
The pain is good, cleansing. I want the desert to slough away my skin until there’s no part of me left that Alec LeMarque has touched.
Noah’s strong arms feel so good around me.
I hate him for rescuing me.
I hate myself.
I lose myself in the delirium of my humiliation. I don’t know how long we walk, but Noah’s breath comes out in shaking rasps. His steps become slow, shaky. His skin is slick with sweat by the time we reach civilization – and calling it civilization is a stretch. We arrive at a gas station on a crossroads, a few miles off the highway I can just make out winding through the desert beyond. Noah leaves me in a lawn chair and points at a payphone. “I’ll be over there. I need to make a call.”
I don’t move or reply. I can’t.
My fingers search for the locket around my neck, and when they find it still there, I slip it under the fabric of my top so Noah can’t see it.
I stare out across the desert, at the scrabbly bushes and gnarled Joshua trees and Jurassic rock formations jutting from the earth like dinosaur teeth. I think about what happened, what could have happened. I close my eyes and see my blood-splattered reflection, feel a gnawing pain in my heart that will never heal.
Something plops down on the table in front of me. I cry out, tripping over myself as I struggle away.
“Didn’t mean to startle you.” Noah slides into the chair opposite me and holds out an object. A plastic spoon.
I peer through a curtain of blonde hair matted with dust and dirt and blood at the object on the table. It’s a chocolate cake, five miles high – layers and layers of cake and cream and frosting and a mountain of fresh, glistening cherries on top. It looks like the kind of cake you’d see at a high-end wedding, not at a gas station in the middle of the fucking desert.
It’s so fucking random and crazy that I burst out laughing.
Noah digs his own spoon into an equally ridiculously slice of key lime pie. “There’s an entire cabinet of epic cakes inside. I remember you used to like cherry-flavored stuff.”
“I did?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Sure.” Noah gives me an odd look, those coal eyes studying me intently. “At school, whenever they had cherry pie for dessert you shoved everyone out of the way in the cafeteria line so you could get there first. You used to take three slices even though we were only allowed one. The rest of the class was too afraid of you to rat you out.”
“I bet you did, though.” I carve off the tip of the cake. It’s so