Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,45
plastic phone booth rattled. So I did it again. I hammered the phone against the number pad until I heard something crack.
Great. I just destroyed the last pay phone in the world.
I stepped back, breathing hard, feeling wild. Feeling like there weren’t enough drugs or drinks or women in the world to make me right.
I looked across the road at the condo where I had Max.
Max could make me right. He could sort me out.
I couldn’t go in there. Not now. Not yet. I’d lose my mind. I’d do something stupid with Max just to get shit right in my head. Just to balance the scales.
Show me something. Give me something.
He wanted my soul. My pain—because I’d seen his. I’d seen his guts ripped out while I read that text from his brother. And he wanted the same from me.
Fuck him. I wasn’t giving him anything.
Even if I wanted to. He already had enough.
The guy was chained to a bed and still, he somehow had all the control.
The Conch Republic was a bar/restaurant down the road. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday night, and the patio would be full of people. Tourists mostly. A few locals. The families would be gone and it would just be the drinkers left. People getting loose. Sorority girls staying at their grandmothers’ condos.
I could pick someone up. I wanted to pick someone up. I wanted to be pushed face-first against a wall and pounded by some man. I wanted this cellphone in my hand to ring and have it be Lagan. I wanted to put my mouth on another woman and bite. And I wanted her to like it and ask for more.
Max would.
I could bite and claw and hurt Max and he would do the same to me because we both wanted it. We both needed it.
My pain would balance his pain.
But as sexy as that sounded, as romantic as that might seem in our screwed up world—it wasn’t the truth.
The truth was his pain would only add to my pain. I could already feel it happening. His face, while I read that text from his brother, had been so carefully still, so falsely nonchalant, but that did nothing to hide his agony. And even as I was inflicting that pain on him, poking at him with the sticks I’d sharpened with my own two hands, I wanted his pain to be less. I wanted to shut myself up even though I knew it was the fastest and easiest way for me to get what I wanted.
I felt compassion for him. Sympathy. Empathy, maybe.
Who the fuck knows? I wasn’t even sure what those words meant for me—but I felt something for Max.
And I very much needed to feel nothing for Max.
Not one damn thing. Not desire. Not care. Not this lust that made me anxious and restless.
Nothing.
I put Max’s cellphone back in my pocket and swept the leftover change into my hand. Half of it missed my hand and fell to the gravel at my feet, and I was so broke, I reached down to pick the coins back up.
My pockets full of dirty money and a biker’s burner cellphone, I skipped the Conch Republic, with its siren call of sorority girls and bored locals, and instead walked across the street, right past the door to the condo and the temptation of Max chained to a bed, seething and frustrated, and hopped the small gate to the beach.
The waves were loud and the wind off the ocean was cold. Out on the dark horizon where the black sea met the blacker ocean, there were lights, a tanker I imagined. Maybe a cruise ship. Or a fallen star bobbing in the waves.
I dropped down in the sand, like my knees had been taken out. In the cool sand, I buried my feet to the ankles.
There was nothing to do but close my eyes and tilt my face into the wind and hope the elements would erode me. Blow off this shit I did not want to feel.
Not for Max.
Not for Annie and Dylan.
No one.
A few minutes later, I heard the snick of a lighter and then the smell of cigarette smoke blew by me on the wind. I jumped, startled, not realizing anyone was near me.
“Oh, hey,” a woman said. “I didn’t see you there. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” We were way out here past the lights from the condos behind us.
She was sitting a few feet away from me and I could barely see