Shit.
* * * * *
When you were fuelled with adrenalin, shot at and were lying handcuffed to a bed owned by a man you had a screaming crush on for most of your life, it was impossible to sleep. Not to mention, both arms over your head was not a comfortable position.
So I laid awake thinking of all the ways I wanted to kill Luke.
Then I realized, when I couldn’t find a way I liked, I didn’t want to kill Luke because I wasn’t a killing type of person.
Instead, I focused on all the reasons why I hated men. They cheated on you. They lied to you. They stole your stuff. They made you feel like shit. And they cuffed you to beds.
I was mentally arranging and rearranging all the men I hated in order of the ones I hated the most (Luke being on the top of that list in each arrangement, for obvious reasons) when the elevator doors slid open.
He had been gone a long time; it felt like hours though it probably wasn’t.
He walked silently into the room. I saw him moving because the room was dimly lit with the city lights but he barely made a sound. He put something on the kitchen counter and I watched, quiet and secretly fascinated, as his upper body twisted when he pulled off his tee. I held my breath as I saw skin in the moonlight, and even the definition of muscle, and what I saw was nice.
He turned to the bed, walked to it and sat on the side then bent forward and tugged off a boot.
“Please take me home,” I said quietly. I had decided quiet was the way to go, all my other attempts to get my way (yelling, screaming, shouting and struggling), didn’t work so I was trying out other options.
“No,” he said just as quietly, foiling my new tactic and dropping his boot to the floor.
“I need to take out my contacts,” I told him and this was true.
He stopped taking off his second boot then bent down, picked up the first one and tugged it back on.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he got up.
He walked to the tee he threw on the floor, pulled it on and went to the elevator. “I’ll be back,” he said, standing at the elevators.
“Wait!” I called but too late, the doors opened, he disappeared and the light from the elevator was extinguished as the doors closed.
* * * * *
This time he wasn’t gone long and came back less silent because he was carrying a rustling bag.
“Where did you go?” I asked as he went back to the counter, threw the bag on it and then again pulled off his tee and dropped it to the floor.
“Contact solution and a case,” he said, coming to the bed, sitting on the edge again and tugging off his boot.
“You can just take me home, I have, like, a million cases there and contact solution.” This was obvious but I pointed it out anyway.
“I’m not taking you home, Ava.” He dropped boot one.
“I don’t understand. Why? Whoever they were, they weren’t shooting at me. No one even knew I was there.”
He dropped boot two. “I know. They were shooting at Vincetti.” He pulled off a sock.
I sucked in breath. This was news.
“They were shooting at Dom?” I whispered, unable to wrap my mind around this fact.
“He isn’t a well-liked guy,” he pulled off the other sock.
This didn’t surprise me, as I explained, Dom was a jerk. But shooting out his living room with an Uzi? That seemed a bit much and this was coming from a woman who was searching his house to try to find evidence to nail him in an upcoming divorce battle.
“Why would they shoot out his living room with an Uzi when he wasn’t there?”