Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,2

the relationship. Being married to the sex symbol famous author. Intelligent and pretty in a way that looked like I did porn, but he could still take me home to his family.

They pretended to like me because of my social cache.

They hated me.

But they all hated each other, so it worked.

Todd had maybe hated me too. But he loved what being married to me would mean. He didn’t want me to succeed beyond something he would be happy to introduce me as at dinner parties. Other than that, he wanted a pretty face, a mind that wasn’t smarter than him, and devotion and support that would not be reciprocated. He wanted to be seen as the man with the famous, depraved, beautiful, and so obviously kinky Magnolia Grace.

Maybe I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d continued to write. To see success. Success made you blind to the truth. As it was, writer’s block and self-doubt stopped me in my tracks, bringing on a functioning version of depression that forced me to see everything as it was.

Lacking.

Hence me landing myself here, thinking if I threw myself into the proverbial deep end, it might not feel like freefall anymore.

I definitely wasn’t falling.

I’d landed. Right here, in the middle of the woods.

I wasn’t sure that was better.

My GPS told me to turn right and I yelped with the foreign voice interrupting my blaring music. I’d been driving straight on this road for so long, I’d forgotten the near constant “turn right here,” “take exit 54” that had become my background. Even though I’d been so sure I was suffocating with all these trees, they’d relaxed me enough to get a goddamn fright from the GPS. Magnolia Grace was not one to get frights. She was one to give them.

I recovered enough to pull into the small gas station from every horror movie ever invented and hoped my story didn’t end with my car being stored in an impound lot out the back and my body being hacked to pieces by cannibal locals.

I’d done my research on Terror, Washington. From what I’d found, the locals had no history of eating tourists or lost travelers. And I was really fucking good at research. It was meant to be quaint, quiet, and unpretentious. Up until recently, it hadn’t made any headlines because it was just too boring. That wasn’t why I chose it. I chose it because its name was Terror, a woman had been brutally murdered there last year, and if that wasn’t a sign for the famously fucked-up horror author going through an existential crisis, then I didn’t know what was.

The gas station itself was clean, cluttered, and about ten years in the past. It was not quite as dramatically eerie as it had seemed on the road, but it was close.

Especially when a man came lumbering out of the small building, which housed what I guessed was a tiny store, a lacking restroom and food packets likely full of high fructose corn syrup and covered in dust.

He was dressed pretty much exactly as one would expect. Plaid shirt, slightly rumpled, stained and worn almost to threads. Jeans were much the same. His work boots were worn but good quality.

Something made me feel a little comforted by that. A man with a reasonable taste in shoes wasn’t going to drag me into his little store and murder me, would he?

Even if he did decide to do that, he looked to be approximately one hundred years old, so I figured I might be able to take him. I trained daily to make sure I had a really good chance against any man who wanted to try anything. The handgun in my glove compartment helped if I didn’t have a chance.

He appraised me as I got out of my car and approached him.

Not leered, as I might expect.

I was used to getting leered at.

Most women were.

Despite the strides that had been taken for our rights, the male gaze was the pesky thing that remained like a cockroach after a nuclear explosion.

Most women had gritted their teeth through many a crawling gaze, a suggestive remark…if they were lucky.

Lucky.

I swallowed that word and it went down my throat like a half-chewed potato chip.

I focused on the not leering look. This man was assessing me, I was sure. Upon first glance, I wasn’t really that difficult to assess. Dark, long hair I didn’t bother to cut—despite my best friend threatening to hire a hair stylist to break into my