Page 221 of Boyfriend of the Hour

Fear skittered up my skin, leaving goose bumps everywhere in its wake.

“Go away, Shawn,” I said as my back reached the brick of the building. “Just…please. Go.”

“Let me think about that…no.”

I turned to run, but he was too fast. I had almost turned the corner when I was grabbed by the nape of my neck and slammed against the brick while Shawn shoved his body against my back in a sick parody of love.

The hand at my nape slid around until his entire arm was wrapped around my neck.

“Shawn.” I could barely speak; his hold was so tight. “What are you doing?”

“You didn’t really think I was going to leave you alone after what happened with your boyfriend, did you?” he asked.

Before I could answer, he hauled me across the street toward a white van. The back doors opened up as we approached.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no!”

I kicked my legs out wildly as Shawn shoved me toward the van. “Let me go!”

But my voice was dampened by the hand at my throat, my legs so much weaker than normally after recent surgery.

“Shut up and get in.”

Shawn hurled me into the van, where two other men grabbed me roughly, blindfolded and gagged me, and secured my hand with zip ties before tossing me into a corner.

Vaguely, I heard the sounds of another person joining us, then the doors to the van slamming shut.

“I got her,” Shawn barked. “Let’s fucking go.”

FORTY-SEVEN

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER GO ON A BOAT

#4 nothing good in movies ever hapens on a boat!

They didn’t remove the blindfold until the van came to a stop, I was yanked back out somewhere I could hear seagulls calling through the air, towed down a distinctlyunstablewalkway, then thrown into a room that smelled like body odor and hot dogs. The door slammed shut over the voices of men barking in an Eastern European language. Then and only then did Shawn rip the blindfold off right before he tossed me onto an old plaid couch in the corner.

The room was small and had no windows in the concrete walls. The couch was the only piece of furniture in it, and it was lit by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling and connected to a pull string.

“What am I doing here?” I demanded. “Where am I?”

My knee throbbed. This was the opposite of treating it gently.

Shawn leered at me like a contractor might assess a wall he was about to demo. I’d seen that look on Matthew and Mike’s faces a few times. Some people found something immensely satisfying about destruction. An outlet for their rage. Or in thiscase, maybe just because Shawn was an asshole who liked to fuck shit up.

“You know, when I first met you, you were a little firefly,” Shawn said. “You buzzed around in everybody’s faces, and they all thought you were so beautiful. I’ll admit, you dazzled me too in the beginning. If I’m being honest, I sort of hated you for it.”

“No one told you to keep looking,” I said. “No one told you to chase after a fucking child.”

The smirk on Shawn’s face twisted into something uglier. “You think you were a child at fourteen, sunshine? You were asking for it the second I saw you. You didn’t even know, but you were.”

“You’re disgusting.”

His snarl deepened like it was etched with a knife but relaxed as he went on. “After a while, you reminded me of something else, though. You weren’t a firefly. Just the fire. A living flame that ‘danced.’”

His eyes lit up when he said the last word, almost as if he was making fun of me at the same time as he was lusting over me. I remembered that expression. It always confused me when I was younger.

Sometimes he’d even bring me back to, well, not his apartment. Never that. When I was in high school, it never struck me as odd that Shawn wouldn’t take me to where he actually lived. I couldn’t do that either.