Page 37 of Emmett
“Hey,” I greet them as I walk in.
“Bubba!” Macie shouts, running over to wrap her tiny arms around my waist, and I drape an arm around her neck to lean down and give her a kiss on the top of her head.
“Did you get some sleep?” Dad asks.
“Yeah,” Ro chimes in with a furrowed brow. “Were you in—”
I stop her with a subtle shake of my head. “Yeah I did,” I lie to my dad, squeezing his shoulder, “just got up early and thought I’d take a page from your book and go for a run.”
He seems proud. He thinks that my going for a morning run means that I’m getting better. He has no idea that standing here, talking to him, I’m fighting every instinct in my mind screaming at me to hug him and make sure that this is real and that the dream I had was just that.
He has no idea how fucked up I actually am.
“Can you take your sister, bud?” Dad asks as we both see Ro blow out a breath.
“Yep.” I pull Sarah into my arms as Dad swings a stool around to the other side of the island and guides Ro to sit down on it. Inclining my head toward the dining room, I tell Macie, “Come on, supergirl, let’s go set the table.”
As we work to get each place set, complete with floral-printed place mats that my dad would never in a million years have picked out on his own, my phone buzzes in my pocket. My face scrunches while I stare at the text message on the screen: a GPS link to a place I’ve never heard of, followed by one simple instruction.
UNKNOWN:Eleven PM. Come alone.
What the fuck?
•
I blink at the address on my phone’s GPS, then at the building in front of me. This can’t be right. Swiping the map away, I pull open my text messages and double check that I have the right address. I do.
If you’d asked me even six months ago if I would agree to meet someone from an unknown number at a random address texted to me, I’d have called you insane because six months ago, I would have blocked the damn number like any sane, reasonable person would do.
I must no longer be sane nor reasonable, because I walk toward the front door of a place called The Velvet Vault, every inch of it lit up with neon signage, and I hand the woman working the door my ID. She scans over it for a second and follows by giving me a pat-down.
Smacking on a piece of gum with her mouth open, she hands my ID back to me and inclines her head toward the door, telling me that I’m supposed to sit at the bar and wait. It weirds me out, sure, but I’m entirely too invested at this point to walk away, so I do exactly that, taking a seat on one of the velvet-clad stools as the pop music over the speaker pours into my ears.
I wait a good five minutes before ordering a drink for myself, and as I sip on it, I swivel in the stool, taking in my surroundings. It mostly looks like any smaller bar on a busy night, but some of the décor inside catches my attention; particularly a neon light against one wall that makes up the outline of two women locked in a kiss.
Looking back behind the bar, I notice that sandwiched between some T-shirts hung up for display sits a flag, a sharp angle to the left side made up of shades of pink, blue, black and brown, and next to the point, going straight across, line the colors of the rainbow.
I spin in my seat, looking at each of the walls in the building, taking in the different-colored flags that line them.
This is a gay bar.
“Excuse me,” I say, waving over the bartender. “Do you know who I’m supposed to be meeting here?”
Shoving a towel into a glass to dry it, he smiles and jerks his chin behind me. I turn to see Nash Montgomery standing behind me. He flicks his wrist toward himself to check the time on his Rolex, then looks at me with a grin.
“You’re early,” he points out, almost sounding impressed. He takes the seat next to mine and pulls my drink to his lips, taking a sip from it.
“Why am I here?”
A hand comes up to cup my jaw, and my stomach flips at the sensation. “I want to play with my new toy,” he answers.
“I am not your toy,” I bite, shoving his hand away. “Stop calling me that.”
A feline smile crawls across his face as he fidgets with the thin chain around his neck. “You keep telling me that,” he says, “but then you let me play with you, anyway.” He lifts my drink to his lips again. “I think even more than you like to push the rules, you like to be chased. Isn’t that right, pretty boy?”
Maybe it’s because the music is so loud in here, but I could almost swear that ‘pretty boy’ had less hatred in it this time. I could almost be tricked into believing that it was a compliment.
“And I think you don’t understand the word ‘no,’” I tell him, slapping a twenty dollar bill onto the bar as I stand. His hand grips my wrist like a vise and I have to hold back the urge to deck him across the jaw. “Leave. Me. Alone.”