Page 106 of Ominous: Part 1

Drowning,Eden.Winslet could have… drowned.

My heart picks up speed, slamming fast against my ribcage, and I really do need to breathe. I need to get up. My mind is doing things to me down here, and all I can hear is his words in my head, and all I can think is I don’t know what they mean.

“God, you’re fun.”

I try to stand up, positioning one foot flat against the bottom of the pool and pushing.

His hand pushes back.

Fear claws at me, and I can’t open my eyes, because if I do, I might have to watch it. Him hurt me, just like he said he wouldn’t.

I try again, pushing up, raking my nails down his thighs, feeling the firm muscle beneath, I think I’ve drawn blood, but I don’t try to look for the clouds of it in the water. I’m straining as hard as I can against his hand.

Then my world flips.

For a second, his palm lifts, and I rise a few inches, happiness and something I hate to call relief bursting in my chest. But as the clock ticks, the moment passes, and both of his hands come to my shoulders as he pushes me down, down,down.

My eyes fly open, I’m unable to stop it, and I see his blurry, beautiful figure over me, his knees on either side of my hips, his body pinning mine down, his hands ensuring my back is pushed against the bottom of the pool. His height combined with the fact we’re in the shallow end makes it possible for his head to stay above water. I just barely see the stopwatch around his neck, resting on his sternum, I can’t make out the numbers speeding by.

He has his knees so close to my hips, jammed against my bones, I can’t move them, and I can’t get free. My knees are bent, and I push with the soles of my feet against cement, eerily similar to the way I watched him throw off an opponent at his wrestling match, when it looked like he’d lose.

But his body isn’t even jostled with my movements.

My fingers leave the bottom of the pool and come to his forearms, winding around muscle as I scratch at him, trying to get him off of me.

I push, and dig, and I can feel my pulse hit everywhere in my body.

I can feel something else too, as he pivots his hips, so he’s almost lying on top of me, but keeping his head above water.

I freeze, nails latched into his skin and the sinewy frame of his arms.

The fact he’s so turned on, his erection pressing just above my pubic bone as he squeezes his fingers around my throat, overlapping against my neck, it does something to me.

It makes the fantasy real.

I’m still terrified. I’m still worried he won’t let me up, and my head feels dizzy and the pressure against my lungs, the desperate urge tobreatheis eating at me. Panic is tight around my chest, a burning sensation flowing toward the base of my throat, a pain pounding above my eyes, but… there’s something else, too.

He rolls his hips, pressing himself into me, our swimsuits separating us, and yet it still feels sickeninglygood.

Yet even beneath something like pleasure, I realize I might pass out. I try again to shove him off and for a split second, I think I’ve won.

But he only releases his hold on my throat with one hand, the other still around it, his thumb pressing into my windpipe, almost as if he wants to trick me to breathe. Todrown.

His hand trails over my body, squeezing my breast on the way down like it’s nothing, like he’s done this to me a thousand times, like I’m just a toy for him to play with.

I can’t see his eyes, the surface choppy, but I watch the blurred vision of his hand gliding over my stomach, the flare of my hip, then he hooks his fingers into the side of my bikini, shifting the fabric and… staring at me as he shifts back, so he can see. Maybe. Possibly.

He uses his knee to press against the side of my thigh, stretching me, exposing more of me to him, but he doesn’t touch me.

No one has seen me like this.

Panic thumps a rhythm in my head.

My ears.

But I’m frozen.

And finally, just as black spots start to pop in front of my eyes, and I think I’m going to get a lungful of water, and I’m going to die right here, he releases my swimsuit, shifts his body, and hauls me up by my fucking throat.