Lead Me Not (10 page)

I nursed my own drink as I got my voyeuristic kicks from watching her. The guy, whoever he was, whispered something in her ear and then left her as he headed in the direction of the toilets. Her discomfort kicked up a notch the moment she was alone.

She wore her vulnerability like a neon sign.

I drank some more of my whiskey and turned my attention to the man with a face full of metal and a dead look in his eyes at the end of the bar. I knew the type. I knew what he was thinking. And I knew what he would do if given the chance.

Her friend had yet to come back, so she ordered another drink. The bartender put her beer down on the bar, and she turned away from it to watch the dancers. Full metal jacket took this as an open invitation to play would-be rapist. He subtly dropped a pill I recognized all too well into her open bottle and then slipped back into the crowd.

She didn’t see a thing. Given the size of the crowd in the club, her ignorance was both infuriating and understandable. She was in over her head, completely overwhelmed and unaware. She didn’t have the street smarts to hang out in a place like this.

In one fluid movement, I was beside her. I made sure that my cap still sat low over my face.

My anonymity was vital.

She reached to grab her beer, but I quickly pulled it out of reach. She blinked up at me in bewilderment with eyes that were a clear and vivid brown, her brows furrowed with irritation.

“Give me my drink,” she demanded, trying to sound hard and menacing. She was about as intimidating as a kitten.

Not able to help myself, I reached out and ran a finger down her cheek. She smacked my hand away, and I found myself laughing at her indignation.

“
And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes
,” I quoted, enjoying the confusion on her face. Yeah, I had a thing for Byron. He wrote some dark shit that I appreciated.

The moment would have been uncomfortably cheesy except for the heat in her. I made her hot, I could tell. Yet she hated that I turned her on. She didn’t know me. I was a stranger. I knocked her off-balance. But she felt desire nonetheless.

It was a heady sort of power.

“Give me my goddamned drink,” she enunciated slowly and angrily.

I leaned over the bar and dropped the full bottle of beer into the trash can. “You’re not drinking that,” I told her shortly.

She was furious. I grinned in the face of her anger, soaking it in. My veins hummed, and my head felt full. My eyes were heavy, and my feet felt weighted down as if by cement, but nothing could make me leave her.

Not yet.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, and I could see her jaw tightening as she became angrier. I wanted her pissed. I wanted her barely able to hold it together. Because I could tell she wanted that.

She wanted to lose control.

And I felt it was my mission to give that to her.

I leaned in, purposefully close, invading her personal space. It was violating and encroaching, but I wanted to see how far I could push it. I dropped my hand to her waist, to the bare skin below the hem of her shirt. I pressed my fingers into the skin, flattening my palms in order to feel the warmth.

“Don’t ever take your eyes off your drink in here,” I whispered low in her ear. Her eyes, those incredible deep brown eyes, widened.

She looked up at me, trying to see my face. I ducked my head down, hiding from her penetrating gaze. I knew the lighting would make it difficult for her to see me under the bill of my cap, but I needed to be careful.

I reached up so that my fingers grasped her chin and turned her to face the other side of the bar. “You see that guy over there with his septum pierced and the bad dye job?” I asked, indicating the guy who had slipped her a roofie not ten minutes ago. He was watching us closely, scowling, clearly not appreciating the way I had ruined his plans for the evening.

“Y . . . yeah,” she stammered, and I could feel her heartbeat under my thumb. She was nervous, and probably pretty freaked out.

Good.

“He put something in your drink. And then he would have waited,” I whispered in her ear. I saw her throat move as she swallowed.

“He would have waited until you went to the bathroom, or gone outside to get some air, and then he would have followed
you. You would have been too spaced out from the drug to put up a fight when he dragged you off behind the building,” I said. She looked truly scared, and I felt sort of bad. But a girl like this didn’t understand the dangers that lurked for her in the shadows.

“And you would have been unconscious while he did whatever he wanted to you,” I finished, dropping my hand from her waist and moving away. I adjusted my cap and finished the rest of my drink before pushing the glass toward Eric.

“Guys like that wait all night for an easy mark like you. So if you plan on being here, smarten up. Because there are plenty of predators out there,” I told her, suddenly angry. I wasn’t sure why I was so mad. But all thoughts of possession, of desire, had been erased by an unfamiliar sense of protectiveness.

The girl frowned and looked at me as closely as she was able to in the dim light. “I remember you. You were the one who helped me find my friend last time.” Then she stepped into
my
personal space.
She
violated and encroached. And
I
was the one who took the step back.

“What’s your name?” she asked softly, reaching up for my cap, as though she wanted to remove it.

I grabbed her wrist and pulled it away, holding it down at her side. “You should go home. I told you last time: You don’t belong in a place like this. I think this just proves it. The mouse doesn’t survive long in a room full of cats,” I said.

I was starting to feel jittery. I needed another fix, and soon. The drugs had started to work their way out of my system, and I felt my organs screaming to hold it in. My blood and bones were hysterical over the loss.

I was thinking too clearly, and my eyes were too focused. But
she
made me want to see straight.

I didn’t understand why. I didn’t like the effect she had.

It made me angry.

My night had been consumed by this girl, and there were other things I was supposed to be doing.

She opened her mouth to speak, and I thought about thrusting my tongue between her red lips.

Tasting and conquering.

Making her mouth mine.

But her words and my desires were cut short.

“There was a long-ass line at the bathroom. Sorry that took so long.” Her friend returned, and she was momentarily distracted by his appearance. I used that as my chance to disappear into the crowd.

I left her.

I tried to forget.

I tried to resume my night as it had been before I had seen her.

But there was no forgetting. Some people can burrow their way into your head without you realizing it is even happening.

And later on, as I beat the shit out of the guy who had slipped her the drugs, I knew she had burrowed deep.

I just hadn’t decided what I would do if she stayed there.

chapter

eight

aubrey

“
y
ou wanna head over to the commons and grab some dinner?” Renee asked, walking into my bedroom.

I looked up from my homework in surprise. Was she talking to me? Was this an actual invite to hang out?

Last weekend at Compulsion had been . . . well . . . interesting.

It was hard for me to decide whether I had truly enjoyed myself or not. The entire experience had been completely surreal.

Being there, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, had been liberating in a sense. The need to let go and have fun was a tantalizing temptation, one that for a few moments I had been fully ready to give in to.

But then I had seen
him
again, the stranger wearing the baseball cap. He had swooped in and saved the day as though he had been waiting all night for such a moment.

I had felt like an idiot when he kept me from drinking the drug-laced beer. I prided myself on being hypervigilant when it came to unusual situations. It wasn’t like me to leave my drink unguarded.

I wasn’t an idiot, but that night I had been all sorts of stupid. I had been reckless and almost endangered myself by my ignorance.

But mystery man made sure that hadn’t happened.

I should have been grateful he was there. Instead I had felt su
premely irritated that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself, and he had basically mocked me for it.

I wasn’t the sort of girl who needed rescuing, yet he had done so twice now.

And I still didn’t know his name or even what he looked like. And I knew that, without a doubt, that was completely intentional.

When he had touched me, it had been deliberate, as though he was looking for a certain kind of response from me. He knew what he was doing by invading my personal space, and he enjoyed making me uncomfortable.

But then he had disappeared, and I hadn’t seen him again for the rest of the night.

I hated to admit that I had spent more time looking for him than I had dancing. I had completely forgotten to look for Renee as well, and it wasn’t until Brooks and I were leaving at two in the morning that I realized I hadn’t seen her all night.

Brooks had been more than a little drunk, so I had to drive us home. Renee was already home by the time I got back to the apartment. I had seen the light on underneath her door.

But I had been out of sorts and feeling strangely shaky, so I hadn’t bothered to find out where she had been. And I hadn’t really spoken to her since.

So her sudden appearance in my bedroom caught me by surprise.

“What?” I questioned dumbly.

“We haven’t spent any sort of time together lately. I thought we could . . . you know, get some dinner and then maybe rent a movie. It’s been a while since we’ve watched
Dazed and Confused
,” she offered, her pale green eyes meeting mine tentatively.

I knew she was trying. She was reaching out. And I wasn’t one to smack away what she was offering. It hit me hard in that moment how much I missed my best friend. I suddenly needed the open confidences we used to share.

As much as I loved Brooks, he wasn’t Renee.

I closed my Counseling Foundations textbook and gave her a smile. “That sounds great,” I said genuinely. Renee seemed relieved that I had accepted her offer so readily. Perhaps I hadn’t been as accessible as I thought I had been. Could it be that the state of our deteriorating friendship didn’t rest entirely on her shoulders? Perhaps my tendency to shut people out had contributed to the emotional distance between us.

I grabbed my purse, and Renee pulled on her black leather jacket. She jammed her hands in her pockets and pulled out a couple of receipts that I had left behind after wearing it on Saturday.

“Did you borrow my jacket?” she asked me, crumpling the papers and tossing them in the trash.

“Yeah, on Saturday. Hope it’s okay,” I told her. We had always lived by an open-closet policy since we had moved in together, though perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it without permission, given the current state of our friendship.

Renee smiled. “It’s okay. You know you’re always welcome to my clothes. Anyway, this jacket always looked better on you than on me,” she said lightly, and any tension we had been feeling lessened slightly.

“That’s true. I can’t argue with that logic,” I joked, closing our apartment door behind us as we headed down the hallway.

“Where did you go? I thought you planned on staying home on Saturday,” she said.

“Brooks and I headed over to Compulsion. I was hoping to see you there, you know, after you suggested it . . . ,” I ventured, trying to open up a dialogue between us. I instantly noticed the tightening of her jaw and the stiffening of her shoulders.

“We didn’t end up going,” she said finally after a few moments.

“Why? What did you do?” I asked, not sure she would answer me, whether she would think I was being intrusive and shut me
down. I never knew what my questions would be met with anymore. Long gone were the days of easy conversation. Renee Alston carried a lot of secrets now, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever know what they were.

Renee smoothed down her hair, a gesture that usually indicated she was upset about something. I looked at her closely and was startled to see that she looked almost gaunt. How had I not noticed how much weight she’d been losing in the last few months? Her once-vibrant red hair was now the dull color of rust. Her clothes were baggy and seemed ready to fall off her slight frame.

She had always been a curvaceous girl. She was a bit on the short side, coming up only to my shoulders, but with an ass and boobs that put mine to shame. And she had always worked what she had. Now it was as though her clothes were swallowing her up. Her shoulders were drooped, and these days her gaze was always trained at the ground.

“We ended up at a party. Some guy Devon knew,” Renee explained, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, most likely watching for a sign of my well-known disapproval of Devon. But I kept my face blank.

“Oh, yeah? How was it?” I asked, walking out onto the sidewalk and waiting for Renee to catch up. The air was cold and had been hinting at snow for weeks now, though I had yet to see a flake. The sky was a flat, slate gray, and I for one didn’t miss the sun. I loved the cold.

I remembered the way Jayme and I would wait impatiently for snow. Even if it was futile, given the lack of frozen precipitation we experienced during the winter. She would follow the local weather constantly, hoping for a day off from school. We had developed a strange ritual of doing a dance in the yard as though that would encourage the weather we wanted.

When we were younger, we spent so much of our time to
gether. Jayme had been only two years younger than me, but from an early age, I had felt very protective of her. She had always been shy and insecure, having struggled with body image since she was old enough to worry about that sort of thing.

She just hadn’t understood how truly beautiful she was. She had always gone out of her way to make people like her, even if they were the wrong type of people.