Asking for It

Page 66

My subconscious has other ideas.

Someone’s knocking on the door. “I’m tired,” I moan. “I don’t want to come down for breakfast. ”

The knocking continues. Gets harder and louder. It turns into pounding.

“Jonah?” I sit upright, unsurprised to find myself back in my childhood room. My bedspread is trimmed with eyelet lace. The stuffed lamb I loved as a baby, Woolly Bully, still sits on a bookshelf, ratty and gray and yet adorable. “What are you doing here?”

The next slam against the door makes the wall shake, and I hear someone roar, “Let me in!”

That wasn’t Jonah.

I scramble out of bed. In my haste I trip myself up in my own sheets and fall on the floor, so I try to crawl to the closet. If I hide in the closet he won’t find me—

The door breaks, pieces flying against the wall. I scoot to the back of my closet, hanging clothes swinging against my shoulders and head, thinking, please no please no please—

“You can’t hide from me,” Anthony says as he comes toward me. His fist closes around my wrist, and by now I’m screaming, but no one can hear. Nobody ever hears. “Come on. Get on the bed. Be a good girl. ”

“I won’t,” I shriek. “I won’t—”

Then I’m awake, in my own bed, gasping for breath. I realize I woke myself up screaming in my sleep.

Twenty-one

After that nightmare, sleep doesn’t come easy. I give up around six A. M. If I have to be awake this early, I might as well get in some more studio time.

Carmen texts me around eight, supposedly just to see what’s up—but I know she wants to hear about my night with Jonah. I’m reluctant to explain, for a few reasons, but I’ve admitted he’s in my life. Besides, if I can talk Carmen into swinging by the studio to chat, I might be able to persuade her to pick up coffee on the way.

“One café au lait,” she announces as she comes in the door. “So spill. Good date or bad date? Not a great date, I’m guessing, since you’re here instead of at his place. ”

“Oh, come on. I don’t usually move that fast. ” Jonah doesn’t figure into the equation; he’s an outlier. “Just faster than you. ”

“I can’t help it if I’m an old-fashioned girl. ”

Carmen smiles as she says it, but it’s only half a joke. She dated the same guy throughout high school, and another guy through most of our undergrad years, so she has almost zero experience with sex outside a committed relationship. Not for lack of chances, though: Carmen gets more male attention than any other woman I’ve ever known. Cute as she is, she’d be the first to admit she’s not any kind of supermodel—but she radiates warmth and fun, which is more attractive than anything else.

“Out with it,” she says as she perches at a drafting table in one corner. “What did you guys do? Were you able to get more than two words out of him?”

“We went to dinner. It took the conversation a while to get rolling, but soon it was fine. Better than fine. Great. Jonah’s not cold or unfriendly. He’s guarded until he gets to know people, that’s all. ”

Not really. Something else lies behind Jonah’s silences, his darkness—something that began at Redgrave House in Chicago. But I wouldn’t talk about that part of Jonah’s life even if I understood more about it. His troubled relationship with his family is none of my business, and even less of Carmen’s.

“Who knew? I guess everybody has, I don’t know, hidden depths. ” She blows a bit of her cappuccino’s foam out of the way. “When did you get interested in him, anyway?”

I’m torn. Carmen is my best friend; I don’t make a habit of lying to her, beyond the occasional fib like, You look fine, nobody’s going to notice you spilled coffee on your skirt. But how can I possibly explain the whole truth about this? The only two human beings who come anywhere close to understanding are Doreen and Jonah himself—and even those two don’t have the whole picture.

Finally I decide to start at the beginning and see how far I get. “Well, you remember that I met Jonah when he changed a flat for me—”

“Chivalry’s not dead!” Carmen chirps.

I remember Jonah forcing me to my knees, growling, Look at me when you suck my cock. Even that quick flash of memory gets me hot. “Then he was at your party, thanks to Shay, and—” Maybe I can lead into the truth like this. “—after Geordie, uh, embarrassed me out on the deck, I was pretty freaked out. Then Jonah talked with me. Distracted me. ”