Page 24 of Broken Pact

“Ah, see, I knew you could be submissive. You just need the right hand,” he says, swaying toward me.

I take a half-step back. His implication is clearer than the night sky. “Yeah, well, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go.” I take a step to the side, putting me closer to my car. But to my frustration, he matches my move, keeping himself in front of me.

“Where you going, hm? It’s late. Why don’t you let me take you home?” He’s laying whatever drunken charm on thick, and not for the first time, I wonder what the hell I ever saw in someone like him.

“I’m good, thanks.”

On the surface, he seems good, appealing even. Attractive in that pretty boy kind of way. But he’s more trust fund kid than a man who works with his hands. And it doesn’t take long before the mask comes off so brutally that you question if it was ever even there.

The man in front of me is the real Grant Lawson. Nice enough, until he doesn’t get his way.

He’s a spoiled child masquerading as a man.

“What? You think you’re too good for me now? Is that it?” He leans in close, caging me into the front quarter panel of my car. “If you’re worried about the boys, don’t. They know the score. Besides, I thought you were into that sort of thing—having an audience?”

My breath catches in my throat. I don’t know what’s more alarming: the fact that he somehow seems to know one of my deepest fantasies that I’ve only shared with a select handful of people—definitely not him. Or the casual way in which he threatened me.

My brows sink low over my eyes, and I forget that I’m supposed to be playing the role of compliant woman right now. “Are you threatening me, Grant?”

“We were good once. Let’s be good together again,” he cajoles.

We were never that good, I think. I’m smart enough to keep that specific sentiment to myself.

I clear my throat and glance at my shoes. “I really have to go.”

He tilts his head to the side and gives me a slow once-over. I can’t explain it other than to say it feels so different from the way Jagger’s gaze leisurely swept over me earlier. By all rights, they both should be nothing but a nuisance, and yet I only realize now how very different they are.

He stumbles back a step, tossing his hands up in the universal surrender gesture. “Alright. I’ll just wait here and make sure you get home safely.”

I shake my head, my brows furrowing in confusion. He’s not making sense, but I honestly don’t care to analyze his bizarre behavior right now. I’ll save that for later, when I can deep-dive with a matcha latte and a phone call to Evangeline.

I slide around him, inching my way toward the driver’s side door. Call it paranoia or intuition, but I don’t give him my back. I paste a polite, forced smile on my face and keep my gaze bouncing between him and his buddies.

“Actually. Why don’t you give me a ride home tonight. I’m sure you can’t tell, but I had a few drinks with my boys here,” he says, hooking a thumb over his shoulder and shuffling toward me. He pinches the edge of his kutte between his thumb and index finger, tugging the leather taught. As if he’s showing off the vest.

I lick my lips, struggling to figure out what to say to diffuse this situation. I hate to admit that I might cave if my car was working, just to get it over with. And because I think I have a better shot at handling one drunken ex-boyfriend than one drunken ex and his four friends.

Shame crowds the space between my shoulders, pressing tightly against my skin. My breaths come in choppy pants as anxiety beats against the inside of my skull. A hundred different reprimands fly across my consciousness, each one in my mother’s voice. She’s warned me about getting myself in these kinds of situations from the moment I started going to concerts.

He reads me wrong, like he always has, and crowds me further. “C’mon, Coraline. I already told the guys how good you were. Are you going to embarrass me further?” There’s a line of steel in his tone now, thickening and strengthening with each second that ticks by.

It causes another crack in my facade. Panic bubbles inside of my stomach, sloshing around my insides like acid. My tongue feels thick in my mouth, and my gaze flies from one side to the next, looking for a way out of this. The guys behind him, his so-called friends, don’t even seem to be paying me any attention. They’re too busy fucking around with one another, clearly living it up tonight.

I find myself starting to bend backward over the hood just to give myself a little space to breathe. He reads it wrong and follows me, his eyes brightening with victory.

“I told the guys you’d see it?—”

My hands fly to his chest, arms locked straight. “I have a boyfriend.”

It’s like someone pulls the plug on him, he freezes instantly. “What?” It comes out as sort of a growl.

I clear my throat and remove my hands quickly, crossing them tightly over my chest. A paltry barrier between the two of us. “I said I have a boyfriend. And he’s actually on the way to come get me right now, so.” I trail off, letting the implication hang in the air between us.

“Bullshit,” he spits out. Disbelief and anger line his face, crowd his eyebrows together. He seems to swell in size, or maybe that’s my imagination playing with me again.

I shake my head a few times, an invisible clock ticking inside my head, urging me to get rid of him. “I don’t care if you believe me, but he’s coming any second now. And he’s not going to take kindly to you getting in my space like this.”

Rage flashes across his face, sinking into his neck and turning it red. He crowds into me again, but instead of the mildly uncomfortable situation I was in before, I feel threatened.

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