Page 20 of Kept

He left the basket on the roof and walked me down through the darkened halls of Bourdillon. I didn’t say a word, caught between seething irritation and a feeling I couldn’t pinpoint.

Rhett’s car was parked at the end of the lot, a charcoal-gray Aston Martin. He held open the door for me. Tucked me into the soft leather seats and the intoxicating scent of bergamot and tobacco cologne.

In a way, this treatment felt worse than the callousness, because I knew this guy wasn’t the Rhett Harlow I’d believed he was. He’d already ripped the packaging off his cruelty; why stop to be nice now? To treat this like a real date and refuse to let me walk home?

The drive was very short. He pulled to a stop in front of my cottage, where the lights were off, leaving it bathed in the shadows of the trees. “Good night, Jane,” he said, and reached over to place his entire hand over mine, which was resting on my thigh.

The heat of his hands sank through my chilled skin. I waited for it to slide upwards, to find how wet I was for him despite all emotional evidence to the contrary, but he didn’t move. His fingers tightened around mine.

“Good night, Rhett.” I opened the car door, and his hand slid away.

He didn’t drive away until I was inside, and he waited another thirty seconds on top of that. Waiting for me to lock the door.

It was a weirdly sweet gesture. I didn’t want to examine it further, not while I was tiptoeing through the house, listening for Mom’s quiet snores, and I dry-shampooed my hair instead of washing it when I showered.

Lying in bed, I wondered if I did something wrong to discourage his touch. If my words had hit home.

Then I wondered if I was fucking insane for thinking I’d done something wrong. I hadn’t done anything wrong here.Theywere the blackmailers. They’d already seen everything there was to see.

Thayer and Spears hadn’t yet laid a hand on me. I was on the hook for everything a woman could be hooked for, my future in the palms of their hands…

Which meant my time with them was coming, and soon.

Somewhere, deep inside a well in my mind, Twisted Jane sighed and stretched. Biding her time.

Chapter Seven

I blinkedand realized Sean was only inches from my face. “You seem distracted today, Jane.”

He leaned back in his seat, chewing the end of a pencil to a worn nub, eyes still glued to my face.

Last week I would’ve flashed him a quick smile, but I was getting tired of the constant commentary on my state of mind. At least Rachelle was distracted from my own distraction, still planning her Victoria’s Slut-cret bubblegum statue.

“I’m a very distractible person,” I said shortly, scrawling a few more notes, more for the sake of doing something with my hands.

When I thought of Rhett, my heart wanted to go full-bore and hammer right through my chest. I could’ve said last night was something like a date, even if it wasn’t. A date-not-date. He owned me, his brand-new shiny pet, but he hadn’t tried to claim anything from me.

“Want to get coffee later?”

The question caught me off-guard. He wouldn’t stop looking at me. Whereas the gaze of the Three Demons laid me bare, Sean’s gaze felt like a worm trying to wriggle its way under my skin.

This time I did smile, hoping he got the message. Purely platonic. Here’s your crash pad into the friendzone, please keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times. “Thanks, Sean, but I have a lot of homework to catch up on, and I promised my mom a movie night.”

He leaned in again, and I resisted the urge to lean back. This was my personal space bubble. He could get out; I wasn’t going anywhere. “You seem to spend a lot of time with your mom.”

I stared at him blankly. “I… live with her? It seems like a given to me.”

Sean was nice, I’d give him that. But I wasn’t going to lay out my life for him. Our life, and how easily it had fallen apart when Mom had gotten cancer.

“What kind of movie are you guys watching? We can always put off the coffee date until after one of your library shifts. I’m a nice guy, Jane. I can wait.”

For some reason I bristled at the questions about what I was doing with my mom. They were so innocuous, but it felt like an interrogation for some reason.

Okay. Time to come clean. As much as I liked Rachelle, I didn’t like Sean at all. He made me feel the same way my ex from Northeast made me feel: like I was under a microscope, every answer I gave being dissected and evaluated like I was a different life-form.

Not to mention I had no interest in a date, and calling yourself a ‘nice guy’ was an automatic big, fatnoin my book. It was a disingenuous disguise.

At least the Three Demons were honest about what they were. They were morally corrupt, but they owned it, and didn’t make me feel slimy just by talking to them.

---