Page 57 of Organized Chaos
Brandon insisted we couldn’t make our flight out from Nice due to a malfunctioning rental car. Something about it nigged at the back of my mind, especially as he throttled every one of my alternate suggestions.
“There are no train stations in a hundred-mile radius,” Brandon had chewed out.
The statement confirmed my theory. We passed both the town center and a train station on our way to the cottage. It dawned on me that Brandon had fabricated our limitations.
Brandon was stingy with his words, so I generally read his body language to decipher his thoughts. But today, he was giving nothing away. Stoic face, blank eyes, nonexistent body language.
But his manipulation and motives were the least of my concerns. I was far more anxious about returning home. If I missed my flight, Raven would gather a search party stretching all of Europe and undoubtedly uncover my link to Brandon in the process.
I tried to make Brandon see reason, but he wouldn’t budge.
“I’m not trying to keep you here,” Brandon had repelled my accusation at some point. “I’ll get the damn car fixed. Until then, I don’t want to keep having the same discussion because there is nothing more I can do. You’ve clearly been sheltered your whole life and don’t know how to deal with unexpected predicaments. Sometimes shit happens that’s out of our control. It’s part of life, so get a goddamn grip on yourself.”
The comment hit a little too close to home, provoking the anger I had been masking around him because Maya didn’t succumb to anger so easily.
However, Mia... now she was a beast of her own.
Unable to keep up the pretense any longer, I blurted out, “Go to hell, Brandon! I’m leaving, even if I have to walk back to Nice. I’m sure I’ll find another man who’ll be happy to—”
My sentence was cut off by Brandon shoving me against the wall. Hard. He hadn’t moved from the position since, his larger frame blocking any chance of escape.
Shaken to my core, I averted his gaze. It was the first glimpse of violence Brandon had displayed. At most, he sneered and taunted rather than getting angry... until now.
I had promised to fake it until we amicably parted ways. I should have known better. This was the only way it could have ended—an explosive blowout. Expecting differently was plain naïve.
I was straight edge, following the course set for me. Brandon was the tornado to obliterate it all. This obsession with him had cost me dearly throughout my life because I broke every rule at my disposal for him.
Hewas my motivation to lie and do things I’d never otherwise do. Brandon was the reason for the first time I skipped school. As a result, I got stuck in a walk-in freezer and lost the privileges of sharing a home with my mother. I lied to Raven about this trip, only to lose my virginity to a man who didn’t so much as remember my name.
I had no one to blame other than myself. Brandon turned me into a bumbling idiot because I allowed it. Despite my attempts to act older, these moments made me face the harsh reality of things.
I was only sixteen and petrified of the man in front of me, the one I was stuck with while in the middle of nowhere.
I gently placed my hands on Brandon’s chest to give him a mild push, but he only leaned into me more. Disregarding my tentative struggles for escape, he deliberately crushed me against the wall. I felt his urgent need budding with the erratically beating heart under my palm and the hard bulge against my stomach.
To my horror, Brandon leaned in to kiss me. I turned my face away. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I quickly whispered. Whatever it took to appease him.
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
With a stern glare, his eyes moved over my face, though he didn’t let me go. As if impelled purely by instinct, he buried his face in my hair and inhaled deeply, sounding overwhelmed by the smell. With each one of his exhalations, he verged on more madness.
The scent of rainforest filling my lungs failed to have the same effect on me. Instead, the warmth of him wrapped tightly around me in a chokehold. Brandon was a man possessed, staring at me with nefarious intentions. Like I was his to consume. And all I could do was stare at the far corner of the room with blank eyes, wishing for this nightmare to end.
Similar thoughts must have crossed his mind. Or perhaps it was the dread written on my face, pleading eyes begging silently. Whatever his reason, Brandon picked up on the cue and snapped out of it at long last.
“I’ll take the car into town to see if they can fix it,” he said without moving.
Our gazes collided, breath fanning against one another. Suddenly, he grabbed my jaw and kissed me with such absorption that my knees banged against one another. I clung to him for dear life as his hot mouth devoured mine. With hands that might have been slightly trembling, he shaped and squeezed my breasts, which rose and fell in response.
When he pulled back, our ragged breaths intermingled. With hazy eyes still fixed on my lips, Brandon panted harshly. His rapid blinking could only indicate he was clearing his vision while regaining lucidity.
He detangled at an agonizingly slow pace. It appeared that the control was causing him every bit of the torment etched on his face. Walking backward, he turned away from me to grab the car keys. Brandon opened the front door, slamming it shut after him, the sound loud enough to vibrate through my insides.
It took minutes to regain my faculties and the feel of my puffy lips to return. The confinement he left me in while he was “fixing the car” jarred my panic, but I had to disregard it. I needed to act fast to get out of this predicament.
Brandon left me captive in this cottage, thinking the place was too remote for an escape. That wasn’t necessarily the case.
Though it took us forty-five from the city center to this cottage, it was likely due to the twisted roads—uphill and downhill. I doubted the actual distance was more than a mere ten miles.
