Page 45 of Forced Proximity
Ambitchous: the desire to become a better bitch.
—Dru’s secret thoughts
DRU
I didn’t want to go to work.
I was tired, my body hurt, and I was fairly sure I was about to start my period.
I felt like I’d been hit by a train…or fell out of the sky.
And I knew without a doubt that I’d get asked a hundred times today what happened to my face—you couldn’t hide the tiny little cuts all over me from tiny slivers of wood in that tornado that’d cut my face. Plus, they’d want to know how I got it, and it’d eventually get out that I’d been in that plane crash.
Yet, I walked down the length of Finnian’s driveway, barely able to keep my eyes open.
I’d called an Uber an hour ago, telling him to pick me up at the estate’s front entrance.
I’d have asked him for the code, but the man slept behind a locked door, and slept like a freakin’ log.
I’d knocked on his door for a solid minute before deciding that I wasn’t going to get him to open the door.
If he was even there.
I mean, at this point, he might not have been.
I didn’t actually see the man go to bed last night.
After all his friends left—Finnian had introduced them all to me—he’d led me to a room up the stairs and at the end of the hall straight across from his room.
There, I’d showered, gotten dressed in the clothes that were at the end of my bed when I came out of the bathroom, and headed back downstairs to find the place empty but for him.
He’d fed me a plethora of food, and then he’d put me to bed before telling me to knock if I needed something.
I had, but he hadn’t answered, so I’d taken that as my sign to leave.
I didn’t have a phone, but I’d been able to sign into the same iPad we’d taken from off the dead mother and order my Uber.
I’d also signed in and prepaid and tipped for my ride before quietly leaving the house.
I would get the Uber driver to drop me off at home, where I had luckily thought ahead and put a new electronic key on my door.
If it was even still locked…
I found my Uber exactly where I asked him to be and climbed inside.
After confirming the address, I leaned back and closed my eyes for the long ride that would take me from Finnian’s glorious house to the slums of Dallas where I now lived.
When I got home, I thanked the driver and all but shuffled like a zombie to the side door of the complex that led up to my apartment.
Unsurprised to find that the door wasn’t latched, I walked inside and headed to my apartment that was on the first floor at the back—there were four total on the floor.
My door was surprisingly shut, so I unlocked it and headed inside.
The moment I got there, I felt a little bit more centered.
Not that Finnian’s place was bad at all.
It wasn’t.
