Page 94 of Ominous: Part 1
I look at my screen.
Another text comes through.
Eli: Are you fucking with me?
I can’t stop my smile as I bite my bottom lip, laughing out loud in the darkness of my room.
Him: I’m never going to let you go now.
I’m soaring. I can’t even sit still anymore. I stand, tucking my hair behind my ear, shaking my head as I do a little dance alone in my room.
I start to type, but he sends another message before I can.
Him: God. That shit turns me on.
I’m trying to breathe evenly, and I somehow manage to text him despite the butterflies in my stomach.
Me: I’m not fucking with you. Keep me.
Him: Always.
Then another text.
It’s just an emoji.
A green heart.
I fall backward onto my bed, then lift my arms and rest them above my head as I close my eyes, unable to keep the stupid smile off of my face, despite the apprehension I felt in his car at that intersection.
I am so fucked.
19
Eli
Winslet’sblue eyes are darker than her brother’s. Longer lashes, blonde hair tied up with a bow on her head.
I glance away from her, at the front door, down the foyer of Dominic’s mansion, similar to mine, in an adjoining neighborhood. Luna is at summer camp for lacrosse, and Dominic is on his way with the weed.
But Winslet is restless. She’s been that way a lot lately. Anxious and jittery. I wonder if she’s on drugs.
I drape an arm around the plush, white leather of the less formal living room’s couch, turning my gaze to her beside me as she sighs, loudly. There’s a book in her hands, her nails painted a vivid pink, the same color highlighter pressed between her palm and the pages of the book, splayed open and wrapped around the back, exposing only one.
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I remember a line from reading it junior year, which is what Winslet will be starting at Trafalgar soon while me and Dom move up as seniors.
It was something about the only way to banish temptation is to give in to it.
Winslet licks her pink lips and gazes up at me, sidling closer. Her face is shaped just like Dom’s. Only ten months apart, they’re close in the strangest way. They hate each other, and it looks something like love.
I retract my arm from the back of the couch, tucking my elbow close to my body. I know she notices, the way her ocean eyes narrow.
“Tell me what this means, Eli,” she says, tapping her highlighter against a sentence. Impossibly, the one I just thought of, about temptation.
Irritation pricks under my skin as Winslet slides even closer, her off-white dress rising up and hitting mid-thigh.
You can’t use me to get to him.
