Page 93 of Total Obsession

To hear him actually admit to me that my theories had been correct was almost more than my brain could handle.

"Why?" I finally said after several moments of silence.

"I promise I'll explain all of it to you, Zoey," he said. "Right now, I just need to get us somewhere safe."

"No!" I demanded. "Tell me why. Tell me why right now!"

I could see him look at me in the rearview mirror. Those green eyes that I once loved looking into made my skin crawl now.

"Because love makes us do really stupid things sometimes," he said.

I curled my lip at him. "Don't say that word to me."

We didn't say another word to one another for the next thirty minutes while Axe drove us out of the city. He pulled the car up to a seedy-looking motel somewhere over the bridge in New Jersey.

"Stay here," he said to me, getting out of the car. I sat in the darkness, the silence pressing against my ears. I tried to wriggle my hands against the restraints again, but I already knew it was useless.

Within a few minutes, Axe had returned. He opened my door and pulled the knife that had previously been in his shoulder out of his pocket. I curled away from him, not sure what he was going to do to me, but he simply cut my restraints open.

"I could run away, you know," I said to him as I got out of the car.

"You could," he replied, his breath visible in the air in front of him. "And where would you go? With what money?"

I used the opportunity to hurl another wad of spit onto his cheek. Something had cracked within me.

I wasn't afraid of him.

I wasn't afraid of anyone.

And, I wasn't afraid of dying.

thirty

ZOEY

He didn't pay me any attention. Instead, he just wiped the moisture off his face and said, "this way."

I followed him to one of the rooms on the second floor. He opened the door and the overwhelming stench of cigarettes hit my nose. The place was otherwise fairly clean, but some smells you just couldn't get out of the walls.

There was only one bed in the center of the room, and I made my way over to it. "You can sleep on the floor," I said to him.

"That's fine," he said in a tone that I couldn't stand.

I made my way over to the one large window at the front of the room to look out at our surroundings.

"Don't," he said quickly, jumping up. He nudged me to the side and closed the blinds and the shades tightly, locking us inside.

"Excuse me?" I said to him, putting my hands on my hips. "You're not the boss of me. Not now, not ever again! If I want to look out the window, I'll damn well look out the window."

"Zoey," he began to say, but I'd had enough of him trying to control me. I pushed against him, and he winced in pain stumbling backward and away from the pane of glass.

I really wanted to get under his skin and push him to his limits. I didn't have a care in the world anymore. My adrenaline was running so high that I wasn't sure I was even thinking straight.

I all but ripped open the curtains, letting the street lamps from the completely empty parking lot of this shithole motel shine into the room, and promptly lifted my top, flashing absolutely no one in the parking lot.

Axe growled from behind me as he regained his footing. He was standing in front of me before I even had a chance to do anything about it, once again closing the blinds shut. He turned around, and I was still standing there with my tits out and a smug smirk on my face.

"Are you fucking out of your mind?" he said menacingly.

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