Page 6 of Driving My Obsession

“Yeah.”

He scoffs. “You’re too pretty to be a whore.”

I don’t even know how to respond to that. This backhanded compliment is borderline offensive. I’m not a whore. If I was, I’d have fucked Jake for the money by now.

I cover myself with the skirt of my jacket. “I’m guessing you won?” I ask, pointing toward his hand.

“I always win.”

“I see you’re quite modest.” I fidget with my jacket. “What’s your name?”

He swallows, as if this question is wholly unexpected. I suppose most hitchhikers don’t reach for pleasantries. “Ambrose,” he says. “What’s yours?”

I consider lying, but I’m too tired to fabricate something on the spot. “Oaklyn.”

“Is that your real name or your stage name?”

“My real name.” God, he’s a dick. “You’re being kind of rude,” I tell him.

A hauntingly handsome smirk slides onto his face and twists the thin scar beside his mouth. I should ask him about his face. It’s only fair. But I push the question down in my gut and leave it alone. It’s none of my business, and I don’t want to piss him off, even if he’s bordering on that with me.

Like a ship drawn to a lighthouse on a rocky shore, his dark eyes keep drifting to me. He looks at me as if he’s imagining how my shift went. In his version, I’m probably bouncing on dicks all night. He couldn’t be more wrong, so he should keep his eyes to himself.

He turns onto my street, and I sit up taller. “You can drop me off here,” I say. I’m not a complete idiot. If he doesn’t know where I live, he can’t storm into my house and murder me.

“Don’t be ridiculous. If I want to know which place is yours, I can just sit here and watch which home you enter.”

He has a point.

I take a deep breath. “It’s that gray trailer on the right, just past the house with the basketball hoop in the driveway.”

He pulls against the curb in front of my trailer and puts the Jeep in park.

“Thanks for the ride,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. When I’ve closed the car door behind me, he throws the Jeep in reverse and leaves me in front of my trailer without waiting to see if I go inside. But at least he didn’t kill me and put my skin on a blow-up doll, so that’s a plus. As his taillights fade and disappear, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.

Probably not.

ChapterFour

Ambrose

Anger simmers, boiling within my veins. I shouldn’t have picked up a girl like her outside of a place like that. I let her out and hightailed it out of there before I did something I’d regret. Or that I wouldn’t regret at all. She seemed like the perfect victim for my plan, but I haven’t thought through all the details yet. I need more time to come up with the perfect way to exact my revenge. That’s why I let her live tonight. I’m not yet ready to unleash this black monster inside me.

I don’t know why it has to be her, but it does. It’s not her fault the other dancers ignored and avoided me as if my skin imperfections were contagious. She wasn’t the one who pushed my money back toward me like it was soiled. But she still wears skimpy little outfits and dances for men much worse than me who just look more normal. Close enough.

Fucking. Whores. Just like the woman who carved me up with a butcher knife.

I drive toward home, stewing in my frustration with every mile marker I pass. I rub at my cut knuckles and anticipate a hot shower to wash away the dry, sticky blood. When I pull into the apartment parking lot, I take a deep breath before getting out of my Jeep. The late-night stragglers milling about outside turn and stare. Their judgmental eyes go from my face to my hands and back to my face again. I bark at them as I pass, and they look away. They didn’t care if they made me uncomfortable, but the moment the shoe slid onto the other foot, they got to feel that pointy rock of discomfort grinding against their sensitive skin.

I begin pulling off clothes the moment I step inside my silent apartment. My leather jacket. My shirt. My shoes. The undershirt I put on after my fights. My fingers work open my jeans, and I step out of them without missing a beat. By the time I reach the bathroom, I’m down to my boxers. Such simple tasks seem so monumental when my body is racked with this much tension. I’m always tense after a fight, but that girl made it so much worse. The familiar scent she emitted sent a lead weight into the pit of my stomach. Like sweat and old liquor. Stale.

They all have that smell.

I turn on the shower as high as it goes and climb beneath the spray. The hot water attacks my skin and matches the heat in my veins. The caked blood dissolves from my hand and circles the drain, but I wish there was so much more. I stare at the white porcelain until I can almost see a rush of red instead of the pale pink tinge. I imagine rinsing off my body after picking up a woman like Oaklyn. My brain conjures up fantasies of what I’d have to do to her to coat myself in that much blood. It lands on my favorite imagining: a butcher knife carving up skin. She would beg for me to stop, but I wouldn’t. My attacker didn’t stop, either.

Then I see Oaklyn’s face in my mind. Terrified, tear-filled eyes. Mouth moving as she asks why. I only have one answer for her.

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