Page 9 of Red Hunt

“Again? Damn. I thought he was still in the hospital?”

“He is.”

“I can come by and visit him later this afternoon, but I won’t make it before then. Is he okay? And what about you? You okay?”

The anxious inflection in my sister’s voice annoyed and endeared me in equal proportions.

“He’s fine and I am, too.” And I was. I wasn’t as frail anymore as I’d been in the first few years after we’d come to live with Grandpa. I was fine. Stable enough to deal with the curveballs life threw at me like every other adult.

“Hey, I’m in a bind right now and need to get going. Talk to you later, ’kay?”

Tara dropped the call, but I kept the phone clenched between my shoulder and ear while I took a step toward the opening elevator, and just as I was about to enter, my phone slipped. I fumbled with the cake and the newspaper, and it all started to tumble.

Before I could make any rational decision on what to save first, the guy exiting the elevator rushed forward, caught my phone in midair as I moved, and I slammed into him.

It felt like hitting a wall. A deliciously smelling wall. But a wall, nonetheless. The guy was big—hard planes everywhere—and the only thing between us was the cake smashed against his T-shirt-clad stomach and mine…and then he grabbed me by my shoulders…hard.

Fear shot through my body like a bolt of lightning, and I froze. My vision turned spotty when my breathing involuntarily stopped, and I could feel blackness descend on me like a big curtain made of lead.

Too heavy to fight. Too dangerous to fight.

5

MILLI

I hovered there, suspended, not quite in my body, but also not outside. I was hyper-focused on his hands on me but fighting the black screen of hopelessness threatening to descend on me and the weakness in my knees. I sniffed, and his clean scent hit me. Somehow, it brought me back from the precipice. Soap, fresh laundry, a hint of musk. Not the stench of the dirty apartment I grew up in or the mixture of booze and rotten teeth breathing on me. I wasn’t a powerless little girl anymore. This wasn’t one of the men who came into my room at night. Acquaintances of my mother. Addicts, dealers, scum.

To do unspeakable things to me.

I struggled to get free and mushed the cake even more against his chest and abdomen, but I didn’t care. A moan, almost inhuman-sounding, escaped my lips. I needed him to let go of me. I was too close. Too close to when my body would shut down. When I would faint and not be able to defend myself.

He was emanating heat, close, too close.

It took him another moment, but then he must’ve realized I wasn’t feeling comfortable, so he set me free.

Literally picked me up by my upper arms and set me back a foot or so. Then he let go altogether and raised both his hands as if I was holding him at gunpoint. I observed all this almost as if I was a bystander, as if seeing it all from a distance. But at the same time, I was hyperaware of his every breath, his every move, as if there was some kind of invisible field of energy connecting us…surrounding us. It soothed me, helped me claw my way out of the tailspin of fear.

The distance helped, too. Slowly, my insides calmed down enough so I could finally take a full breath again. My gaze slowly grazed along jeans-clad legs and past a flat stomach and powerful chest with most of the cake still clinging to the white skull printed on his black T-shirt, right where the eye sockets would’ve been. The sleeves of his black T-shirt were stretched around bulging muscles. I followed a prominent vein that led alongside the inside of his arm down to his forearm and ended at his wrist and his big outstretched hand with my tiny-looking phone in it. If it weren’t for the freckled skin, he wouldn’t look real.

“Ahem.”

I looked up past his freckled throat, a red, scruffy five o’clock shadow covering the lower half of his face, with full, soft lips that held a lopsided grin, and into the strangest green eyes I’d ever seen. An iridescent light green with specs of…orange? Shit, was he a vampire or something? Then his mouth turned into a big grin with a row of blinding white teeth. He at least didn’t have fangs. I shook my head to clear those ridiculous thoughts out of my mind.

Fangs… God, silly much?

“Hey there, girly. You all right?” His gravelly, dark voice slid over my spine and left goose bumps in its wake. But strangely, not the fear-induced kind, more like a deep-bodily-awareness kind that replaced even more of my initial fear. But girly? Really? I was a woman. Only twenty-three but still and calling someone “girly” was a bit derogative.

“May I?” He held up the phone, then leaned forward, took my hand, and slipped it into my palm.

“Thank you, I’m okay. Sorry for your T-shirt.”

He looked down at himself, then took a swipe with his finger through the mess, drew it into his mouth, and sucked.

Holy hell.

Deep in my core, there was a corresponding squeezing sensation, and shivers raked down my body, making the hair on my arms stand up. And just like that, for the first time in my entire life, I felt honest-to-God sexual attraction. For a complete stranger.

Unbelievable.

---