Page 16 of Little Deaths
When she felt the tickle of something at the back of her neck, she jumped, eyes flaring open in alarm. But—no, it was just her hair, coming loose from its bun. He must have loosened it when he’d put the flower in.
“Did you know?”
The question was overly loud in the silence and made her pause in the act of tying her hair back in a loose ponytail with unsteady hands. “Did I know what?”
“What he’d done to the wine.”
“No, I—”
Donni paused. A memory sliced into her, with enough force to draw blood.
It was one of Marco’s awful getting-to-know-you parties in that equally awful living room. His friends were all dicks: stuffy and full of themselves, and handsy when drunk. There was always one person like that at cast parties—an aging actor who came “from a different time,” or a director everyone liked too much to chide—but Marco’s friends had no such accolades with which to gild their laurels. They were just talentless dicks.
She had always needed several glasses of wine herself to get through such an evening, especially when they inevitably got around to talking about her movies with that sly tone that all men seemed to get whenever they’d seen you naked.
At the one that she was remembering, Michael Banner had cornered her because he had wanted to talk aboutSatan’s Key, and she had been more furious than normal because the female body he was busily objectifying wasn’t even hers, it wasAngie’s.
She had reached for a gold-colored wine in a tall thin glass, resisting the urge to bash it over the man’s head, and Marco had appeared out of nowhere and said, loudly, “Donni, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
He’d punctuated it with a laugh, so all his friends would join in, chastising the wife, what a fun game, and she had fled to the kitchen to compose herself, because she had been mad enough to scream.
But now, sitting in Rafe’s car, she could feel her skin becoming clammy. Beads of sweat turned to ice as she revisited that moment, the haste with which he’d plucked away the wine.
He’d berated her about her drinking a handful of other times, always when she reached for a glass of sweet white. Since it usually happened at the end of the evening, she had thought it stemmed from a need for control: to put her in her place and remind her that, in this house at least, the stage was his. And maybe it was that, at least in part. But maybe it was because he had known, even then, that some of his wines weren’t fit to consume.
“No,” she whispered, the knowledge piercing through the fog of alcohol like a poisoned blade, and Rafe looked over at her, fingering his pendant, before turning back to the road.
“I didn’t think so.”
When they pulled up to her dark house on the dusty little stretch of St. Anne’s Road, Donni could barely speak around the lump that had formed in her throat. She fairly threw herself out of the car in her haste to get away from that oppressive chill, spilling all those bright orange flowers to the dirt shoulder of the road, and shuddered anew at the caress of the damp fall breeze on her skin that was barely any warmer, and carried a faint hint of the plasticky, smoky smell of fake fireplace logs.
Rafe gripped her lightly by her upper arms and spun her around. Even in her heels, he was taller. That was such a strange part of seeing a man grow up from a boy. Getting used to looking up instead of down. Seeing that vulnerability in their gaze crystallize and harden before breaking off like a chunk of rock lost to a wine-dark sea. What, she wondered, had happened to the boy who used to hold his mother’s hands so tenderly?
When he pulled her forward by the collar of her blouse, she steeled herself for violence, but his thumbs merely stroked over her collarbones and that was somehow worse than the tear of fabric because of how poorly braced she was for it.
“So beautiful.” With a low, eager sound, he gave her blouse a tug, untucking it from her skirt and she stepped back from him so quickly that she nearly lost her balance and several buttons popped off and were lost to the dark. “I’ve wanted this for so fucking long.”
The raw note in his voice sent something bright and painful arcing through her that could have been stardust or razor wire. She clapped a hand over her gaping blouse. The skimpy bra concealed very little and when his eyes dipped to her chest, they lingered. She pulled the blazer closed.
An unsteady breath escaped him, a puff of warm air quickly swallowed up by the cold. “Kiss me.”
“No.” She pushed him, aware that when he moved it was only because he wanted to but glad to deny him, nonetheless. “That’s the thing about whores,” she said coldly. “They don’t have to do a damn thing until they’re paid.”
“Is that so.”
He stepped forward, slow and predatory, causing her hands to slide up his shirt. Before she could skitter away again, something slid roughly into the cup of her bra, gouging at her nipple.
A fifty-dollar bill.
“Kiss me,” he repeated, his tone dark.
Her eyes slid up to his in outrage only to have his mouth crush against hers. His fingers slid into her hair, cupping her head, as the other hand pressed her palm against the front of his jeans. He rocked into her and she gasped and tried to pull away, alarmed at how he filled her cupped fingers.
He squeezed her breast before letting her retreat, stepping back and sliding his hand into his pocket with a smile as she yanked the bill angrily out of her bra and slapped him with it.
“Satisfied, bastard?”
“Not even close,” he responded smoothly, sending a chill down her back. “That only made me want more.”