AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He smiles. “I haven’t. But I want an in-depth tour the next time that I’m here.”
Next time.
He crouches beside me again and murmurs, “I want to look inside every single one of these drawers”, as he runs his fingers down their ridges. I shiver like he’s running his fingers over me.
He grins.
Tate pushes himself up and carefully eases my glasses from my face. He sets them on the dresser the right way up, whichmakes my OCD shudder with delight, and then he leans over, covering me in the warm smell of his golden skin. He presses a firm kiss to the top of my cheekbone as he whispers me goodbye.
My cheek tingles even after he slips out of the house. I fall asleep with the feeling of his warm palm pressing heat and pleasure deep into my womb.
Chapter 11
Present
Mitch is keeping me under intense surveillance now. As my punishment for “deliberate incitement” I have to stay back at school each afternoon until Mitch finishes work for the day at my mom’s, and then he picks me up, takes me to his place, and sends me to my room.
What he fails to realise is that this is pretty much what I did every day anyway, so essentially the only change is that he is now giving me a lift home.
The one thing that Iamdisappointed about is the fact that I am not allowed to attend the Halloween dance anymore. I’m okay to help set it up on the night, but then I’m getting picked up and – surprise, surprise – sent back to my room. I hadn’t really wanted to go in the first place, but now that the option has been taken away – especially after all of my artistic investments – it has given me a good reason to mope about whenever I see Mitch.
My other punishment is that Mitch wants me to help out with his business and “earn my keep”, which is obviously just code for “provide free labour”. It’s notmyfault that Tate can’t control his rabid hormones.
Mitch is sat with me at his kitchen table, showing me his very basic website. I tell him that it matches him perfectly and now I’m sentenced to washing his dishes for the rest of the week on top of all of my other punishments too.
I placate him, mainly to try and undo the dishes situation. “Yes, I can fix it,” I say. “It would be handy if you could provide some before and after refurb pics, and maybe some photos of the team so that buyers know what they’re getting.” I don’t tell him that I’m picturing his entire crew standing shirtless around a truck, holding planks of wood over their swollen sweaty shoulders. “If you give me the email login details I can set up a few social pages too, to spread a bit of awareness across the channels.”
Mitch is distractedly thumbing the Halloween dance poster that I designed.
“Is this what you’re gonna do at college?” he asks.
I pull a face and shake my head. “No,” I mumble. I don’t actually see the point of going to college to “study” about a skill that I already have, not to mention all of the limbs that I’ll have to sell to fund it, but I know that in the real world you have to prove yourself with a college name and a grade sheet if you want to get a job. None of this matters anyway because I’ve been prepped to do exactly what my mom wanted of me since before I even started high school.
He nods but doesn’t say anything. Then he puts down the poster and says, “Okay, you’re hired.” The “for free” is unspoken here.
After Mitch and I work out the basics, I trudge up to my bedroom and scrunch myself onto the quilt, pulling off my glasses and smushing my face into the cotton.
“Uggghhhhhh,” I groan and I pull my slippers off with my toes. It’s grizzly outside, not raining but heavily overcast, and my window is open a crack, filling up the room with pinching cold air. I roll over just so that I can pull my school sweater over my head when there’s a knock on my door.
I sit bolt upright. I fumble with my glasses until they’re back on my face and I flatten my sweater back down.
“Yes?” I ask. Why is my heart in my throat?
The door opens a couple of inches and Tate is standing before me. Faded denim jeans and a t-shirt clearly selected to antagonise. The veins in his tan forearms are bulging, meaning that he must have been going pretty hard at the refurb today. We also now have matching wounded hands wrapped up in gauze, due to my incident with Mitch’s truck and Tate’s scene at the motorbike race. Even though I shouldn’t care, I feel a hot flicker in my stomach knowing that I still illicit some primal hold over him. He’s holding a toolbox in one hand, and he’s gripping the top of the doorframe with the other.
He holds up the box. “You want me to fit that lock in your door?”
I’m clutching onto the quilt for dear life. His voice is so deep I can feel it in my bones. Mainly my pelvic bones.
I narrow my eyes on him anyway. “Fine,” I say, and I roll onto my stomach so that I don’t have to look at him.
I hear him suck in a breath behind me and then the floorboards sound as he steps back out of the room. I glance over my shoulder and I see that he has partially closed the door so that he can start unscrewing the pieces on the outside handle. Only the large curve of his right shoulder is currently visible so I do a quick sweep of my room to check for anything incriminating. The little wooden bookcase next to my bed is probably one of those things. I nimbly lean forward and fling my pyjama top over it.
I shuffle back against the pillows and pick up the college brochures that I’ve been collecting from the school library. I wasn’t lying when I told Kit that I would apply for the places with the best scholarships, even if it is unlikely that I get one of them. It’ll be good to leave this town, even if my soul is begging me to stay.
After a few minutes the door is pushed open again and Tate is standing there, hesitant and rigid. “Can I come in?” he asks, his voice stiff.
He hasn’t been in this room since it becamemyroom. I feel like if I invite him in he’ll suddenly reveal that he’s a vampire and suck out all of my blood. I look at the perfect white teeth biting into his bottom lip and I picture them sinking lusciously into my neck.
