Page 38 of Boardroom Mask

The press of his body against mine.

The helplessness of dangling here.

The lusty, animal dominance of being held up against a wall by someone who could crush me and won’t—yet.

“You done?” I drawl, infusing my voice with all theI don’t give a fuck-ness I possess.

Somewhere deep in the back of my brain, a quiet alarm is going off. Iknowthis game I’ve suddenly found myself playing. I’ve read about it in those dark romance novels I pretend I only consume ironically. We all understand what happens to the mouthy heroine who pushes and pushes and pushes, not because she wants the monster to leave, but because she needs the monster tostay. To push back. To break through, because she can’t open the door herself.

Ican’t open the door myself.

That’s the cold, hard reality of it, isn’t it? I no longer know how to ask for what I want. I don’t know how to saytouch meorhold meorI’m drowning and I need someone to pull me out.The version of me who could ask for those things, if she ever even existed, is trapped inside one of those locked rooms in my heart. She’s been in there for five long, lonely years.

So instead, I provoke, I poke, I sneer, I snap, I gnash, and I dare this stalker to be a man and fuckingdosomething about it, because ifhebreaks through, then I didn’t have to ask.

He’ll just kick the door down himself.

I’m aware that this is not healthy. I’m using a masked intruder as some kind of psychological locksmith. Any half-decent therapist would have a field day with this.

But awareness and control are two very different things. Right now, I have plenty of the former and not a whit of the latter.

The Masked Man watches my brain whirl. Then his eyes change. The rage drains out and something else takes its place. That amusement rears up, bright and hot and highly pleased with itself.

“You know what’s interesting, little fox?” he murmurs. “If I’m so evil and you loathe me so much… then why haven’t you called the police?”

I go to reply, but my throat is suddenly frozen. He sees it andknows.

“You’ve got a phone. You’ve got neighbors. You’ve got a voice that carries—trust me, I’ve heard you use it.” He leans his head to gaze at me from a new vantage point. “But you haven’t screamed for help. Not once. You haven’t even tried.”

I swallow.

“Why is that?” he teases. “Hm?”

I don’t have an answer. I have a hundred answers, but none of them are the right one, and heknowsit.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” His face stretches into a vicious grin.

His free hand drops from the wall beside my head. I think he’s going to let me go.

That’s not what happens.

Instead, his hand dives down and plunges inside my pajama bottoms and the underwear beneath. His fingertip rakes through my sex and find me bare and wet. I make a sound that I will despise myself for until the day I die.

He doesn’t move his hand after that. It’s one step farther than what he did last night. We’ve passed the clothes now, but still, he just holds it there, cupping me, feeling what my body has been doing this entire time while my mouth was pretending it wasn’t.

Then he pulls his hand out.

He holds his fingers up between us. They’re glistening. He looks at them, then at me. Then, without breaking eye contact, he puts two fingers in his mouth and licks them clean.

“This, Ms. Pierce, doesn’t taste like fear.”

14

JILLIAN

“I want to fuck you like an animal / I want to feel you from the inside”

— “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails