Page 27 of Cruel Demands

She learns almost nothing about me, not my last name or my work. She doesn’t learn about the guards stationed around the bar since before she noticed me or I noticed her. She doesn’t notice them even now, something that scares me.

She’s forgotten about her little friends, Petyr and Anya, hasn’t noticed that Petyr has left or that Anya keeps checking her phone and glancing toward us with open worry. Anya has nothing to worry about. I have already decided that I should leave without touching her.

The server returns. I order water for Taylor and when it arrives, I push it toward her.

She stares at it like I have insulted her. “Subtle.”

“Drink.”

She touches the rim with her finger and looks at me, eyes wide and unblinking, slightly hazy with the alcohol in her system and snickers. “Bossy boy.”

Her finger, wet with ice water, creeps toward my nose. I catch her wrist. “Man,” I correct her before letting her go. “But yes.”

“Mmm, you should work on that,” she says with a long blink. She pulls the straw to her mouth, and I try not to think of the things going through my mind, the way her lips would look puckered around my thumb or my cock.

I run my tongue over my teeth and look away quickly, pushing my nails into my wrist. “No.”

She laughs again and drinks the water. Obedience looks good on her. She could tell me to go to hell. I suspect she would enjoy doing it. Instead, she drinks because she knows she should, because I told her to, because the line between those two things has started to blur and she is curious where it leads.

Then Taylor leans forward, chin resting in her hand, and says, “You’re lonely.”

I still. The words are soft, so soft they’re almost swallowed whole by the music in the bar. “What did you say?” I ask her, my eyes cutting toward her so hard that she pulls back like I struck her.

She makes no apologies. “You’ve been watching everyone in this room like you’re outside of it,” she continues. “Like you’re waiting for someone to surprise you and they keep disappointing you.”

No one speaks to me this way anymore. My mother, perhaps, when she is in enough pain to forget caution. Olga Dobrovaa tries sometimes, but even she wraps truth in policy and principles. She does not put her hand directly into the wound and press.

Taylor does. Accidentally, maybe. Or maybe because she is drunk and young and foolish enough to mistake honesty for bravery.

I lean closer to her to whisper in her ear, and I feel her breathing change as she stirs to sit upright. I move her hair away from her neck. “You should be careful,” I say.

“I know.”

“No. You do not.”

She looks at my mouth. Only once. But once is enough. I stand. “We should go,” I say.

Her throat moves. “We?”

“You can go back to your friend,” I tell her. “Or you can come with me.”

I should not give her the choice. Rather, I should not want her to choose me.

Taylor looks over her shoulder. Anya is at the table alone now, watching us with her phone clutched in her hand. Petyr is gone. The empty shot glasses remain. A little circle of ordinary life, waiting for Taylor to step back into it. She could. She should. I would let her.

I hate myself a little for knowing that.

Taylor turns back to me. “How far?” she asks.

“Not far.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No.”

“Are you always like this?”

“Yes.”