Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
My vision cleared completely.
“Why are you calling me?” I whispered.
“Why haven’t you eaten all day, Violet?”
I frowned at the road in front of me. “How do you know that?”
“You told me, before explaining the difference between the Mexican places.”
I let out a sigh. “I’ve been busy.”
“You shouldn’t be too busy to fuckin’ eat, baby,” he grunted.
“You shouldn’t care,” I snapped. “Don’t even get me started on the things you shouldn’t be doing. Riding a motorcycle without a helmet … recipe for a brain injury if you don’t die immediately. And smoking. Like, who smokes anymore? Yes, it may look cool, and you pull it off like a bearded, biker James Dean, but the lung cancer is not cool or sexy.” I sucked in a deep breath. “And don’t call me baby,” I added as an afterthought.
There was a long silence on the phone, and I feared for a moment that he’d hung up. Anxiety crept up my throat.
“How far are you from home?” he asked, obviously choosing not to argue with me at this point.
I let out a dramatic sigh.
“Ten minutes, maybe less if I go a little faster.”
“Don’t drive any fuckin’ faster,” he ordered.
Something skipped inside of me at the firmness of his words, remembering when he’d demanded I take off my dress.
Though I liked to think I was in the driver’s seat of my own life—and right now I was literally in the driver’s seat—something inside me relaxed when Elden took control.
I let off the gas just a little.
“Are you going to hang up now?” I asked in a small voice, terrified that I’d lose him.
“No, Violet,” he replied firmly. “I’m gonna be right here until you pull up to your house.”
Something inside of me relaxed. No, everything inside of me relaxed.
The rain battering the windshield was the only sound for a long time. “Are you afraid of anything?” I finally asked.
There was a small pause before he answered. “Besides somethin’ happenin’ to you?”
My heart skipped, and I did my best not to latch onto that
“I’m afraid of small spaces,” he admitted in a low voice. “Of being locked in somewhere. Trapped somewhere. My room at the clubhouse is barely big enough to keep me sane.”
I digested that information, my body rebelling at the thought of him fighting against panic by just living in his room at the club. I held onto that information tightly, wanting to tattoo it somewhere so it could be mine forever.
“Why don’t you live somewhere else, then?” I asked him. “Somewhere bigger.”
“Because there’s nowhere else for me to go. The club is my home.”
My heart spasmed at this admission, at the vulnerability in his tone. The club, for whatever reason, whatever was in his past that I wasn’t brave enough to ask about, was all he had. And I was jeopardizing that. Me wanting him could take that all away. Swiss was a more established member of the club, he had more rights. That’s what I assumed at least.
“How old are you?” I asked the question that would make things all the more difficult between us. I knew he was older. The lines in his weathered skin told me that, the silver in his chocolate hair told me that. But ‘too old for me’ was a vague concept and I needed to know numbers. Not that it would make any difference.
“Thirty-five,” he said without hesitation, his tone hard.
I sucked my teeth. There it was. The number. Sixteen years between us. My mom had had me by that age.
Not that it mattered to me. If anything, the stretch of time, how it made this all the more forbidden, it made me want to sink my nails deeper into this. Into us. Yes, that was fucked up, but I didn’t give a shit.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive, but he was there. I could hear him breathing against the sound of the rain.
“Elden,” I whispered, putting the car in park. “Why did you call me?”
The rain poured on the roof of my car as I waited for his answer.
“Because, baby, you don’t like to drive in the rain,” he murmured. Then he was gone.
I sat in the car for a long time after that. Maybe even would have all day if Sariah hadn’t come up with a leopard print umbrella, knocking on my window.
“Bitch!” she called through the glass. “You better not be letting those burritos get cold, or they will never find your body.”
So then there were burritos. Henri made margaritas. We watched movies and got drunk. I fell asleep on the sofa. Ollie woke me up at three in the morning on one of her trips to the fridge.
I stumbled to my own room, collapsing on the bed, only then remembering Elden’s last words to me with the patter of rain on the roof.