ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(60)

Which made me think of Murray and his slobber.

My situation hadn’t changed all that much. I was in a small house. I was babysitting. There was a dog.

Except it wasn’t the right house or the right dog or…the right person.

It was, however, the first time I’d gotten to spend time with a girl my age, who I wasn’t imagining one hundred different ways to kill. Okay, maybe for like the first month or so tops, but after that, it was actually okay. It helped that Thia was a good shot. We’d spent hours a day and many boxes of bullets f*cking shit up together. And there was no pretending at all. No having to be someone else.

You weren’t pretending with Nolan.

I thought about him every other memory. Everything I saw made me want to tell him about it. I wanted to tell him about the grove, about Thia. I thought about when he’d told me about his parents. The overwhelming feeling I’d had to both comfort and devour him.

While Thia was asleep, I’d patrol the grove and wonder what he was doing…and how much he hated me. With time, I thought all the feelings and urges Nolan had brought out in me would die back down, but if anything they’d only grown stronger. Every memory of our time together had me wound tighter and tighter until my nighttime patrols turned into jogs and then sprints for hours.

Nothing relieved the ache.

Not the one in my chest.

Not the one between my legs.


Some tall, skinny guy in a suit showed up at the grove one day with a file in his hand. I could tell right away he wasn’t who he said he was when he tried to pass Thia the file and I spotted the Bastards’ skull symbol tattooed on the top of his hand.

Long story short, I invited him in. Stabbed him through his hand and tied him to a chair.

It felt good to be back in the game. Back to doing what I was good at, but it also felt empty. Darker.

I had been contemplated hanging the son of a bitch I’d stabbed in the hand, because why the f*ck not? When my phone buzzed in my sports bra, I didn’t answer because I was kind of busy and it was the phone reserved for parental units only. But it kept buzzing and buzzing and it wouldn’t stop.

I huffed and pulled it out, ready to tell them I was busy and I’d call them back. But it wasn’t a call at all. It was a picture text. The same picture sent over and over and over again.

Nolan.

It was a selfie. He looked very much like he did the day I first came to his house. A huge, ridiculous smile on his face. The dimple as deep as ever. Scruff along his square jaw.

How did he get this number?

That’s when I saw it.

I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand. I made an excuse to Thia about a selfie bat signal, and I’m positive that whatever I told her made no sense whatsoever. It was the very first time I left a job mid-torture, or mid-anything for that matter.

What initially had made my heart skip a beat and my stomach flutter, turned into something so dark within seconds. Nolan’s selfie was no selfie at all. He had his back to a refrigerator with pictures and recipes stuck to it with all sorts of magnets.

But it wasn’t his kitchen he was standing in.

It was my parents’.

I ran through the grove, hopped onto my scooter, and sped off. I’d never wished I owned something faster before that day. My palms were sweating. The burn that usually started as a simmer was a full blown f*cking fire by the time I hit the only stop sign in town.

Nolan stoked the fire more when, in the same type of letter magnets I’d used to leave him my good-bye message, he had one of his own written out for me on my parents’ fridge.

FUCK YOU

HOPE





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX




Rage


All the lights were off when I got to my parents’ house. I’d parked my scooter up the street and slung my bag around my shoulders. With my gun drawn, I crawled along the fence until I rounded the house to the backyard.

In the dark, I snuck up the back steps of the porch one by one when I spotted him sitting in a chair in the corner.

Waiting.

I aimed my gun and crept up the stairs slowly and quietly until I was standing right behind Nolan. My gun cocking was the only sound.

“It took you long enough…HOPE,” Nolan said, without turning around.

“Where the f*ck are my parents?” I asked, pushing the gun into the back of his head. “If you hurt them, I’m going to do things to you that your f*cking nightmares are too scared to come up with.”

Nolan chuckled dark and deep, but there was no humor about it, or about him. “Your threats are…adorable.” He stood and turned around, kicking the chair off to the side. My gaze darted to the gun in his hand. “Tell me, Hope, were you going to threaten me before or after you killed me back at the cottage?”

“I wasn’t going to kill you—” I started, but Nolan interrupted.

“Bullshit!”

“You didn’t let me finish!” I yelled, not caring if I woke up every neighbor on the block. “I wasn’t going to kill you until I got the order. Lucky for you, it never came.”

Nolan gazed up and down my body. “No, but I remember how you felt when you did. On my fingers. On my tongue.”

My nipples went hard instantly. I hoped he couldn’t see, but when his eyes lingered on my chest and he licked his bottom lip, I knew he had.