Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(3)
“Who the hell you talkin’ to?” he slurred.
I closed the lid of the laptop. “No one, Dev. I’m writing.”
He threw his keys on the breakfast bar and held out his hand. “Gimme it.”
I held my computer against my chest. I was telling the truth. I had rewritten three chapters of my novel but hadn’t saved them yet. “No,” I told him, standing.
I should have felt inadequately prepared, standing there barefoot in my tank top and shorts while Devin Berlin coiled strength into his considerable muscles. He was drunk, slow, but still dangerous.
“You think I don’t know,” he growled, “about all the f*cks you get on the side, Sweet Say?”
I closed my eyes. Sweet Say. His nickname for me. Once it had been endearing. Now it only sounded lethal.
“I haven’t been with anyone but you since we met. You know that, Devin. Now why don’t you go sleep off your liquid paranoia and we’ll talk in the morning.” My voice fought with my nerves, trying to stay casual. Something more than my nose had already broken in me. And as I watched Devin’s mind sorting through the rage of this imaginary betrayal, I realized it would always come back to this. There was no way out but to leave. There was no time other than now.
I held my computer tighter and tried to smile at my boyfriend. I had no intention on talking to him in the morning. The reason was because I had no intention of even being there in the morning.
He reached me so quickly I didn’t even have time to flinch. I could smell the mix of smoke and liquor on him. It used to make me hot, just like it used to make me hot when Devin would push his hand crudely between my legs and inside my panties.
“Tell me a bedtime story first,” he grinned, fingering me rudely and roughly. It wasn’t a request.
Repulsed, I twisted away. There was nothing erotic about any of this. The feel of his fingers groping inside my body was vile. But as I saw his eyes glaze with fury I knew I had waited too long. I should have left sooner.
Devin grabbed the laptop out of my arms. Reflexively, I cried out as he held it over his head and slammed it into the marble floor. It landed with a cracking thud and I lashed out, pushing my palms into his hard chest.
“Asshole!” I screamed.
When Devin clocked me in the face he was clumsy. Otherwise it would have been worse. Still, the blow stung and left me off balance so that I toppled face first into the buttery leather sofa. Devin was immediately on top of me, all hands and hot breath as he ripped my shorts off. I struggled mightily but he pinned my arms and I felt him growing hard, pushing relentlessly against the soft flesh of my backside.
I twisted my head, saying his name, trying to get him to hear me. “Devin. No. Fucking stop it, Devin.”
“Filthy slut,” he groaned, getting harder as I tried in vain to kick him off. “How many boys you give it to, Sweet Say?”
I thrashed. I was wild, desperate. The feel of his dick trying to pry me open was revolting. “I hate you. Sick bastard! I hate you! Get the f*ck off me!”
“You love me, Say. Aw shit, you’re tight.”
My mind screamed. All the times he’d been abusive he’d never done this. I’d realized some time ago how it was all bound together with him, the violence and the sex. But I was always willing. Perhaps if I hadn’t been he would have done this brutal thing sooner. The thought unleased a primal ferocity which coursed through my blood like fire.
I’d always heard stories of people in extreme circumstances who find themselves, just for a moment, endowed with superior strength. A soccer mom pinned under her overturned SUV. An elderly man fighting off a pack of attacking pit bulls. As I writhed under Devin’s cruel violation I became that surge of adrenaline. I rolled my head into my chest and reared back with a great gasp of power. The back of my hard skull caught him under the chin and he wavered, dazed. One swift elbow in the gut later and he’d fallen on the floor, his dick flopping around idiotically.
Naked and furiously wronged, I stood and calmly picked up a beach-weathered end table. I’d never been a strong girl and Devin was twice my size. His hideously handsome face held something close to surprise as he watched me raise it above my head. I wasn’t Saylor McCann formed out of a shitty prison town in the desert. I was powerful, a goddess of vengeance. I brought that thing crashing down on top of him with the strength of five angry women. Just then the most satisfying sound in the world was the impact of wood cracking over flesh. As he screeched like a pig I even found myself smiling.
“Fuck!” he howled. “You broke my f*cking arm. Bitch,” he spat.
Devin was floundering at my feet, still drunk and now with his right arm bent at a cruel angle. A leg of the table had broken off and I grabbed it, holding the thing like a baseball bat and enjoying the way he cowered at the sight of me.
I tapped his sweaty forehead with the table leg. “I’m leaving,” I told him plainly, “and if you try to stop me I’ll break something else. Something more important.”
Devin glared at me hatefully. I could almost read the disjointed outrage churning behind his dark eyes as if he’d spoken the words aloud. Sorry ass bitch lucky I stuck it to her all this time should have tossed her snatch out months ago.
I stood and felt oddly clear headed. I needed to get out. Now, before he was done stewing in his pain.
With one eye on my sprawling ex-boyfriend and the other feverishly packing a duffel bag, I warily held the impromptu bat in case Devin got a burst of adrenaline to call his own. With breathless haste I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and grabbed a shoebox of my most treasured possessions; a small army of thumb drives holding everything I’d written since the age of ten. I’d always meant to upload it all to a more secure location. As soon as I figured out where I was going, that’s what I would do.