“Shit, it’s eleven thirty,” Tatum said with a laugh. “We slept for like, fourteen hours!”
My heart leapt. No – it stopped. Ceased to beat. Forgot to pump blood around my body or oxygen to my brain. My ears rang and my breath caught in my throat with enough force to drown me. Here was the panic I should have been feeling from the moment I woke up in this fucking closet. Here was the thing that would drown me in suffering for the rest of the fucking day and beyond.
“No,” I growled.
Tatum looked down at me with wide eyes as she seemed to catch on to my mood.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” she began, but I sat up so quickly that she cut herself off with a gasp of fright as she suddenly found me in her face.
“Not that big of a deal?” I hissed, wrenching my wrist out of her grip and turning the watch to face me.
She was right. Eleven thirty. Thirty minutes past eleven.
It’s gone to shit.
There’s no fixing this.
There’s nowhere to hide from it.
No, no, no, nonononononono…
I gripped her waist and dumped her out of my lap onto her ass with a thud before standing and striding to the drawer which held my watches.
I pulled out the closest box and glared at the time on it before checking the next one. And the next.
“If four of them say it’s eleven thirty then it must be true,” Tatum pointed out. “But it’s really not so bad, it could be wor-”
“If the word worse leaves your lips, I swear to Christ, I won’t be held responsible for my actions,” I snarled, whirling on her.
Her.
The girl with the blonde hair and blue eyes and a smile that could cut right through me. The girl with a body I couldn’t stop thinking about and the balls to go toe to toe with me again and again and again. The girl who came to me last night with her tears and her sorrow and her fucking mind games, who’d managed to trap me in this closet and allowed me to wake up in hell.
“Did you plan this?” I demanded, rounding on her and my breaths came in harsh pants as a vice seemed to tighten around my chest.
“Plan for you to find me sobbing with grief so that I could get you to sleep in a fucking closet with me?” she asked incredulously. “How the hell do you figure that out?”
I stared her down for a long moment. Every second I wasted threw my day off more. Each beat of my heart brought more chaos into my existence.
I clenched and unclenched my fists, grinding my jaw before twisting away from her and ripping my pants off without taking the time to release the button, just popping it right off with brute force and kicking them off as fast as I could. I threw them into the laundry basket in disgust as my hands started to shake with fury.
“Take it off,” I demanded, refusing to look her way while she was still wearing clothes intended for yesterday. “Right now.”
I threw my boxers into the laundry basket next, keeping my back to her as I quickly selected a new pair from my drawer along with clean sweatpants before pulling them on. I felt marginally better once that was dealt with, but it wasn’t enough.
She stayed silent behind me but movement in the corner of my eye told me she’d dropped my old shirt like I’d requested.
I refused to think about the fact that she was now naked behind me as I stalked towards her clothes, selecting a matching red silk bra and panties for her and tossing them over my shoulder.
This was her fault, she’d lured me in here. Intentionally or not. Without her I wouldn’t have ended up sleeping in a fucking closet. I wouldn’t have slept through my music and I wouldn’t have…slept…
I looked over my shoulder at her with wild eyes and she tilted her head like she could fucking see me.
“I should have slept in your bed last night,” she said slowly. “And I didn’t.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat as I turned to face her fully. She’d pulled my shirt back on over the bra and panties, only hooking a few buttons back up and it looked so…perfectly imperfect on her.
“I feel like the demon in me will burn me alive from the inside out sometimes,” I rasped, wondering why I was even telling her that.
“It won’t,” she disagreed. “You just feel like that because your ritual has been sabotaged. By me. I broke your rule about sleeping in your bed. You just need to take back control.”
“Control?” I asked slowly, trying to make my brain function around this cloud of rage and chaos which was threatening to fucking consume me if I didn’t do something. If I didn’t-
“Punish me,” she said breathily and every part of me fell still. Even the darkness in me stopped and took note. Because I wanted that. I wanted that so fucking much it hurt.
“I…” I stepped back and pushed a hand through my hair as I tried to figure out if this was a good idea. I was so fucking angry that I didn’t know if I could control myself, yet I was tempted, seriously fucking tempted because the voices in my skull were screaming that this could be the answer I craved. “You need a safe word.”
Her eyes lit up. Honest to fucking God, lit up as I suggested that.
“Can it be utterly ridiculous?” she asked, biting her bottom lip.
“No,” I growled.
“Can it be cock-munching-honey-badger?”
“No.”
“Super-dicks-unite?”
“No.”
“Hail-Saint-Lord-of-spanking?”
“How many times do you want to end up being punished?” I demanded as her eyes danced with amusement.
