Skin Deep by Adrienne Wilder

Author:Adrienne Wilder [Wilder, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Chapter 16

WHILE I knew Joe was only gone for a couple of minutes, it might as well have been hours. Every laugh or note of music up the block, every bit of trash skittering across the street, made me jump. I saw flesh dealers everywhere. Only in my mind, they’d been transformed from the average street-dwelling asshole to ten-foot-tall ogres, complete with yellowed broken teeth and bloodshot eyes.

It was ridiculous. I told myself how ridiculous it was. And yet they were there, in every crack and corner, where daylight failed to reach. I shut my eyes and willed my body to quit shaking, for my gut to unclench.

“Tay?”

The sound of Joe’s voice made me jerk back. He caught me before I could topple over. I blinked against the late-morning sun that backlit him into a darkened figure. My brain had fun with that too, superimposing nasty teeth and hard gold eyes.

He pressed something cool into my hand. My fingers closed around it. The keys.

“Can you drive?”

Could I? I didn’t answer. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, the only sounds I’d be able to make were sobbing noises and small helpless whimpers. Joe pulled me to my feet, and the ghosts of strange hands brushed against my thighs and my privates. One step and I realized why. My boxers were all skewed and only pulled halfway up, jammed them around my thighs while the crotch of my trousers tried to push everything back into place. I tried to fix them, but the broken fingers on my right hand were so swollen I couldn’t get them down the front of my pants.

Joe put something in my other hand, then quickly straightened out my clothes while I blinked at the small leather square I held and waited for my brain to catch up. My wallet. I opened it up. The cards had been replaced, my license, even my cash.

He led me around the passenger side. I didn’t resist when he pushed me in and took the keys. A moment later Joe was behind the wheel. It took him two tries before he found the right key. The engine turned over, and the sound made every muscle want to rip clean off my bones.

A gentle pressure on my thigh made me open my eyes. Joe petted me up and down before putting his hand on the steering wheel. “It’s okay.”

I nodded.

“I think you may be in shock.”

I nodded again. Shock sounded better than the alternative. Scared shitless. And I was. I’d never been so helpless in my life as I’d been just moments ago. Helpless, defenseless. God help me, did Joe go through this every time he’d been brutalized in school? I stared at him in wonder, trying to get my mind around how he’d ever survived. Survived and not fallen apart. Because just one time on the receiving end and I was in a million pieces.

Joe guided the car out into the street, moving way too slow. Of course, at this point anything under a hundred would have been too slow for me.

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