Red Leather (Book 2)

Chapter 13

The music was changing and yet I couldn't really hear it. Eli stopped abruptly, and grabbing a hold of my arm, pulled me away from where we were. I hadn't wanted him to stop. Not yet.

He was right.

He pulled me down into a crowded hallway, one that I hadn't been able to see before. The twists and turns made me trip, and I laughed, heady with the smell of cigarettes and adrenaline, knowing that this boy knew, he knew and I knew and it meant everything.

"Where are we going?" I whispered.

His mouth twitched. "You'll love it."

A narrow staircase later and we were inside a den. That's when the real party began.

I'd never taken drugs before, believe it or not. And especially not around dingy strangers with yellowing whites in their eyes. I was a heavyweight drinker, no doubt, but I couldn't afford to lose such control around people. I had to be alert. I had to be observant.

But with Eli... that was different. There was no control left for me to lose, not with my secret planted in his ears.

Tightly rolled joints were passed around in the darkness. I inhaled, closing my eyes, letting that strange smoke fill my lungs and mind. There were bottles of very strong whisky, too, and I poured some into Eli's mouth and sucked it out with my own.

Everything became so hazy. It was a haze that I found somehow hilarious, because the laughter poured out of my mouth like bittersweet poison. Everything was funny and distorted – the couple having sex behind me, the mysterious hand making its way up my leg, and even the toothless man who leered at my cleavage.

I didn't want it to stop. It couldn't stop.

I wouldn't let it.

Time blurred into nothing. Voices and laughter and screams passed back and forth, back and forth from one ear to another, but I kept smoking to keep that buzz. I swallowed and smoked and snorted everything that was passed to me, even the clean white lines on the table, even the strange little pill that tasted like sugar cubes.

Eli's face became distorted. My laughter didn't sound like mine – it sounded like a witch's throaty cry, cackling and cackling out of the dim hole opening up on the ceiling. I looked down and gasped, because it wasn't a hand crawling up my leg at all, but thick, slimy tentacles.

"You wanna stay?"

Bounce, bounce, bounce, the sentence went. It bounced back and forth across the walls, echoing and then dimming down and then echoing again. I look back up at the distorted man and saw Eli. Lust combusted in the pit of my stomach with alarming rate, and I took his face in my hands and kissed him. I almost knocked the table over in process of climbing into his lap.

People laughed all around us. But the heat had been injected into my veins already, and what I wanted nothing more was Eli. He met my lips just as hard, putting his bottle down and hitching up the fabric that covered me.

"This her first time here?" Someone rumbled in a low voice. It was like I was invisible, merely a toy on display. My mouth was on Eli's neck, now, and the dress had ridden up too far to hide anything. Too much made no sense to me. But it was the greatest form of chaos I'd ever known.

"'Course it is. Look at her."

"Eli always gets the pretty ones."

"Hurry the fuck up!" A man yelled, impatient. "I wanna turn before the cops arrive."

"Touch me and I'll have you dead," I panted into Eli's throat, getting rid of his shirt. I didn't give a damn if they watched – they could have a free show if that's what they wanted. All I needed was for Eli to be naked, and to be naked now. My hands were already done with his jeans.

A series of chortles erupted, and soon a greasy hand was caressing my ass. Eli barked violently, "Fuck off. She's mine."

I turned around, still panting, but now angry with whomever had touched me. It was the boy in his mid 20's, the one with yellowing teeth and equally yellow hair.

My senses had slowed down to a point when I reacted to things 5 seconds after they happened. The boy managed to cop a feel before I could retaliate, and that riled the rest of them up, thinking that I was some kind of sex toy. It began to dawn on me that these people were dangerous, and that I had put myself in a position in which I was helpless.

It also dawned on me that it was Eli who brought me here, who knew who these people were, and knew exactly what would happen to me.

My anger was muted and drugged, but Eli's anger was immediate. He threw me off of him, throwing a punch, and I felt the impact of the dirty ground 5 seconds too slow.

I was sluggish. I was weak. I was temporarily no longer a force to be reckoned with. And I definitely didn't have time to react when the door was busted open by the Alistair Police Department.

***