Chapter Sixty-One
Havermouth, Five Years Before
“Are you alright?” Cameron asked as they returned to the car.
“Yeah,” she said. “You drive though. I don’t think I can concentrate.”
“All the more reason you should drive,” he replied, passing her the keys. “You’re going to get behind the wheel when you’re not well, when you’ve had to put your dog down, after getting fired from work, after hitting a bird, with the kids screaming in the back seat… You’re not always going to be focused. You must learn to drive and put other things out of your head.”
Their eyes met and held for a long moment, and she felt herself waiver. “Okay,” she sighed, taking the keys. “But you better pay attention in case I fuck up.”
“Nup,” he replied cheerfully putting the groceries into the back seat. “Otherwise, you’ll rely on me to do the thinking for you.”
“Fuck,” she clenched her teeth and got into the driver’s seat. She started the engine as he joined her. “But you’re responsible for any collisions that might occur.”
“If you get us collision-free of town, we’ll pull over, and I’ll suck your clit until you pull my hair and scream my name,” he offered with a grin.
“Hmm,” she flicked him a look under her eyelashes and felt her lips curl as humour and lust glowed their warmth through her. Pulling over somewhere with Cameron and fucking was precisely what she wanted, she decided, as she put the Ute into reverse and inched it towards the car behind her.
She put it into gear and pulled out into traffic. “Things are so… crazy right now,” she said as she navigated the grid of the main streets of Havermouth. “I feel like I’m living in some sort of weird, very realistic dream…”
“How’s that?” He glanced her way, his eyebrows raised and pulled together in puzzlement.
“Well, like… I don’t know,” she felt as if she was exposing too much, as if she were cracking open her ribcage and exposing her heart to him. “It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, finally, unprepared to be so vulnerable with him, suspecting he would ridicule her for it.
“Aislen,” he said, reaching out to touch her thigh, his thumb stroking. “I can’t figure you out. You will never… be open. You close yourself down. It’s like you put up a… a shell around you to keep me… us… everyone, really, out. How can anyone get to know you when you won’t let us? You won’t let us see who you are?”
She blew out a breath. He wasn’t wrong, she admitted to herself. She was always building and reinforcing the bubbles that preserved her sanity and protected her from everyone else’s thoughts. Constantly shielding herself away from others on one front meant that she found it harder to open herself on others.
“I don’t trust you,” Rhett had said, and she knew that a big part of his distrust was because she couldn’t be open with him without revealing what she could do…
She didn’t know if that was something she could change. She couldn’t stop protecting herself from their thoughts – the chaos when the bubbles fell was overwhelming and would drive her mad in short order. But closing herself off from their thoughts meant that every instinct that she possessed was designed to protect, to shield, to ward off, and not to share.
She wasn’t an open lover who would share her heart or thoughts easily. Everything about her was controlled, pushed in, and compressed. Letting go of that control, though, would be madness, she told herself. Wouldn’t it?
What would happen if she just… released her hold?
But the few times that things had escaped, her snippy retorts, her sharp words… the Triquetra, Rhett… All three of them had chastised her for that. If she released her hold completely, it would be so much worse, she thought. Would she even know the spoken word from the thoughts of the person that she spoke to? Would she even be able to hide what it was that she could do?
If she was reviled for being the fuck toy of the Triquetra, if the Triquetra themselves scolded her for being mean when she did speak of the things that she knew… If she released her grip on her control, it would be soooo much worse. The things that she could say… And if people knew how she had come to learn their secrets, she would be feared, and the witch trials were an example of what people did to women who knew too much.
Fuck, she thought, shaking her head. Nope, it wasn’t an option. “I’m not the only one in this town with secrets,” she reminded him, aiming her barbs for his vulnerabilities, seeking to drive him back by poking him where he was sore. “Where is mummy this weekend?”
He looked away. “Everyone has secrets.”
“Precisely, and let’s leave them just like that. As secrets.”
His shoulders tensed, and the feeling in the cab tightened uncomfortably, churning in her stomach and chilling through the core of her. “Cameron,” she reached out and touched his hand, before having to return her hand to the gear stick to drive. “I didn’t mean to… I mean…” She blew out a breath. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He replied. “You don’t know why you’re such a bitch, you mean? This road coming up, Aislen,” he pointed, and she indicated and took the turn off, although it wasn’t familiar to her or a road that she thought that they had taken before. “Keep going,” he told her, his voice tight.
She felt the chill seep into her bones. “Cameron,” she breathed fearfully. “I didn’t mean too…”
She was driving into foreign territory with a pissed off werewolf, she thought. There were horror movies that started that way. She flicked Cameron wary looks. “Cameron,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “Keep driving.”
“Cameron,” she pleaded. “You’re scaring me.”
He turned at looked at her with bleak blue eyes. “Perhaps you need to be scared, Aislen. You are so headstrong that you don’t seem to see clearly at all. I don’t know what it is about you, except that you are so fucking screwed up that you can’t…”
“Stop it,” she was on the verge of tears. “Stop it.” She pulled the car over and turned off the engine. “I’m not driving any further,” she told him, striking the heels of her hands against the steering wheel. “You’re scaring me. I’m not driving into the forest, towards a destination that I don’t know, and…”
“You think that I’m leading you into the forest where I will, what, precisely?” He snarled. “Rape and murder you and leave you to rot? Get out of the fucking car.”
“No,” she was crying in earnest, shaking her head. “No, I’m not getting out.”
“Get the fuck out of my car,” he ordered, and reached for the door handle. “If you drive off whilst I’m out of the cab, I swear to you, Aislen, you will regret it!”
“I’m not fucking going to!” She replied and opened her door, sliding out of the driver’s seat.
“Fucking hell,” he said from the other side of the car, his tone the polar opposite to the anger that it had held in the cab. “Stay where you are, Aislen,” he said over his shoulder. “Better yet, get back into the car, and get my phone out of the dash. Call emergency.”
“Cameron,” she was shocked. “I mean, we’re arguing, but that’s a bit extreme…”
“No,” he said thickly. “It’s not about that. Just call them, Aislen, and tell them to come to Taylor’s Road. Tell them that’s there’s… there’s a body.”