This curse might have fucked me over, but it’s her touch that is currently incinerating me. I don’t want to stop. Do your worst, mousetrap. Do your worst, curse.
I make one last effort to pull away, and this time, the suction of our mouths break, our hips detach, and our legs and arms untangle. Ellis takes a step back. I, however, falter back and nearly land on my ass because my legs are weak and shaky. My entire body feels weak and shaky, and I can’t look away from Ellis’ face, her glistening, swollen lips, and the red of her skin, irritated by the fact that it’s been more than a couple of hours since my chin has seen the business end of a razor. Her blown pupils hold me captive, as do her heaving shoulders, and her breasts pushing and straining against her damp blouse with every breath. I flick my eyes up fast before she accuses me of staring at her boobs, even though I was, as they are very nice boobs.
I wonder what they’d feel like in my hands, her nipples straining under my tongue.
Christ.
Ellis’ brows shoot up like she can hear my thoughts. Her lips thin out, and a muscle in her jaw twitches as she clenches her teeth. “No. We are not going there.”
“To the bedroom?” I had no plans on getting that far. I was more envisioning the couch, the coffee table—it did hold her weight during the meeting with my brother and cousins—the floor, the wall, or the ceiling. Though the ceiling is mighty high, it could be quite inventive.
“No!” She gives me a look of frosted death, and not the vanilla kind of frosting but the icy kind we rarely see down here in New Orleans. “Not to the bedroom! That just proves how far gone this is. How far wrong it is, I should say.” She thrusts out her left hand. “It’s this. It’s making us crazy.”
“I’m not sure that’s all it was.”
That is clearly the wrong thing to say because Ellis’ nostrils flare. “I’m not interested in cursed sex, pity parties, sad sex, hungry humping—any of it.”
What in the ever-loving heck is hungry humping? Maybe I’d like to find out.
“The point is, you saw what you saw, and now you feel bad for me. Poor Ellis, who lives in a dump. Poor Ellis, whose father is so depressed that he never leaves the house. Poor Ellis, who has to look after him because he can’t look after himself. Poor Ellis, who is the adult and not the child. Poor Ellis, who lost her mom and is so afraid to love anything again that she doesn’t even have plants or a cat. Poor Ellis, who doesn’t have any close friends she can talk to about any of this, so she’s slowly dying a very sad, horrible death inside while it all festers and rots, and has for years…”
Okay, wow. I’m not the only one astounded at the big speech. Ellis is pretty shocked at herself. She stops and breathes like she’s being chased by a pack of wolves. Carefully, she composes her face, rearranging her features into a fuck you kind of careful mask. Then, she holds up her hand again.
“Uh, forget that last bit.”
“Which bit?”
“Everything I said after the point is. It was this.” She glares at the ring. “It’s doing things to my tongue, making me confess things. I…I didn’t exactly mean any of it.”
It’s my turn to cross my arms. “So you do have plants? And a cat?”
“No.”
“You have some close friends you trust enough to share the hard things in your life with?”
“Not exactly.”
“Your mom died?”
Her eyes automatically fill up with tears, and watching the waterworks turn on makes me feel like a complete asshat.
“A long time ago,” she says, her voice wavering somewhere between ‘please stop talking now because this is one subject I can’t stand,’ and ‘I’m ready to shut down now, so please just let me.’
I can’t do that. I can’t just let what she said and what I saw tonight go, especially now that I know some of the details. “Is…is your dad…is he alright?”
Ellis doesn’t know what to do about what she just told me, and I really don’t know what to do about it either, so the inappropriate questions just keep rolling. The last one seems to break down whatever reserve and strength Ellis had left, but the damage is already done. Maybe this is the mousetrap I was waiting for. God, fuck the mousetrap. Why do I keep thinking about mousetraps? This is real life, and maybe this is the bit where Ellis reaches her breaking point, and shit just keeps getting real. Perhaps that kiss threw her off balance, or the cursed ring is turning her into a truth-teller. Whatever’s going on, it’s out there, and I’m not about to pretend I didn’t hear it.