Filed To Story: Pretty Poisoned Novel by Elle Mitchell
“That’s what River called it,” I tell him. “Why do people keep saying you’re dangerous?”
“Mmm I don’t want to tell you that,” he says.
“Mmm I’m probably just gonna ” I slip out from under his arm and begin scooting away from him. “Move over here then.”
“No, don’t,” he says, laughing. “Okay, wait. Wait. Maybe if you tell me something really fucked up about you, I’ll tell you.”
“How do I know if my thing meets your qualifications for really fucked up?”
He shrugs. “I guess you don’t until you do.”
I narrow my eyes. “What if my thing is worse?”
“Do you think it might be?” he asks with a smirk.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “My friends don’t run around warning people that I’m dangerous, so probably not.”
“That’s because you don’t have any,” he says.
I snicker. “Okay, yeah. Well, maybe.”
“Is your thing illegal?” he asks.
“Kind of. Yes. Is yours?”
“Apparently.”
“And you’ll really tell me? Like, actually tell me? Because the fact that you’re smiling right now makes me doubt you.”
“I’m always smiling, though, aren’t I?”
“ I think so.”
“So then, that should be normal. Not like the coat.”
I sigh. I’ve never had to tell this story out loud before aside from therapy, but I really want this information. If he is crazy, maybe he will just tell me. And the sooner I get the information I want, the better before I get sucked even further into this rabbit hole.
“Fine,” I tell him. “But don’t look at me while I talk.”
“Okay,” he says. He lies back on the ground, looking up at the sky.
“I can still see you smiling,” I tell him.
He laughs and covers his mouth with his hand. “Okay, go.”
“Okay, so. You know how I said I don’t have any friends?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was a weird fucking kid, okay? I have this sistershe’s four years older than meand she was always prettier and smarter and involved in everything in school, and I was never really anything like that. I was like the extra. No one ever paid any attention to me or what I was doingnot my family, not people at school.”
“Sounds familiar,” he says.
“Don’t talk,” I tell him. “And you’re prettier than Declan.”
“You keep telling me what to do like that, and I’m going to fuck that mouth of yours.”
Jesus. This man.
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Yeah, I do. I just you know what I want to do to you.”
“I haven’t cried in over three years,” I say.
“We’ll see.”
“So anyway, instead of having friends and a life, I had hobbies. And it started out with horror movies and novels and then I moved on to true crime and serial killers. But I got like a little too into it. And when I was in high school, I started writing letters to convicted murderersjust to see who would write back. A few of them did, and it escalated quickly.”
“Of course they did.”
“So, I’m going to wrap this up as fast as I can. A few things happened. The first was that I left a journal with some of the letters and details about what I had been doing in English class, and someone made photocopies and posted them all over the school. They made videos of me crying; they went viral. The teachers called my parents. School, for the next couple of days, was torturethey literally tortured meand then the administration decided that the best thing to do was expel me for the rest of the year because I’d become too much of a distraction. Nothing ever happened to the other kids who did that to me, though.
“My parents enrolled me in this alternative school and ended up selling the house to stop the letters because they were afraid, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything. And the last thing that happened was that one of those people got out of prison, found me, and abducted me. The police found us the next day and shot him dead in front of me.”
“Jesus. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“You want to know the worst part? The fucked up part I’ve never told anyone before?”
“Yeah ”
“He didn’t really abduct me. I went with him willingly.”
He removes his hands from his face and turns to face me, his green eyes lighting up. “Really?”
“I never told anyone, though. There wasn’t any point. And I never flew under the radar again. When I realized people were always going to be paying attention now, I started dressing differently, started doing my hair and makeup, and started making a fucking scene. When I went back to regular school my senior year, the popular girls made a game out of trying to make me cry on camera, and I never fucking cried again. They did, though. When I fucked all of their boyfriends.”
“Teagan,” he says, reaching out and caressing my cheek with the back of his hand. “I think we might be soulmates. I’ll tell you my thing now.”
“Okay.”
“A few months ago, I met this girl,” he starts. “And this is going to sound worse than it actually is, okay? I mean, did your boyfriend ever kill anyone? I wasn’t going to kill her”
“Hey! Dumbass!”
I look over Luca’s shoulder and spot Declan standing with his arms folded, no jacket of course, because he probably isn’t human, with Rhett at his side.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Are you a fucking idiot?” he asks.
His tone drips with rage, his eyes hard. Luca pulls himself to his feet and I do the same, my eyes darting between the two brothers as I start to worry one of them might swing on the other.
“I’m not”
“I heard you,” he says. “Do you want to go to jail?”
“I ” I start. “He didn’t tell me anything. I won’t tell anyone.”
“See?” Luca says. “Teagan’s cool. She’ll probably find out anyway if she hangs around long enough.”
“God, you really are fucking stupid. Teagan’s cool until you piss her off, too. Then what?” he asks. “And she won’t be sticking around. Two-stop rulewe’re leaving her in Seattle with the skanks Eli brought home.”
“Fuck this,” I say. “I’ll just leave right now. I’ll get a cab or something. Luca, why do you let him tell you who you can talk to and who you can fuck? I thought my relationship with my family was messed up, but it is nothing like this.”
I stuff my hands into my pockets and storm off toward the house, but I only make it a few steps away before Luca grabs me by the collar of my jacket and turns me around.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.