Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 89985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89985 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Peter let me go, and I nearly breathed a sigh of relief. I had to get away, as far away as soon as possible. This was scary.
I stepped into the changing rooms, going to my locker like I did every day. Grabbing my stuff, I snuck into the bathroom and changed into my waitress uniform. My hair was nearly dry from doing the cooldown stretches.
Opening the door, I almost jumped out of my skin. There was one of the women I noticed lurking around the gym the past few days, watching Peter.
“You know, he will never go for someone like you,” she said.
Normally, I’m very good with names and faces, but I was drawing a blank with this woman.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
She took a step toward me and then pressed a long, thin finger against my chest.
“Back the fuck off him. He’s not yours to have.”
I was being threatened. This was now clear to me. The woman startled me because she had a wedding ring on her hand.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, or why you’re even doing this, but you’ve got this all wrong. Peter is helping me learn to swim and that is all.” I wasn’t here to cause problems. All I wanted was to be invisible.
She glared at me, and I quickly left the changing rooms, stepped out into the main entrance of the gym, only to come face-to-face with the problem.
Peter was growing a little fan base. Again, it wasn’t hard to see. Being a waitress made me seen but not heard, and allowed me to listen in on all kinds of conversations. I was aware he’d taken on more clients, which brought me back to the trust issue.
I couldn’t help but worry. The heavy brick in the pit of my stomach that caused me to freak out, also helped keep me on my toes.
“You’re ready?” he asked.
No, no, no, I wasn’t ready. This was not helping me. The idea of coming to the gym was to lose weight. To attempt to change what I looked like. I knew this wasn’t going to be plastic surgery kind of changes, but it might help me become unrecognizable. Yeah, I even struggled not to mock myself at the very thought.
“Look, I think I should go alone today.” As I made the suggestion, I was already walking toward the main doors in the hope of doing exactly that, only Peter had other plans.
What was it with this man constantly grabbing at me? This wasn’t fair. He all but dragged me to his car. I wonder if I could still scream “stranger danger,” and whether it would count. Not that I was going to do that.
Being dragged to a car by a guy I didn’t know wasn’t exactly knew to me. My dad had a tendency to do it often. He’d send one of his goons to pick me up. The first time it happened when I was a kid, I was so excited. My dad had come to get me. Well, not my dad, but someone who knew my dad, worked for him. Yeah, for some reason, that ended up with me getting my face slapped and locked in my bedroom for the weekend, with someone pushing only bars of candy beneath my door. By the time he left, the place was trashed, and Mom was crying. I did have an en-suite bathroom, so there were no worries about toilet breaks.
That happened often, which sucked big time.
It didn’t take me long to figure out a way to escape. No one came to check on me, so finding a ladder and using all the courage I could, I’d climbed out of my bedroom window and made my escape.
Peter opened the car door, and like every other time, he put the child lock on. Every time I left his car, I might also remove the child lock, but I couldn’t seem to completely get rid of it. Not going to happen. I didn’t know the first thing about cars.
He slammed the door closed, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had pissed him off. It wasn’t me, or it shouldn’t be me, because I didn’t do anything wrong.
My stupid brain was working against me, and suddenly began to list the potential things I’d done wrong. First, insult him. Second, during our beginning warm-up, I might have accidently kicked him in the balls. Again, that hadn’t been intentional. I’d not been trying to hurt him. In fact, what I had been trying to do was stretch, and his fingers touched my stomach, I flinched, and somehow managed to knee him in the balls.
He rounded the car, and then climbed into the passenger seat. Every other time, he started up the engine, and we’d drive off toward the diner. He didn’t turn over the ignition. No sound of a purring car. We sat there in silence.