Body Shot (Tapped Out) Read Online Free PDF Page A

away from the rail. I stumbled down the hall, the sickness in my belly spreading upward to burn hot in my mouth. I’d forgotten it momentarily, but now it was back, the bile twice as thick. She was touching him. It was her choice. She was desired so much that no man would say no.
    She was in control.
    My phone rang in my purse and I dragged it out, holding it to my ear without checking the readout.
    “Car?” My sister. “Where are you?”
    My lips felt numb as I struggled to answer. I couldn’t tell her the truth. She would be shocked. She would demand I come home.
    Home . Where was that, exactly? The place I’d stayed at with my aunt? The house where I’d grown up in Georgia, now crowded with the apparitions of my dead parents? Or was it the tiny place I shared with Mia, where we tried not to notice each other’s ghosts when we passed too close to them? We were both waging a battle for normalcy. It had been in short supply since I’d been eleven and Mia fourteen, and we’d mourned its loss ever since.
    But what was normal really? Did it even exist? If it meant denying the darker, neglected parts of myself I’d never been brave enough to explore, I didn’t want anything to do with it.
    “I’m at a club,” I said, couching a lie in the truth. She’d never suspect a club like this . “How is the movie?”
    Movies seemed so banal and ordinary. I’d aged in the past hour. I didn’t feel more experienced, but I sure felt older. Even a little wiser.
    No wonder Giovanni didn’t want to play with little girls like me. He knew where he could be satisfied by women who wouldn’t say no or wait or please pretend you love me, just a little bit . There was an honesty here, maybe more than the average person could handle.
    More than I could handle.
    “What club?” Mia demanded. No movie could compete with smothering me.
    “Just a club. No big deal. Did you go to an early show?”
    “It’s past eleven, Carly Ann. The movie’s over. When are you coming home?”
    When I find one that’s mine.
    “Soon,” I said vaguely, aware of voices coming from another one of the VIP rooms. Loud male Italian cursing. The sound of a glass being slammed onto a table. Those guys weren’t getting their dicks sucked—or else they weren’t pleased with the service.
    Unlike Giovanni, who hadn’t made a peep when that woman had knelt between his splayed legs.
    Mia’s sigh gusted over the phone, somehow audible even in the noisy club. “Are you okay?” Her voice gentled. “I don’t mean to be a nag. I know you’re an adult now, I just worry.”
    “I know.” Because I understood all too well how it felt to watch the clock when Mia was out late without calling, I tried to dial back my annoyance.
    My sister was my whole world. I adored her. Whatever problems we had, they were insignificant in the scheme. She couldn’t help wanting to shelter me. After what she’d been through, that was the only way she knew how to be.
    At twenty-five, I’d probably appreciate her attentiveness. Now, it just felt restrictive and cloying, like a noose around my neck she could pull from miles away. I hated that feeling. I wanted more than anything for it to go away. I didn’t want to chafe at the boundaries she’d set for me. If only I could just…behave.
    But I couldn’t. I’d behaved for far too long.
    “I should’ve left a note to tell you I was going out,” I conceded, moving toward a corner that promised relative privacy. I could chill next to a fake plant and pretend not to remember that Giovanni was probably panting through an orgasm at this very moment. One he’d paid for, no less. “I thought I’d be back before you were. Didn’t you guys stop for a bite after the movie?”
    “Mama drama,” was all she said, and I left it at that.
    I knew she meant Fox’s mother, because ours was long dead. I’d been just a kid when our mother had died of an aneurysm. Sometimes I barely remembered her, though before she’d been