My Bestie's Dad Likes Me Wet-Chapter 137 Counterattack

NALA POV

The first thing I noticed as usual was the bed.

I know, I know, honestly I know it’s weird but this right here is a thing of beauty.

I was just traded by my own brother to a tattooed man who had already started talking about one strange wedding like it was a calendar appointment and the first thing my brain decided to register and appreciate was the bed.

King sized, thick white linen, the kind of mattress that looked like it had dedicated its entire existence to the singular purpose of holding a person and doing it correctly.

Under literally any other circumstance I would have been face down in it within four seconds of entering the room and I would not have moved until something important forced me to.

I sat on the edge of it and immediately stood back up.

Sitting on it felt like agreeing to something, it felt like maybe my body was filing paperwork on my behalf that my head had not approved.

I looked around the rest of the room instead. It was actually nice if I’m being honest, it felt warm and personal in a cozy way like you belonged in it. The warm lighting and a bathroom stocked with products that smelled expensive and a window that looked like it understood the assignment of being a window and was doing it beautifully.

The kind of room that expected you to look around and exhale and settle in and the expectation itself made something in my chest catch fire because I was not settling anywhere, I was not exhaling, and whoever had designed this room’s welcoming energy had badly misjudged who they were welcoming.

I gave it four minutes so they could think I was settling in... as if!

Okay.. five more minutes before I started banging on the door.

...

Time’s up!

"Open the door." I slammed my palm flat against it loudly and I could hear it echo through the silent as fuck house. "I need to fucking talk to someone right now."

Nothing.

"I am not playing, open the fucking door, I want to speak to whoever is in charge of all this bullshit."

Still nothing? These people didn’t do their research if they thought I would give up and be the gentle lamb.

Nah. Fuck it.

"Okay. Okay fine." I relaxed my voice dramatically like I was thinking out loud but it was loud enough for the whole house to hear me perfectly well.

"I am going to walk into that bathroom, I am going to put my head through the mirror, and I am going to use what’s left of it to do something your boss is going to have a very hard time explaining at the wedding tomorrow. Open. The fucking door!."

There was a pause then almost immediately the slot at the bottom scraped open and a glass of water slid through onto the floor.

I looked at it.

"Really? That’s what you’ve got? Water?"

The slot closed.

I picked up the water and drank it because I was thirsty and I hated myself a little for it and then I put the empty glass down harder than the glass deserved.

"Okay. So fine I drank the water. Can you open the door now?"

The silence that answered was the part I was least equipped for. I could handle Noise, chaos is my friend, it gave me something to push against, but silence in a closed unfamiliar room with no indication of what was happening on the other side of the door did something to me that I had never found a clean way to manage.

I had always been like this for a while even though I’ve never boldly acknowledged it. I’ve always needed either sound or people or both, I hated the specific quality of alone that came with four walls and no exits and nothing to listen to except my own thoughts which were not good company right now.

I tried the window, maybe I could sneak out but it was sealed. I checked the bathroom twice, then the door hinges, the ceiling, the corners, mapped the whole room the way I had learned to map spaces over the last few weeks underground and found nothing useful in any of it. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

I had no choice but to go back to the bed that has been trying to lure me in since

I didn’t get in it. I sat on the floor with my back against the side of it because the floor was cold and the bed was there and the contact of the frame against my back was something at least, like some small physical anchor in a room that was starting to feel like it was breathing differently than I was.

I sat there and I thought about Ethan’s face but then on second note, ii don’t want to do that right now because if I did that now I was going to come apart in a room where I could not afford to come apart and right now more than ever I needed to be strong even if it was a false mask, I need to put it on.

Based on that thought I decided to tuck all thoughts of Ethan away deep down where no sun could shine on it, I put it away and thought about something else instead.

I thought about mismatched eyes.

That was the first thing that bubbled up, mismatched eyes fucking me so realistically I almost didn’t believe it was a dream, mismatched eyes looking at me with no emotion, mismatched eyes looking at me with some hints of emotion when he kissed my forehead the other day. Mismatched eyes doing a lot of things to my heart that were supposed to be nonchalant.

I thought about unhurried footsteps and a hand flat on a door above my head and the specific silence that lived between me and a man I had spent weeks insisting I hated. I thought about his face in the half second before the car door closed and how it had cracked open just slightly and how I had been carrying that image around since it happened like something I was not ready to put down, or I just simply couldn’t let go of my last memory of him.

I sat on the floor against the fancy bed in the fancy room and I missed the underground building but fuck it, no one was going to ever hear me admit that.

I got up and banged on the door again.

Threatened in multiple creative directions. Begged once, briefly, and then felt so disgusted with myself that the fury came back stronger than before and I rode that for another twenty minutes of sustained door abuse that nobody on the other side acknowledged in any way.

The being alone was worse than the threats not working. Every hour that passed with that door closed and no sound from the other side of it the room got smaller in the way rooms did for me when I was by myself for too long and I kept going back to the bed, not in it, just near it, sitting against it or perching on the edge, because at least it was something solid and the linen smelled clean and I was having a terrible time and small comforts were still comforts.

The dress arrived in the morning.

Two women came in without knocking. They were looking everywhere except me, no eye contact, it was obvious they’d been briefed.

The guard in the doorway had his arms crossed and I could see why he was the one guarding the door, his inability to be moved by difficult women being the core one.

I looked away from his hard cold face, he was definitely not beating Ivin in a stone cold competition but at least Ivin cared enough to hate me.

This man here with the huge dangling gun around his bare chest with multiple scary tattoos simply doesn’t care and I resent everything about him.

I finally acknowledged the voluminous dress they brought in and it was beautiful. I’ll give them that, it was beautiful in an expensive way like every other thing in this room aside from the humans of course.

But I hated every thread that made up the dresses.

"Not happening." I said it to the room generally.

One of the women moved toward me with it anyway.

I looked at the guard. I looked at the gun on his hip — not the dangling one, the other short piston peeking out of his waistband — I ran the numbers in my head in about one second and then stopped running them and just moved.

I grabbed the gun.

I got my hand on it, fingers around the grip, and felt the unfamiliar weight of it shift and for one real second it was mine and then his hand came down on my wrist like the idiot had been waiting for me to try exactly this but hell would freeze over before I gave up easily.

We went back and forth and I was not going quietly, I was using everything, from my teeth to my elbows and weight and sheer bloody mindedness and it was close, it was genuinely close, and then something hit the back of my head and the room tilted sideways all at once.

The floor came up.

The guard in front of me was smiling weirdly but I clocked it in the last slow second before everything went and I made myself a promise to turn that smile to painful tears but the dark swallowed the promise and the room and the dress and all of it whole.