The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [65]
He continues staring at her, his eyes diamond-sharp, his lips pursed with conviction. She knows what he’s doing, but it doesn’t matter because he’s right; whether he actually believes it or not, he’s right about her. This person he’s describing is who she really is, who she knows she is inside, who she looks for when she looks in the mirror and can sometimes even glimpse for a fleeting moment before the fear and self-hatred chase the vision away.
His eyes lock on something in hers, gauging some minute change in her expression.
“BE THE LION!” he shouts. “Do you hear me? You can be the lion! Now tell me. Tell me which you want to be. You want to be the baby or the motherfucking Lion Queen?”
His eyes are inflamed, serene, and cool all at once—red, white, and blue in equal proportions. He is offering her power. Whatever else is false, this much is plain to her. All she has to do is take it. All she has to do is make it her own.
“The lion,” she says. For what it’s worth, this is true. Sure, she’d rather be the lion. Who wouldn’t?
“Say it louder,” Chas says, standing almost against her so she has to look up to find his eyes. “No one can hear us. There’s no one here but you and me.”
“Like you have to remind me,” she whispers.
“Stop whining!” he says, putting a hand over her mouth, tilting her head back still farther. “Start being the lion! I want you to say it as loud as you feel like saying it. I want you to say it as loud as you can muster. Tell me you want to be the lion!”
He takes his hand off her mouth.
She stands up straighter, getting right up in his face, widening her eyes. “I want. To be. The lion,” she replies in a calm, mockingly studious voice.
He turns his head slightly and looks at her from the corners of his narrowed eyes. She laughs at his consternation, feeling a sudden lightness. To her surprise he smiles as well, that sly half smile, his lips parted just enough to reveal the lower parts of his upper teeth on one side of his mouth. That was all it took, she thinks to herself. All I had to do was show him I was unafraid, show him I was his equal, and he relented. She likes this feeling. Likes his smile, the admiration in his eyes. She suddenly realizes she’s flirting with him, and he’s reciprocating. For a moment she thinks of Javier, but his betrayal smolders in her even more than before. He barely ever even spoke Ivy’s name, but her image was running through his mind all that time. She thinks of his fingers, those sensitive, tender fingers, sketching the contours of Ivy’s pointy breasts and taut little belly again and again. At least with Chas, she thinks, looking up into his eyes, I have no illusions. At least I know he’s a bastard.
“You don’t sound like a lion to me,” he observes, leaning closer. “You sound like a little pussy.”
She laughs at the innuendo as he walks the fingers of his free hand up her leg.
“Nice try,” she says, making of her hand a wall to impede the path of his fingers. He’s an interesting bastard, she’ll give him that.
“Just try it,” he coaxes. “What are you afraid of? Say it like you mean it. Say it like you are one.”
“Sure, Chas, you’d like that. You say ‘Jump,’ and I say ‘How high?,’ is that it?”
He walks his fingers up over the wall of her hand and farther up her leg. She makes another wall, a couple inches higher.
“No, that’s not it,” he says. “This is about you, not me.”
“Let’s make it about both of us, then,” she says. “You go first. Show me how.”
He considers, then shrugs. “All right. Like this.” He tilts his head up to the sky, takes a breath.
“I AM A LION!”
He shouts it at the top of his voice, so loud she flinches away, but she can’t move far because he’s simultaneously brought his hand inside her thigh, beneath her skirt, to hold her