The television murmured like a drunk uncle at a wedding, spilling canned laughter into the dark while its blue glow painted the walls in sickly pulses. I wasn't watching. Couldn't. The screen may as well have been a fish tank full of plastic clowns. My skull was the real circus, and the ringmaster was a pair of women who'd slipped past every barbed-wire fence I'd ever built around myself.
Mia. Mom.
One wore sin like couture; the other wore exhaustion like a second skin. Both were wrecking me from the inside out.
Mia—Tommy's girl, the forbidden fruit dangling so low it bruised my knuckles every time I reached.
Tonight she'd floated down those stairs in lace pants so sheer they were basically a rumor. Moonlight through gauze. The sway of her hips had been a metronome counting down to damnation. That black top? A couple of rebellious ribbons playing hide-and-seek with gravity. Every strip of bare skin felt like a dare scribbled in neon across my retinas.
