Yasmine patted her mouth with the napkin and placed it by the empty plate on the coffee table in front of her. Jake finished the last of his burger and sat his plate beside hers. He steeled back against the couch in his apartment and guided Yasmine back into his chest, his arm around her shoulders.

  “Pretty good wasn’t it?” he said. “I told you I make a mean burger.”

  “It was a great burger,” Yasmine replied. “The fries were good, too. Homemade fries are not easy to get right. I’m not that great of a cook myself.”

  “It’s nice to be here at home,” Jake said. “No crowded movie or restaurant. You know we are hardly ever alone.”

  Yasmine laughed the thought away, “Oh, we are by ourselves plenty of times. I’ve always had fun on our dates.”

  Jake leaned in with a mischievous look in his eye, “I have too. But here, by ourselves, we can have new kinds of fun.”

  He kissed her- softly at first—a kiss she felt comfortable returning. It was the deepening of that kiss as he knit his fingers into her hair and pulled her body closer to his that made her bristle and pull away from him. After a moment, she realized she was looking at him with a stern, quizzical expression. She relaxed her face into a sweet smile and leaned up to grab the remote.

  “Want to cuddle up and watch a movie?”

  “Cuddling up is more what I had in mind—minus the movie,” Jake said with a grin.

  He leaned forward again and planted another kiss. She politely returned it although he didn’t seem to be aware, or perhaps didn’t care, that it was a kiss empty of any genuine feeling.

  “Slow down, big boy,” she said making light of the situation. “You know I like taking things slowly.”

  “How slowly do you plan to take it?” Jake remarked with an impatient tone. “We’ve been practically at a standstill since day one.”

  “That isn’t true, Jake. We’ve had lots of fun.”

  “Movies, dinners, going to the fair—that’s not my idea of fun, Yasmine. I’m ready for more. It’s time we got this relationship advanced to the next level.”

  Yasmine pulled away and put some space between them on the sofa. “I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “Not ready?” Jake cried. “We’ve been dating over a month, Yasmine! It’s time we explored more physical sides to this romance.”

  “I am not ready for sex, Jake.”

  “Well, it’s time you started getting ready because we’ve waited longer than anyone has a reason to expect.”

  “I don’t owe you sex simply because we’ve gone out a few times,” Yasmine huffed, standing up.

  “Sit down!” Jake yelled. “I’m not finished talking to you yet. You’ve been yanking me around like a dog on a leash for weeks. It’s time we got this show on the road.”

  Yasmine grabbed her purse from the end table. “I think it’s time we just called this off. It’s clear we want different things.”

  “I’m beginning to realize what it is you do want,” Jake snapped. “I think his name is Seth.”

  “Seth?” Yasmine cried.

  “Yes. Your cousin, Seth,” Jake sneered. “I have been going out with you all this time, but I’ve never seen you once look at me the way you do the two times I’ve seen you around him. And the way you talk about him all the time. I think I’m getting the real picture here.”

  “I think you are ridiculous,” Yasmine said. “Don’t bother calling me again. I’m going home.”

  Jake grabbed her by the arm and slung her back to the couch forcibly. “You’ll leave when I am ready for you to leave.” He began kissing her again, this time against her will. She fought and pushed against him, but he held her too tightly for her to get any leverage on him. “You owe me something for time served.”

  He pinned her to the sofa and crawled on top of her. While he was pressing his lips onto hers and smearing across to her face, his right hand was grabbing at her while his left arm was pinning her down. Yasmine screamed for him to stop. He wouldn’t. He was like an animal unleashed. As she lay under him, she wondered how she could have ever been so wrong about a person. She could not believe this was Jake treating her like this. Is he going to rape me? The thought made her sick to her stomach. Was she going to be a statistic? Was this how all date rapes started? She had begun this evening so innocently and now it was going to end like this. He is. He is going to rape me. In a brief flash of a second, she imagined having Salem’s powers. The ability to freeze him in place and escape. Or the power to lift him up in the air and slam him back-first into the ceiling above. But she had no powers like her cousins had. I’m not a witch. Then suddenly another thought occurred to her at the exact moment Jake began trying to tear off her shirt. But I’m not a victim either.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Yasmine slid her hand out from underneath her back and fumbled for the coffee table. Her arm wasn’t long enough. She placed her arm on Jake’s back and began to rub his back, as if she were finally giving in and starting to enjoy this scenario. He liked it. He pulled back and stared into her eyes. She smiled coyishly. He pushed his lips into hers again devouring her with his kiss. Yasmine wrapped her legs around his waist and scooted herself a few inches across the cushions, inching a little closer to the coffee table. Jake removed his hands from her shirt and began fumbling around at his pants, unzipping them and pulling them down. He then moved to Yasmine’s shorts. While he grabbed at the waist to pull them down, Yasmine’s free hand found the coffee table. With one swift swipe she grabbed the fork from her plate and stabbed into the back of Jake’s thigh!

  “What the fuck?!” he shrieked, jerking upright and falling to the floor. He reached around and felt the fork sunk all the way into his hamstring.

  “You stay away from me!” Yasmine screamed, jumping up from the sofa, grabbing her purse and running towards the door. “You come near me again, and I swear my next wound will be in a place you won’t heal from any time soon.”

  Across town, Seth pulled his car into Reverend Collins’ driveway with Vanessa seated beside him. He could tell from the movement behind the living room curtain that her father had seen them pull up.

  “He knows we’ve been out,” Seth told her. “I just saw him peeking.”

  “I don’t care if he knows or not,” Vanessa said. “I have bigger concerns.”

  “Such as?” Seth asked.

  “Do I really have to tell you?” she replied. “Seth Blanchard we just spent the evening in virtual silence. You have barely spoken to me. Things have changed between us.”

  “My brother-in-law just died, Vanessa,” Seth explained. “My family is going through a lot right now. My mind is not in the game.”

  “The game?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I really don’t. I thought our relationship was important. It was to me at least. But ever since that dinner at your house, I feel like we’re growing apart.”

  “It’s just a difficult period,” Seth said. “Don’t read too much into it.”

  “And what about your cousin?” Vanessa asked. “Yasmine. What should I read into that?”

  Seth rolled his eyes and shook his head before turning to face Vanessa with a look of exasperation. “Please don’t start up with all that shit again. She’s like my little sister. I don’t know why you’re so jealous of her.”

  “I’m not jealous of anyone,” Vanessa clarified. “But I also am not stupid. I thought it was cute at first, how close you were with your sister and your cousins. Not a lot of guys bond so closely with female relatives. But as time went on, I started to notice how your face is different when you talk about Yasmine. It is not the same as your other cousins or your sister. Then the other day when her boyfriend was at the house, and I was with you in the cemetery—Seth you couldn’t take your eyes off them.”

  “Vanessa, this is really stupid.”

  “Then tell me, Seth,” she confronted. “Before I move one more step into this relationship with you. Before I alienate my father even more for being with you. Look me in my eyes and tell me that Yasmine is not in your heart. Tell me you don’t love her.”

  “Of course, I love her,” Seth countered. “She’s my cousin. I remember being very young when Granddaddy left the house one night, really upset. He came back the next morning holding the hand of this little girl. She was so little and scared. Me, my sister, my cousins, my aunts, my grandmother—we were this big group of strangers that met her at the door. This scared little girl who had just lost both her parents and her brother. Right away I wanted to protect her and look out for her. Then as we grew up, I used to tease her. I shot bottle rockets at her one 4th of July. Boy, she was so mad at me. I remember that one Christmas when she and Fable and I all figured out there was no such thing as Santa. Yasmine cried and cried. So, I put on the old suit my Uncle Larry used to wear and snuck into her room that night, trying to show her Santa was real after all. You should have seen this suit, Vanessa. It was just dragging on me. Hell, I was maybe 10. She was 8. I wanted to make her believe again. I didn’t want to see her cry anymore. She’d already lost so much in her life.”

  Vanessa sat silent, watching Seth’s face lighting up in all the ways she’d just described. She didn’t interrupt. There was no need to. She had been provided her answer already. Now she waited for this to play out until Seth finally saw the plain truth as well as she could.

  “Then when Granddaddy died,” Seth continued. “Oh my God, Vanessa it almost killed us all…but Yaz. Little Yaz—he was her whole world. Her only living blood relation. Of course, by then she was as much a part of us as we were of her, so none of us really thought much about that really being her only relative. But the way she grieved for him…I couldn’t take it. Half my crying over his death was from watching her cry. I used to go into her room at night and sleep on her floor, just so she could hold my hand until she fell asleep. So, she wouldn’t feel alone.”

  Seth stopped talking. He sat in the driver’s seat staring at the wheel, as the world dawned on him for the first time. Vanessa leaned over and kissed his cheek. She withdrew her purse from the floorboard and opened her door.

  “It’s all right,” Vanessa said. “Goodbye, Seth.”