by KL Hughes
The force with which Fiona’s stomach bottomed out nearly made her lose her balance. It was just like the one and only time she’d gone bungee jumping, just before she left for college. The second she’d jumped, her stomach had gone screaming into her knees, and all she could think was that the rope wasn’t going to catch, she was going to hit the ground with a splat, and everyone watching would glimpse her insides. She felt that way now. It was as if all the things she had hidden inside had been gutted out of her and put on display.
But then Lizzie laughed. “Take me with you. Duh.”
“All right. You can come with us,” Michael said, “but only you and only because—”
“I’m your favorite sibling.”
“Eh, I was going to say because you’ve got valuable information to trade, but I mean, I guess you’re up there on my list of favorites.” He squeezed Fiona’s hand. “What do you think? Is it cool if Liz comes, too?”
What am I supposed to do? Fiona thought, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. Say no because she’s the reason I need to escape in the first place?
Fiona forced a smile and nodded, unable to say anything at all. She was afraid of what might come out if she actually opened her mouth. Neither Michael nor Lizzie seemed to notice or care that the smile was fake. They bounded toward the door like happy dogs on their way out for a walk. Fiona made herself follow, certain her blessed few hours of escape and relief had just been transformed into an even more unbearable form of torture than what she had already endured.
Chapter 8
“So, where are we going?” Lizzie shimmied her way up between Michael and Fiona. Each of her arms brushed theirs as she leaned as far forward as she could manage. “Also, I hate sitting in the backseat.”
Michael glanced sideways at her from behind the steering wheel. “Does it even count as sitting in the backseat when you’ve already crawled halfway onto the console?”
“How else am I supposed to know what’s going on?”
“You could try using your ears.”
“From a comfortable distance,” Fiona added. Her stomach hadn’t settled once since she’d climbed into the car.
Lizzie looked at her. “What? Am I too close?”
Yes.
“Does it bother you?”
Yes.
“You’re fine,” Fiona said, leaning away from her. She leaned so far to her right that she was practically on top of the passenger-side door. The cool glass of the window soothed her burning cheek.
“Some people like their personal bubbles, Liz,” Michael said. “You should know this considering you’re always complaining about people getting in yours.”
“Only people I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure that’s everyone, Michael. No one wants a stranger rubbing up against them in line at the Panda Express.”
“True, but to be fair, you’ve only known Fiona for a few days now, so you’re still basically strangers.”
“Huh.” Fiona could feel Lizzie’s eyes on her and looked over. They shared one short but heated stare, then Lizzie laughed and shook her head. “Nope. The way I see it, we stopped being strangers the second we ended up in bed together.”
Heat flooded Fiona’s body from her head right down to her toes. She simmered against the window, half-expecting it to fog at her touch. She was so close to boiling, and she was certain Lizzie knew this. At this point, it couldn’t be coincidences anymore. It couldn’t just be unfortunate but innocent word choices. It was deliberate. Lizzie was fucking with her.
“You mean when you attacked her?” Michael steered them onto a larger road, one with actual cars and businesses. Nearer the McElroy home, there had been nothing but land filled with various junk and livestock, of course, but mostly just acres upon acres of land. Thankfully, it didn’t take them long to reach the rest of civilization.
“Attack is a strong word.”
“But appropriate,” Fiona said and readjusted herself against the window.
“You know my sister doesn’t bite, right?” Michael leaned forward to look at Fiona. “You’re gonna push yourself out the door if you keep trying to get away.”
“Is it my perfume?” Lizzie flashed a smug grin her way. It was all Fiona needed to know that Lizzie was a troublemaker and likely had been all her life. She was enjoying this. “Because it’s not mine, I swear. It’s some crap old-lady perfume Mom bought me. She loves those little Avon perfumes. She sprayed it at me, but I could’ve sworn I dodged it in time. Do I smell like I’m headed to a Bingo tournament?”
Fiona tried not to give her the satisfaction of a laugh, but it bubbled up and out before she could stop it. “You smell like apricots, actually,” she said, then silently cursed herself. Her body had apparently decided to respond to Lizzie regardless of her insistence on resisting.
“Oh, that’s just my conditioner. Hey!” Fiona looked up, startled, but Lizzie was focused on the windshield, not her. They had just pulled into the parking lot of a small theater. Its marquee was yellowed, and some letters appeared to be missing. There were only two other cars in the parking lot. “Are we going to a movie?”
“Yup,” Michael said at the same time that Fiona shouted, “No!”
The car lurched to a hard stop, jarring everyone inside, and Michael and Lizzie both whirled to face Fiona. They wore expressions so similar that, in that moment they could pass for the third set of McElroy twins. Their ginger eyebrows arched high above their eyes, both sets surprised and pinned on her. Fiona cleared her throat, unsure of what to say to explain or cover her outburst. She’d tried not to react, but the protest had simply jumped out of her.
A dark cinema. A cute girl. An undeniable attraction. What could possibly go wrong?
“Um, I just meant…is this theater really open on Christmas Eve?” She took a subtle, deep breath through her nose. Rein it in, Fiona. “Wow. That’s crazy.”
Michael and Lizzie looked at each other, then burst out laughing. “You scared the hell out of me,” Michael said. “I thought I was about to hit something I couldn’t see.”
The laugh Fiona conjured was more a flutter of nerves than anything. “Yeah, I… Sorry.”
“S’okay.” Michael let off the brake and pulled the car into one of the many empty parking spaces. The engine clicked off, but Fiona was certain she could still feel its rumble in her stomach, in her bones. “Ready?”
“Are you sure we have time? Don’t we have to be back soon for Secret Santa?”
“Nah, we’ve got plenty of time. Come on.”
He hopped out of the car, Lizzie following. As soon as their doors closed, Fiona took a precious moment to steel herself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she muttered under her breath in rapid-fire rhythm. “Okay. Suck it up and go.”
She threw herself out of the car, concerned she’d barricade herself inside if given too much time to fret. Word vomit spewed the minute her feet hit the asphalt. “Is there even anything playing that we’d want to see? What’s even going to be in theaters on Christmas Eve? Some lame romantic comedy?”
“What’s it matter?” Michael twirled his car keys around his fingers. “You’re the one who wanted to get out of the house so badly. Who cares if it’s lame? At least there’s popcorn.”
“Not even popcorn will save us if it’s a bad Christmas movie.”
“A bad animated Christmas movie, probably.” Lizzie bopped into the space between Fiona and Michael and slung an arm through each of theirs. “Michael’s favorite.” She grinned and knocked her hip against his. “Does Fiona know you watch Shrek the Halls every Christmas?” She looked at Fiona. “Every Christmas.”
“Unfortunately, I’m aware.” Fiona tried to keep her voice even, but every step toward the theater felt like a step through quicksand. She was being dragged toward her inevitable doom. She could feel it. “And Casper’s Haunted Christmas, too.”
“Ok
ay, first off, Shrek the Halls is amazing, and only someone with a true heart of coal would say otherwise,” Michael said, “and second, Fiona, you like Casper’s Haunted Christmas, so I don’t know why you’re trying to act like you don’t in front of Lizzie.”
“I get it,” Lizzie said. “I’d try to hide that embarrassing truth from me, too.”
“It’s better than watching A Christmas Story every year.”
“Hey.” Her hands rose in a show of surrender, tugging Michael’s and Fiona’s elbows along with them. “I totally agree with you. Talk to Brian. He’s the one who insists on watching it every Christmas.”
“On loop.”
“Or at least until Mom makes him turn it off so Jessie’ll stop threatening to take a hammer to the VCR.”
“Your parents still have a VCR?” Fiona endeavored to bury herself in the conversation so she wouldn’t have to think about the doom. The dark-room doom. The dark-room, cute-girl doom. The hands-touching-in-the-popcorn-bowl-in-the-dark-room-with-the-cute-girl doom. Oh God. Stop.
“Uh, yeah, of course,” Lizzie said as they bypassed the ticket window sporting a handwritten Buy tickets inside sign. “They still have Dad’s old Atari system.”
Inside, they were greeted by a dingy, well-worn red carpet, a half-asleep employee leaning on a service desk, and the overwhelming smell of buttered popcorn. “And Dad’s old Stereo 8 player,” Michael said, stomping the snow off his boots.
Fiona wiped her own feet on a small black rug just inside the door. It sat atop the red carpet, looking terribly out of place. “What’s a Stereo 8 player?”
“You know. Like 8-track tapes. Those big clunky tapes they had before cassettes.”
“Oh yeah. I know what you’re talking about now. Wow. Do they still work?”
“If the seven-thousand-year-long intro to Boston’s ‘Foreplay/Long Time’ blaring from the barn every time Dad goes out there is any indication, then yes,” Lizzie said. She released their arms so she could dig a wad of cash out of her jeans pocket, then squinted up at the digital red lettering of the day’s showtimes. “Okay. What are we seeing? It’s on me.”
Michael and Fiona both grabbed Lizzie’s fistful of bills and pushed it away. “No,” they said in unison.
“It’s only fair. I mean, I did force y’all to let me come, so I owe you.”
“Not sixty bucks!”
“Fiona, it’s Arkansas, not LA,” Lizzie said. “Tickets aren’t twenty bucks a pop here.”
“Still.”
“Still, you’re not paying for either of us.” Michael swatted Lizzie’s hand back down when she attempted to slide her wad of cash to the zombie behind the desk. “I’ll cover my own ticket, and Fi’s with me, so I’ll cover hers, too.”
“And because you actually do owe me,” Fiona said with a laugh.
Lizzie looked between the two of them. “For what?”
“Uh…” Michael glanced at Fiona, panic in his eyes. He couldn’t exactly say that he owed her for pretending to be his girlfriend. “For, um…”
Fiona tried to help. “For an incredible—”
“Orgasm!” His face ripened in seconds, the reddest tomato face Fiona had ever seen, and his hand balled into a fist as if he was resisting the urge to slap himself in the mouth.
“I mean, I was going to say an incredible Christmas weekend,” Fiona said, smacking her lips together awkwardly, “but, uh, sure, yeah. An incredible orgasm. Yup. That’s what you owe me for. That incredible…orgasm…that I gave you…”
Lizzie’s lips pursed, clearly holding back a laugh. “Right,” she said. “An incredible orgasm. Sure.”
“Can we just buy the fucking tickets already?” Michael asked with a huff. He yanked his weathered leather wallet from his back pocket, wiggled free his debit card, and practically threw it at Lizzie. His eyes glued themselves to the floor as he wandered a little way off from them, unwilling to exist any longer in the awkward tension he’d created.
“Congrats on the incredible orgasm,” the heavy-lidded theater employee mumbled, waving Michael off with a tired hand and a dreamy smile. That’s when Fiona realized that the kid wasn’t half-asleep at all. He was high. Or, well, maybe he was both. He turned back to Lizzie, who stood ahead of Fiona, shoving cash back into her pocket and sliding over Michael’s debit card. “You guys seeing the Christmas movie?”
“Is it good?”
The employee, whose nametag read Jonas, shrugged. “Haven’t screened it, but probably not. It’s the only ticket we sold today, though.”
Lizzie looked back at Fiona, eyebrows raised. “What do you think?”
“Can we not?”
“Michael’ll be crushed, but then I guess you could always just cheer him up with another incredible orgasm, huh?”
Jonas chuckled behind the desk, propping his lazy, heavy head up on his hand. “Heh. Nice.” He grinned at Fiona in a way that made her physically uncomfortable, as if he was wishing he could hit her up for his own incredible orgasm.
Fiona didn’t give her the satisfaction of answering, nor did she give Jonas the satisfaction of returning his smile. “What about Autumn Falls? That’s a slasher flick, right?”
“I think so.”
“Works for me.” Fiona blurted the words, then took off to catch up with Michael, leaving Lizzie to finish the transaction. Once at his side, she took one look at him and said, “A fucking incredible orgasm, Michael? Really?”
Red still marred his face in big, uneven splotches. He looked like a miserable baby with a fever. “I know.”
“Do you, though? Do you?”
“I hate myself right now.”
“I hate you right now, too.”
“I deserve it.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I’ll buy us some Milk Duds.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“’Kay. Come on.” He tangled his hand with hers and pulled her toward the concessions stand.
Long, thick branches crept over one another, weaving and tangling between trees so the canopy overhead effectively blocked out the moon. The forest was as dark as pitch, and the rustling of leaves in the breeze accounted for the only sound outside her short, shaky breaths. She pressed her back to the rugged bark of the nearest tree trunk and silently slid to the ground. Bloodied, bare knees were pulled to her heaving chest, and she wrapped her arms around them, trembling.
The snap of a twig.
Her terrified eyes widened. With quaking, dirty hands, she cupped her mouth so tight that the skin of her cheeks strained around her fingers. Her eyes shut hard. Tears spilled through her lashes.
Another snap! The shuffling of brush underfoot.
“Mhm. That’s what you get for breathing so loud,” Lizzie said, staring up at the scared girl on the movie screen. She shoveled a handful of popcorn into her mouth and spoke around it. “Of course he fucking found you. You’re out here wheezing like a dying cow.”
“Liz.”
She leaned forward, past Fiona, to look at her brother. “What?”
“Stop talking out loud.”
“We’re the only people in here.” She waved a hand out over the seats in front of her. Not a single one was occupied beyond the three they’d taken at the very top of the cinema. “Who am I bothering?”
“Me.”
“Whatever.” With a huff, she sat back in her seat and chomped on another handful of popcorn. One kernel soared past Fiona’s face, barely missing her, and smacked Michael in the cheek. “It’s not like you don’t already know what’s going to happen.”
“No, I don’t,” he snapped, “and I’d rather find out from the movie than from you.”
“Good. I’m busy eating my popcorn anyway.” Another piece flew his way, catching him on the shoulder. “My delicious popcorn.”
“If it’s so delicious, then stop throw
ing it at me and shut up and eat it already.”
“It is delicious.” Lizzie crunched a piece between her teeth loud enough to rival the movie’s volume. “It’s incredible, really. Like an incredible orgasm, but you know, in food form.”
Michael growled and stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Oh. Really? I thought you were really into the movie. You sure you can handle missing even a minute of it?”
“Never should have let you come,” he grumbled as he clambered past their knees and made his way toward the stairs.
Fiona grinned as she threw a Milk Dud into her mouth and dug another out of the box. She, too, hated when people talked in the theater, but the movie was boring. Every scene was predictable, every death over-the-top, and none of the characters were even fractionally likeable. Plus, she liked to bask in the glow of Michael’s embarrassment. He was the king of creating situations he later wished he hadn’t, and no matter how many times Fiona had gotten onto him about taking a moment to think before he spoke, he still hadn’t learned.
“So, now that he’s gone…”
And, apparently, neither had she. Shit.
All the joy and humor she’d just been reveling in stopped on a dime, shriveled, then died a crumbly death. Caramel plopped off one tooth and stuck to another as her jaw hung wordlessly open. Melted chocolate coated her fingers, still pinched around a now firmly squashed Milk Dud, and the pulpy, quivering organ in her chest that couldn’t choose between honor and desire decided it was as good a time as any to pick up the pace. It raced like the now dead girl’s shallow, scared breaths had on screen just moments earlier. It raced like the clumsy, fast footsteps of the male character through the woods, the one they all knew would die just as horrible a death as his brother had at the start of the film.
It raced in time with the rapid tap of Lizzie’s heel to the floor. “Fiona?”
“Huh? What?”
“I said you’re avoiding me.”
“What?” Fiona hadn’t heard a thing. Her blood was rushing too loudly in her ears. “You did? I didn’t. I’m not. What? No. I’m not avoiding you.”