Her jaw drops. “I–”
“Therapy can’t get youthissatisfaction, can it?” I smirk. “Come on. Live a little. Burn down this ugly, stupid frat house with me.”
Tyler bounds up the steps and kicks in the door. He disappears inside, and I wait until she nods firmly. We head intogether, and her shoulders creep higher up her neck. She has a death grip on the handle.
“Douse anything and everything,” I advise.
“Is this– Are we going to get in trouble?”
Questionable.
“I think your dad can get us a good lawyer if anything comes up.”
She huffs on a laugh then goes to the huge L-shaped couch and splashes gas on it. It soaks into the cushions and drips onto the floor. I follow her lead. We go upstairs, and she seems to be in a trance when she leads me down the hall, past many other doors, to one near the end.
“Here?” I ask quietly.
She nods once.
My throat closes, but she doesn’t back down. She enters and stops in the middle of the room. It’s empty minus some bare furnishings. A twin mattress on a standard school-issued frame, a desk and chair, a dresser.
All wood.
All easy to burn.
She dumps the rest of her gasoline on the mattress. “I hate you,” she says to the room. “I fucking hate this place.”
“Let’s destroy it, then.”
She turns to face me. “But the people–”
“They’ll pay too.”
She darts forward and catches the back of my neck, dragging me down to kiss me hard. Our mouths open, our tongues feuding for space. I love the taste of her.
The gas fumes are getting to me, though.
I pick her up and carry her out, tearing my lips from hers so I don’t run us into a wall. I let my canister make a trail from that room out and down the hall, down the stairs. It won’t be long before the whole place is engulfed.
I hope, anyway. I’m really not an arsonist.
We meet up with Tyler at the front door, and he produces a matchbook.
“You want to do the honors?” he asks Scarlett.
She slides down my body and plucks it from his fingers. With shaking hands, she sets a match ablaze and tosses it.
It sputters out mid-fall.
“Kind of anticlimactic,” I murmur.
“Oops.” She grimaces. “Okay. Take two.”
This time, the flame doesn’t blow out. It hits the puddle of gasoline on the threshold, and a wall of heat hits us. I grab her arm, and we hurry down the steps, all the way to the sidewalk.
Truly, it’s impressive how fast it goes up.
“As much as I’d love to watch this, we should get back to our cars before someone sees,” Tyler says.
