Wes and Laurie stand on either side of me while we press our backs against the wall and keep watch in the main hallway, armed with one knife and a couple of corkscrews between the three of us.I shift my corkscrew into my left hand to scratch at the residual glitter on my arm, ignoring how the pull of my skin makes my cut throb in warning.Even Wes’s efforts with the antiseptic wipes haven’t been able to get rid of the red sparkles, and the layer of sweat on my skin acts like glue.
“Stop it,” Laurie whispers.“You’re not getting it off.”
“It itches.”
“You’re being a little bitch,” she says solemnly.
I mimic her tone when I reply, “Don’t call me a bitch, you’re a bitch… bitch.”
An amused exhale sounds above my head and Laurie lifts her gaze.Wes shifts next to me, and when I look back at him, I can tell he’s been watching the whole interaction keenly.
“Is this normal?”he asks, extending a finger from where he’s grasping the first aid kit and the flashlight, gesturing between us.For a moment I appreciate the skill and dexterity needed for him to hold everything in one hand.I wonder what else that dexterity extends to.
When I glance back at Laurie she nods her assent, allowing him a little insight into our lives, and I reply, “It’s pretty standard, yeah.”
“We’ve lived together for… five years?”Laurie asks, and I nod in confirmation.
“Almost.Since we were twenty-two.”
“Five years,” she repeats before adding, “I can tell you every disturbing, disgusting, dirty detail about this woman.”
It sounds like a promise, and even in the dim light of the hallway, I catch the way Wes’s eyes flash with mirth.“I’d like th—”
“But she won’t,” I say, whipping my head between them to find matching shit-eating grins on their faces.
I’m hit at once by the heart-pounding fear of Laurie divulging something that would make Wes balk like he did on our date and the equally heart-pounding encouragement that, if she’s threatening to release potentially embarrassing information about me, she really must like him after all.
“I don’t have any flaws in any way, shape, or form,” I finish soberly—the first time those words have ever left my mouth—and aim an elbow back into the ribs of my best friend when she responds with an exaggeratedpfft.
Wes seems to enjoy the interaction, and it makes me wonder: Does he have his own Laurie?Does he have someone who would stayby his side and make him laugh or give him a brief moment of relief in this hellhole of a situation if they had come with him tonight?
It’s the kind of question that weighs on my mind and brings another, more prevalent thought to the forefront: I didn’t get to find out that kind of stuff about him during our date.I don’t know that much about Wes at al—
“Of course you don’t have flaws.”His gaze drops down to meet mine, and that grin turns soft when he says, “?’Cause you’re a Leading Lady, right?”
That sinister thought is gone.Replaced by warmth in my chest and my cheeks and the feeling that my spine might melt right down this wall if he keeps smiling at me and looking at me with those deep, dark,hungry—
Quick footfalls pull our attention to the right, and when a shadow slices past, Wes’s finger on the flashlight is trigger quick.The end of the hallway is bathed in light, catching the figure for a split second, but it’s too late to decipher who it is before they disappear down the corridor.I almost doubt I saw anything at all when the flashlight illuminates the smooth red surface of the wall, the tarnished metal of the lamps, and nothing else.
“Did you see that?”Wes turns back to us for confirmation.
Already my brain is trying to rationalize what we saw to counteract the fear that starts to simmer below my throat.I tell myself it could be one of the remaining daters, somebody to rescue us, or just a trick of the light caused by the convergence of the flashlight and the gas lamps.
Anything but the killer.
“I sawsomething,” I whisper back, turning to check over Laurie’s shoulder just in case it was a distraction meant to draw our attention away from the real threat coming up behind us.A real-life misdirection.An old-fashioned jump scare.But the other end of the hallway is quiet and empty.
“I think…” Laurie says.“I think it wasBillie.”
It’d be hard to tell if it was.
Billie is the only one of us dressed head to toe in black aside from Laurie, whose shiny silk jumpsuit turns her into a night-light—albeit a gorgeous one.Billie pulled off the all-black look.She looked chic as all hell, but she could have doubled as a cat burglar, and she is the only one of the daters who could camouflage herself into the dark corners of the hallways if she wanted to.
“Do you think she came back?”I ask, though that seems highly unlikely.
“She seemed pretty happy to be getting away from us,” Laurie points out, and then verbalizes what I was already thinking.“Well, from you.”
“I’ll go check,” Wes says, pushing away from the wall before I grab his shirt sleeve and almost wrench him back.
