Her door is locked, but one hard shove with my shoulder has the doorjamb splintering and giving way to my body weight, and I find Lena standing at the doorway of the bathroom, breathing hard, her hands covering her mouth.
“What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head, still staring straight ahead.
“Damn it, Lena, why did you scream?”
She points, and in the bathroom, in the center of the floor, is one giant fucking wolf spider.
Lena pulls in a shaky breath, and then she turns into me, buries her face in my chest, and clings to me.
“Why is there a spider the size of my goddamn head in this house?”
“It’s cold out, so the bugs that haven’t died yet try to come in. I’ve never seen a wolf spider inside before, though.”
“Gideon.”
“Okay, I’m on it. You can go.”
“What if there are more?”
“There aren’t. Go, Rebel. I’ll get it out of here.”
She’s clinging to me, so I hug her tight, keeping my eye on the asshole so it doesn’t hide somewhere, and rub my hand down her spine.
Thank God she hadn’t gotten naked yet.
“If you want me to take care of this before it gets away, you have to let me go.”
She blinks up at me, swallows hard, and then runs away from me, out the door, and toward the stairs.
I turn back to the spider.
“Fuck. How am I supposed to get rid of you?”
I’m not squishing it. Even with these boots on, it’ll crunch, and that’s fucking disgusting.
I could shoot it, but then I’d have a hole in my bathroom floor.
Finally, I trap it in a towel and take it outside, about a hundred yards from the house, before I flick it away.
“Burn that towel!”
I spin and see Lena standing on the back deck, watching me.
“I can just wash it.”
“No! Absolutely not. It needs to be burned. The whole house might need to be burned. It’s okay, I have some money. I can help pay for a new one.”
“A newhouse?”
She nods solemnly as I approach, and she skitters out of the way, afraid that the spider might still be on the terry cloth in my hand.
“I can appreciate that that was a gigantic spider, and your scream and my subsequent heart attack were warranted, but I’m not burning my house down for you, Rebel.”
But I would incinerate the entire fucking world for you.
“I’m terrified to use that bathroom now. I have PTSD.”
