Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 77793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
He shakes his head. “I’ll keep watch. I’ll sleep at the foot of the tree.”
“You don’t have to do that. Anyway, if something did happen, who would be keeping watch for you?”
He tries not to grin, but just a shadow of it sneaks through his fierce façade anyway. The thought of him keeping watch at the base of the tree while I sleep up here like some princess in a tower who needs to be guarded is kind of insulting yet also kind of hot. I mean, not hot. I refuse to be tickled in any way over this, and I’m not shivering a little in the lady bits. He needs to stand down.
“I’ll be fine.” I muster up my tough face, which isn’t actually that tough. I have to say, part of the reason I’ve gotten as far as I have in life is that I look like a sweet, innocent, angelic woman who would never hurt a fly, let alone hack the shit out of you. “You really don’t need to sleep down there. Or stay awake down there. Or do anything down there.” Down there. That sounds dirty. “At the base of the tree, I mean,” I clarify. “I’ll talk to your granny and tell her I’m fine.”
“She won’t see reason. You should just sleep in the house.”
“I don’t want to sleep in the house,” I say stubbornly.
“That’s silly. We have an extra room.”
“Is it silly? I still don’t know any of you yet. When I unearthed information from my own digging to find you, I found enough evidence to credit what your granny says, but she could also be pulling off a huge epic lie, and she could still plan on duping me and doing the whole concrete shoes thing.”
“No one does that anymore. And Granny is nice. She’s never hurt anyone physically. Financially, yes, because that’s how she gets to them. She cripples them at the source of their power, which is their money. It’s what we do. I get that you don’t trust us, but I can promise nothing will happen. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
“No.”
He becomes stubborn. I’m already stubborn, though I don’t really even know why. I just don’t want to give in, and isn’t it perfectly rational to not trust someone? I’ve made it this far trusting only myself, and I’m not about to let my guard down now when it counts. I’m a lone unit, and I’m not sure I want to be more than that, even for a better cause or a higher purpose. Moving into the house would feel, in a way, like I’ve already given in, and it means giving up everything I am. Kind of. It feels like it does right now, and that’s what matters.
“Then I’m sleeping at the bottom of the tree.”
“Alright then. Go ahead. Have a terrible sleep. Just don’t blame me in the morning.”
“I won’t.”
I shift from one foot to the other. I probably look like a crumpled mess with my crinkled blouse, my hair that’s half brushed, and the smudges under my eyes from a long day.
I march over to the air mattress, and to make my point, I sit down hard. Maybe a little too hard. I didn’t seriously expect that the bed would try and get me, but alas, my thoughts about the danger of blow-ups were totally well founded. The thing bounces up at the foot, then at the head, and suddenly, I’m sucked into the middle like it’s turned into a giant, lady-eating clam of a shell-type creature.
“Argh!” I struggle against it, trying to roll myself off the side since I can’t make out an actual back or front to contend with. The mattress continues to eat me, the plastic all new and nasty smelling, the surface of it getting in my mouth. “Help!” I don’t want to cry out for mercy, but I’m also hella claustrophobic, and this thing is my worst nightmare come true.
Death by air mattress would not be a noble way to go. Not one bit.
All of a sudden, pressure is applied to one part of the air mattress, which straightens out the other part, and since it basically has a see-saw effect, I roll straight off the hard side onto the soft side and get flung to land in a heap on the floor beside it.
“Oomph!” I collect myself after I hit the ground, scrambling up into a seated position. I glance around to see if Orion saw that or if he was busy with the air mattress, but I find him looking directly at me, a secret twinkle in his eyes even though his face is totally straight. Yup, he freaking saw that. “Still not sleeping in the house,” I mutter darkly.
“What about the spiders?”
“That was a one-off. Maybe I intruded on her home, and now she’s cleared out. She’s probably not coming back in until I leave. She doesn’t look like the kind who wants to share her space. She’ll just wait, plotting her revenge, then wait it out some more because I’m bigger, and she’s probably smart. Then, as soon as I’m gone, she’ll swoop back in and grin at herself and call herself the victor.”