I’m the one laughing now. “I think you cook better than I do.” That’s not true, either.
“Well, we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?” he challenges.
Great! Now I know I have my work cut out for me.
I manage to get most of the food down, but it wasn’t really that bad, just bland, and bland I can manage better than bloody.
“So other than heights and losing your job and my cooking,” he says, sitting back down beside me after taking our plates away, “what else are you afraid of?”
I shrug. “Nothing really, I guess.”
“Nothing at all? Are you sure?”
“Nothing that really stands out,” I tell him.
“So you have no issues with snakes or snails or anything like that?”
“Nope.”
“What about bugs? All girls are afraid of bugs.”
He chuckles when I poke his leg with my toe underneath the table.
“That’s sexist and stereotypical,” I shoot back playfully.
“So then you’re not afraid of bugs?”
“Nope.” I smirk at him. “What’s with the twenty questions, anyway?” It dawns on me only slightly how odd he’s acting.
Then suddenly he very slowly stands up and goes to lean across the table, reaching his hand out toward my hair.
“Just be still,” he says.
I don’t.
Freaking out instinctively, like a jack-in-the-box, I come out of my chair in two seconds flat, shrieking when I feel the movement of whatever terrifying creature is crawling in my hair burrowing itself deeper into my long locks.
“Oh my God! Ahhhh! What the fuck is it?” I run across the lanai in a frantic, chaotic spectacle, my arms flailing above my head and then my hands grasping at the back of my shirt.
“LUKE!”
I can’t see him because my body is spinning, but I can hear him calling out, “Just be still, Sienna, and I’ll get it!”
Wings of some sort flutter against my skin as it crawls down the back of my neck and out of reach of my hands—I lose it the rest of the way and scream at the top of my lungs, so loudly and intensely that my eardrums seem to pop. And then I take off running in whatever direction is forward. I hear Luke’s voice and laughter somewhere behind me, getting louder as he follows.
“Come here, Sienna!” He laughs between words. “I’ll get it out! It’s just a roach!”
“A ROACH?!” Did he seriously just say a roach? I’d rather have a cobra in my shirt than a roach. “GET IT OUT NOW!” I roar, my hands still grasping behind me at nothing because I can’t reach back that far.
“I’m trying, babe. Be still.”
In the commotion, I feel my ankle bend painfully to one side and I cry out and lose my footing, then go tumbling down the steps. I hit the ground with a big splash! and muddy water sprays up into my nose and paints the side of my face. I look down in the disarray to see that I’m lying on my hip in a giant puddle of fresh mud, feeling it cold and gross and soaking up into my white shorts and white shirt and all the solid white undergarments underneath—bleach’ll never get this out.
TWENTY
Luke
Oh shit! Sienna, are you all right?”
I leap off the lanai, missing all five steps, and might’ve landed crouched like a ninja if it weren’t for all the mud—my foot slips instead, and I slide through the mud on my side like a baseball player sliding into home plate.
“Sienna,” I say, putting my hands on her shoulders from behind, “are you all right?”
She’s sitting upright in the mud, and covered in it, her white clothes drenched and stained; her long auburn hair is dripping and matted. She won’t look at me, and the little humor I found in watching her freak out like that drains right out of my body. She’s looking downward into her lap as she sits with her left leg bent upward and the right one lying against the mud, both hands gripping her ankle partially under the water.
“I’m fine,” she says in a wounded, unforgiving voice.
I tried to get it, but I feel like an asshole. Sighing heavily, I place my fingers about the tail of her drenched shirt and lift it to the middle of her back. The bug is nowhere to be found—I think it might’ve fallen from the back of her shirt before she made it all the way down the steps.
“It’s gone,” I tell her carefully and then drop her shirt back down. “Did you hurt your foot?” I move around on my knees through the mud to be in front of her.
“I said I’m fine.”
I reach out for her foot anyway, taking it carefully in both my hands.
She winces, hissing through her teeth. She still won’t look at me.
“I’m sorry. I think you just twisted it. Here, I’ll carry you back inside.” I start to reach for her when she cackles loudly and then her hand comes toward me, mud flinging in the air between us, before it slaps me across the side of my neck.
Sienna roars with laughter.
Mud covers one side of my face, sticking to the facial hair I need to shave soon and dripping down my neck and into my shirt. I’m too stunned at first, realizing she was playing me for an idiot—and did it so well—until she tries to run away from me and slips twice, scrambling to get to her feet.
“Oh no, you’re not going anywhere,” I call out from behind.
Her laughter fills the air, along with the sounds of her hands and feet sloshing through the puddle as she tries to crawl her way out and onto the wet grass. In a swift movement I reach out and grab the ankle she was pretending was injured and I yank her backward. She falls onto her back into the water. Slimy mud and droplets of brown water splash outward from beneath her.