“You don’t like my cooking, do you?”
Shit! Was that whole scenario on my face just now where he could actually see it?
“What?” My mouth falls open and my eyebrows crinkle in my forehead. “No, Luke. Why would you say that?”
He shakes his head, laughing on the inside, and then takes an enormous bite from his burger; the lettuce makes a crunching sound between his teeth.
“Because,” he says with his mouth full and then swallows, “you reminded me of my mom when she was driving and a spider crawled across the dashboard. She tried to keep from freaking out and wrecking the car until she could pull over somewhere and deal with it.” He laughs.
“I did not look like that,” I defend, but I know I probably did. “And your cooking is … all right.”
He raises a brow. “Oh, so now it’s just all right? You’ve been faking it with me since you got here?”
I take a huge bite so I don’t have to answer.
Luke smiles. “Well, then I guess you’ll have to cook for me tomorrow.”
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