Her battered old canvas military bag hangs off her shoulder, bouncing off the backs of her legs when she walks. The thick red waves of her hair sway from side-to-side as she walks. It’s warm today, like really warm, and an uncomfortable snapshot of a bead of sweat running down the curve of the back of her neck fills my head.
A memory, not my imagination.
I can almost taste the faint hint of salt on the tip of my tongue as I run down the slope after her. God knows how she got so far ahead of me. By the time I catch up with her, she’s already at the mouth of the maze. She has plenty of time to head inside, but she just stands there, looking up at the high hedge walls, clasping hold of her bag strap…
She doesn’t so much as give me a sideways glance when I pitch up next to her.
She squints, shielding her eyes against the sun. I follow her gaze, though I can’t tell what the fuck she’s looking at. All I see is blue sky.
She breaks the silence first. “Is this it, then?”
I blow out a long breath. “Is what what?”
“Is this the maze? The maze.”
Oh. Right. I interlace my fingers behind my head, cradling my skull as I consider the splintering pathways that lie ahead of us. “No. This is just a maze.”
“Are you afraid of it?”
“Why the fuck would I be afraid of it?”
Now she looks at me, her expression unimpressed. “I read your chapter, dumbass. You were terrified in it.”
“Are you drunk?” I laugh coldly.
She pops her bottom lip into her mouth, squinting up at me now. I do not like the way she’s looking at me—like she can see through my bullshit and I should just give up already. “What, you think you’re qualified to psychoanalyze me because you read something that I wrote, and it scared you a little?”
Swish, swish, swish. The ends of her hair brush her back, almost at her waist, as she slowly shakes her head. “The fear leaping out of those pages wasn’t mine,” she says matter-of-factly.
“What does that mean?”
She mulls on her response. And then comes out with something so unsatisfactory and frustrating that I want to shake her. “Nothing. Forget it, Pax. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Coward.”
She drops her bag to the floor and throws her head back, unleashing a howl of laughter that surprises the shit out of me. “Ohhh, that’s good. I don’t think I’m the coward here, am I, friend?”
“Lord. Not this again.”
“What, you still don’t think we’re friends?” She loops her finger through the colorful bracelet that’s still looping my wrist, giving it a playful little tug. “Just accept it. It’s obvious.”
“You’re delusional.”
“We’ve been hanging out. We’ve had sex—”
“Careful.
She disregards the cold warning in my voice. “If we’re not friends, then we’re something else. If you’re not careful, I’ll start to think that you actually like me.”
“Christ, you really don’t know when to stop talking, do you?”
She pokes her tongue out—a childish, playful gesture designed to provoke. But I see the wetness, the pinkness of her tongue, and the only thing she provokes is a wall of heat. God fucking damn it, why does my body hate me? Why does my mind immediately show me what it would feel like to grab her by the back of her neck and suck that little, delicate pink tongue into my own mouth?
What fucking purpose does that serve?
“We’re a little more than casual acquaintances, Pax,” she says softly.
“What I wouldn’t give to be total fucking strangers.”
“If you wanted to be strangers, you wouldn’t have fucked me last night. You definitely wouldn’t be diving out of your car and chasing me across two hundred feet of lawn.”
“We had an agreement. Stop talking about the sex. And I did not come down here to have a chat because we’re pals.”
“Then why did you come down here?” She’s genuinely curious.
“I wanna know what the hell you meant by that text message. Divisive? Divisive?? You’re fucking high again.”
“I’m not. But I will be in a minute. Here, hold this a second.” She gives me no choice. I accept her bag, holding onto the base of it for her while she uses both hands to rummage around inside it.
What the FUCK.
She finds and takes out a small tin with a painted Victorian lady on it carrying a parasol, takes her bag back from me like she didn’t just use me as a fucking countertop, and then slumps into the grass at my feet, sitting Indian style. She opens the tin, takes out a small glass pipe, and begins to pack an enormous amount of pre-ground weed into the bowl.
“You realize they’re going to smell that on you when you go back inside. Your eyes are gonna be red as hell.”
Silently, she dives back into her bag, pulling out a bottle of perfume, a tiny bottle of eye drops, and a pair of over-sized black sunglasses. She sets the items down one at a time in the grass, pulling a face at me as she does so.
“All right, then. Well I guess you’ve got this all figured out, haven’t you.”
She rolls her eyes up at me. “More than you do, I’d venture.”
This is the perfect moment for me to let rip. She insulted my writing. She’s been so fucking annoying for so fucking long now that I have plenty of ammunition in my belt, and a couple of real harsh comments in the chamber, locked, cocked and ready to rock. But then she looks up at me, and the soft mid-afternoon sun caresses the side of her face, and all I can do is clench my teeth as I sink down into the grass next to her.
“You’d have had better luck just texting something sharp and hateful back, y’know? Instead of coming to have it out with me face-to-face.” Holding a lighter to the bowl, she sucks, dragging a plume of smoke into her lungs. Her eyes water as she holds it in her lungs like a fucking champ. She doesn’t even cough when she releases, which I quietly admire. Very quietly. My admiration presents itself in a swift pinch of her calf through her jeans.
She kicks me in return.
She’ll probably leave a bruise. She doesn’t hurt me, though. She could never hurt me. “What are you talking about? Why the fuck would I ever bother texting you something sharp and hateful?”
“Because you’re butt hurt about the divisive comment, and I said you could do better. You came after me to tell me off. I can see it on your face. You should have just texted me back and saved yourself the trouble.” Like bottomless drowning pools, her pupils have eaten her irises again. The burned sage and caramel of her eyes gone, replaced with a dark void.
“I don’t give a shit what you think about my writing. I know it’s good.” I take the pipe from her, hating the fact that she’s the one encouraging me to sin and not the other way around.
“If you say so.” She does that thing, where a girl will casually hitch a shoulder and angle their head to look off at something that isn’t there on the horizon—a low key, bullshit maneuver, the sole purpose of which is to tell you that she doesn’t believe whatever just came out of your mouth but has no plans to argue with you about it.
Fuck killing her; I’m ready to kill myself at this point. Anything to end this weird cycle I’ve found myself caught up in. I keep waiting for myself to snap back to reality and lash out at this person. If I were in my right mind, my usual, regular, take-no-shit self, I would have canned this nonsense a long time ago and done or said something terrifying enough to make sure Presley Maria Witton Chase stayed the hell away from me for forever and a day.