Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 73683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
It didn’t matter that she’d asked me to go to this stupid place and participate in something that was seconds away from being the worst part of my week. All that mattered was that she loved it, and had enjoyed herself.
“Which hall do we go down?” she asked once we got to a fork in the hallways. “That one says exit, and that one says, ‘bad things lie this way.’”
“I vote the goddamn exit,” Liner muttered.
Jubilee rolled her eyes and walked down the one that was labeled ‘bad things lie this way.’
Of course.
I had to hand it to the creators of this haunted house. It was fairly creepy with the way that it was decorated.
But I just couldn’t get into it today. Not with knowing what I knew about Jubilee’s actual haunted house that wasn’t haunted as much as infested with a parasite.
“I can hear screaming from behind us,” Jubilee laughed.
I could as well.
In fact, I could hear pounding feet as well, which was why both Liner and I were both looking back instead of forward.
The pounding feet ran toward the exit, and when we turned back around to look in front of us, there was a man standing there, bloody knife in hand. Right the fuck there.
That was when Liner screamed like a girl.
High-pitched. Long. And goddamn loud.
It was long seconds later, once he’d finally run out of breath, that everyone just stared at him like he’d just pulled his dick out and waggled it at everybody.
“Oh my God! Did you see that knife? Why were there holes in the blade? I hate holes, like that,” he gasped, breathing like a racehorse that’d just run in the Kentucky Derby. “Goddamn Trypophobia is no fuckin’ joke.”
I’d heard of that as well.
“That’s creepy as fuck,” I finally said to the silence.
The man chuckled and backed back into his hidey-hole, waving us on.
“We’re just going to forget that ever happened,” Liner said to the two of us.
“What happened?” Jubilee was shaking with laughter.
“I know where you live,” he grumbled. “And I’ll make sure to never let you take a nap.”
Her mouth dropped open in affront. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me and find out.”
Chapter 14
If I say goodnight and an hour later you see me online, that doesn’t mean that I lied. It means that I’m a failure.
-Jubilee explaining her night habits
Jubilee
I didn’t want to be back in my hometown.
Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure how it’d happened.
One second, I’d been at Brittany’s, ready to go back home, and the next I was on the back of Zee’s bike heading back to where I never wanted to go again.
Sure, I’d been back before.
But never on the back of Zee’s bike where everyone and their brother could see us riding in on his Harley.
“What’s with that look on your face?” Zee asked from my side.
“She’s scared of her mommy,” Liner teased.
I flipped Liner off, causing him to laugh.
Speaking of mommy, I could see my mother in the booth of the diner sitting next to Zee’s mom, Carrie.
Carrie was looking out the window and slapped my mother across the chest when she saw us pull up to the diner.
“Shit,” I muttered again.
Liner started to laugh. Zee sighed, resigned to his fate.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I repeated for what had to be the thirteenth time.
“Yes,” he answered. “If we didn’t go see them, they’d just come see us. Then we’d have no control over them leaving.”
I sighed and dismounted the bike, my legs shaky from being on the back of it so long.
Zee, who’d followed right behind me, caught me around the waist almost instinctively when I started to wobble and pulled me into his body.
“I agree,” I muttered. “But it still doesn’t make this feel any better. I feel like I’m walking into my doom. Even now they’re getting all giddy.”
And they were. My mother was practically bouncing in her seat as she stared, open-mouthed, at us. Her eyes were on Zee’s hand on my waist, and she was practically salivating.
“She’s going to ask for kids the moment you walk in the door,” Liner guessed.
I felt my heart sink.
“She knows that I can’t have them,” I murmured softly. “She’d never bring it up just because she knows how bad it hurt me to hear those words when I was struck by lightning.”
Liner grunted. “I can’t have kids, either. Thanks to my dad.”
I looked over at him in surprise. “What happened?”
“Beat my ass so bad that I got an infection that wracked my body for days. I laid on the floor of my bedroom for four days with such a high fever that I nearly died. When I came to on day six, fever free, it was to find out that I was in the hospital after my mother finally thought I might die and not make it. Killed all my swimmers,” he answered. “Mostly. There are a few in there, from what I’m told…but not many. Like one in a hundred thousand chance of having kids.”