Free New Title 1 by Bonnie Dee Page B

dismembered him still haunted me. Even after I turned off the hot water and reached for a towel, I was shivering with cold that seemed to come from my very bones.
     
    I dressed in a tank top and sweats then looked at the bed with the fancy quilt tumbled halfway to the floor, the sheets crumpled from last night’s sleep. Brian’s mom would’ve had a fit to see her guest room so messed up. I imagined the kind of wholesome, bread-baking, cake-decorating, PTA-attending mom she must’ve been and felt a pang of loss for a woman I’d never met. Part of me wanted to tumble into bed and sleep for hours. But it was early so I went downstairs instead.
     
    Brian had already cleaned up in the other bathroom and sat on the living room couch, drinking amber liquid from a glass. His hair was still shower-damp. When I dropped down onto the couch beside him, I smelled shampoo and whiskey. He leaned forward and poured me a glass from the bottle on the coffee table. I drank it in a gulp. The ice chips inside me began to thaw as the alcohol hit.
     
    “ Hungry?” he asked.
     
    “ No.”
     
    After that we had nothing else to say. A day like we’d been through, there weren’t words to describe and reliving the details of what had happened was too painful. It was too much effort to talk so we sat and drank and watched the patch of sunlight on the floor shift slightly as the sun progressed across the sky.
     
    Some time later Brian got up and put music on a small ‘90’s style CD player. He sat down again and we listened. The guitarist was decent, the drummer better, but the lead vocalist was what really sold the songs. He growled and moaned and whispered and played the listeners as if they were his instrument. I closed my eyes and dozed a little.
     
    I jerked awake when Brian lightly touched my arm. The homey smell of soup made my stomach grumble. I took the bowl and spoon he offered. The sunlight on the floor had disappeared, the houses across the street blocking its rays.
     
    “ Want anything else?” Brian asked when I’d emptied my bowl.
     
    “ No. I’m good. Thanks.” I looked at his drained face, the lines curving on either side of his mouth, the furrow between his brows. No guy in his twenties should look so old. “What about you? Is there something I can do for you?” For once I didn’t mean anything sexual by those words, but even so they hung in the air between us creating a subtext all their own.
     
    “ I mean, can I give you a backrub or something,” I explained. “It was a hard day. I’m sure your muscles are in knots. I was going to be a massage therapist once. Even went to classes for awhile.”
     
    He smiled and he didn’t look sixty anymore. “Thanks for the offer. But I’m sure you’re tired too. Maybe another time.” He rose. “I think I just want to crash now.”
     
    “ Yeah. Me too.” I stood and my legs nearly buckled they were so wobbly. I was a little light-headed from drinking straight whiskey on an almost empty stomach and worn out from field labor and zombie dodging.
     
    Brian caught my arm and supported me until I got my balance. And then that moment happened, the one full of possibility and hormones and anticipation. I tilted my face, ready for a kiss, but Brian let go of me and turned away. I was disappointed as I followed him upstairs. When a guy looks at a girl as if he’d like to devour her then rejects her, it’s confusing.
     
    In the hallway, we paused before the two bedroom doors. We were the only ones in the house tonight and I could feel emptiness pushing in on me from all around.
     
    “ I’m sorry about your friends,” Brian said. “You lost a lot of them today.”
     
    “ You too. I’m sorry about that family.” Only one of the Wilkins son’s wives had survived the attack and she was a catatonic wreck.
     
    “ I didn’t really know the Wilkins family, but thanks.”
     
    We paused again, silence spinning around us like a spider’s web and binding us