(21) Smoochie Girl

(21) Smoochie Girl

     Riley arrived in the kitchen to find Ash hunched over the sink. She looked over at him sympathetically, but he waved her away. She had brought his backpack with her, and she reached in remembering something. She tossed a bottle of water to him across the room, and even having just thrown up he caught it easily.

Riley gave him the space he requested, sitting at the breakfast nook, but told him, “You don’t scare me.”

     He looked back at her with a pathetic face. “Throwing up scares me.”

     She couldn’t help but laugh, but she at least had the decency to apologize for it. After a minute she looked around the room warily.

Ash clocked it. “Yeah, I keep thinking about how any minute the house could wake up. Are we even allowed to leave?”

“Well, I think Bliss left, so suspect yes.”

“Do you think so, really?”

Riley nodded, “Oh yeah, I just have no idea why. Or why she would come back?”

Ash took a big swig of the water that he swished, and spit out into the sink. Then another that he actually swallowed. He took a deep breath, and more water before he looked at Riley slightly more like himself.

     Riley asked, “How are you feeling?”

     Ash let out a burp, and then wide eyed looked at Riley. He was opening his mouth to apologize profusely, but she just laughed.

He finally answered, “I am so hungry. Honestly. I wish there was some of Bliss’s sandwich around.”

     Riley grunted. “I don’t know. I met the ghost lady and I don’t know if she was as helpful as Bliss made her seem.”

     Ash looked at Riley in surprise. He lets out another small burp, and went to sit next to her. “So how did you know how to pop my shoulder back in?” Riley looked at him with surprise and some small amount of annoyance. “Oh, you thought I just wasn’t going to ask about that?”

     Riley sat on her hands. “I just helped pop your shoulder back into joint, so I’m not sure my situation is the highest priority in this situation.”

     Ash recklessly tried to roll his shoulder around to show he was good. It nearly made him barf again but he continued with his charade. “See, all good.”

     Riley rolled her eyes, and Ash smiled his charming smile.

     Riley tried one more time, “Like you said, we don’t have time for talking about all that.”

Ash didn’t say anything, just looked at her with a raise of the eyebrows. Riley relented. “It’s part of why I am stuck with my family. I was born with this genetic issue. It isn’t like deadly serious, but it means stuff like your shoulder used to happen to me a lot.”

“Used to?”

“That’s how I fell in love with horses. The doctor said that learning to ride would help me get stronger in the right ways. It worked, maybe too well if you asked my mom.”

Ash nodded. There was no way he knew the breadth or width of that story, but he knew enough.

“You are better at handling tough situations than anyone gives you credit for.”

Riley scoffs. But Ash didn’t laugh or undercut his compliment, and Riley was forced to accept it. “Thank you.”

Although she couldn’t stand doing nothing, so she deflected it back onto him, “I have just been following you, honestly.”

     Ash sat back in his seat, clearly feeling better. His face was as smug as it could be, and he has his hands on in his chest in overexaggerated pride. “Oh, you know I am just living my life, beautiful.”

He even threw in a wink, and they both knew he was being over the top to get her to laugh. And it worked.

     He leaned over so that they were arm against arm, and he was not quite talking low in her ear, but he also was. “You know what’s going to happen?”

     Her face was unbothered curiosity, and she had goosebumps on her arms from his heat. He waited patiently for her to actually answer. They stayed close like that until she was finally able to breathe out, “What?”

     “We are going to go to the living room. Figure out a plan to finish this shit.”

     “Ok.”

     “Then we are going to get some food, and sleep for like three days. And then we are going on our horse ride.”

She smiled back, “Yes, let’s do that.”

There was a moment, close together, breathing in each other, existing. And Ash went for it. He leaned down, and they kissed. Gentle, testing. They pull back, breathing together, then kiss again. Riley put her hand on Ash’s face, cupping his chin. And just for a moment, in this stupid monster house, none of it mattered. It was just them, and they were happy. And then Saint and Bliss came in from the living room.

     For as happy as Riley and Ash had been a moment before, Saint and Bliss were too happy. Laughing a little too much, eyes barely focused. They had smoked way too much during their conversation.

Bliss was a veteran. She was more or less fine. Saint was not at all used to it and was not handling himself well. Either way Riley saw, and smelled, it on them immediately. Ash was looking around for Lou, and getting angrier about his absence every second.

     Saint was clearly annoyed to find Ash and Riley clearly intimate. Bliss looked bummed to see Riley’s angry at her.

     Ash was trying to follow the plan, and keep everybody on track. He tried his best to give Saint and Bliss the benefit of the doubt. “So did Lou calm down?”

     Saint acted like he didn’t exist. He was looking at Riley with red eyes, and an amused smile. “Are you jealous?”

     Riley looked directly at Saint without blinking, “I am very jealous that you got to smoke with Bliss. Yes.”

     Bliss shuffled across the floor holding out the rest of the joint and some matches towards Riley. “Oh, don’t worry, I brought it so we could all smoke.”

     Ash planted his face in his hands. “Oh, my gods, no.” He turned to Riley, a serious teacher-like look on his face. “No. Come on.”

     “No. Ash is right. This is not the moment. We need a plan.”

     Saint was thrilled again. “Ay! One step ahead of you because we have one of those.”

     Riley looked suspicious. “Really? You two?”

     “Yeah, Lou helped.”

     Ash visibly relaxed. “Oh good. So Lou is doing better.”

     Saint answered Riley with a laugh, as though a question had been asked, and not a comment by Ash. “I mean he is pretty worn out. But at least his crazy talk was helpful.”

     Ash looked at Saint, blinking brain trying to process. “I’m sorry. You left him alone in there?’

     Saint didn’t see the issue. “I told you he had worn himself out, and he was tied the chair. Where is he going?”

     Ash had turned a bright shade of red, “You…” he sputters trying to find the right words. He settles on, “I pulled my arm out dragging him down and you didn’t think!” He left the room without even finishing his thought.

     Like a trail of ducks following their mother, they all filed back through the kitchen door into the living room. Sure enough, empty chair, ropes on the floor. Door to the stairwell wide open. Lou gone.

     Ash looked at Saint, who for his part had been sobered harshly by the situation. “Fine. What was the plan?”

     Saint answered Ash directly, without any extra snark. “The house has legs and we need to destroy them. We think they are in the basement disguised as boxes.”

     Saint was as plain as possible, but it didn’t make his bizarre sentence any clearer. But time was a weighted pressure hanging over the situation. The longer they took the further away Lou was getting. The closer they got to the house waking up again.

Ash looked back to Saint, “What is your confidence in this plan?”

     Saint didn’t miss a beat. “Very confident.”

     It wasn’t like they had a lot of other options.

“Ok.” Ash looked around. “Ok. Saint and Bliss, you go upstairs and get Lou. Then all of you get out of the house as fast as you can. Riley and I will go downstairs and I guess blow up some boxes?” It started out as sentence, but went up at the end as he looked at Saint to double check that he had gotten that right. Saint gave an enthusiastic nod.  

Ash said, “We will give you as much time as we can but you need to go fast.”

     Saint looked at Riley, and offered a modification to Ash’s plan. “Riley, you and Bliss just get yourselves out. I will get Lou and Ash can handle the basement.”

     Riley and Bliss immediately chimed in, “No!” Bliss kept going, “We’ve seen it this far we are going to finish it.”

     Riley agreed with her, but Saint wasn’t ready to let it go. He looked at Riley, “I know you said you could do this alone but you really can’t. Clearly.”

     Riley told Ash, “Give me just a minute ok.”

     Ash nodded, “I brought in some explosives in my duffel. Find them and I will see you down there. Be quick.”

He winked, and she smiled back, “It’s a date.”

     The basement door closed behind Ash, and Bliss mumbled something about starting the search for Lou. Except her curly hair could still be seen bobbing in the upstairs doorway.

     Riley leaned down and dug through one of the duffel bags in the pile. She found some grenades somewhere towards the middle. She was thrilled, and managed to get the first one without a problem. Unfortunately, the second one had a saber threaded through the pin.

She shook her head at the mess of certain death barely contained in the bag, and started trying to untangle it. She started to work getting the stupid saber with its ungodly large bell that itself was entangled with basically everything else.

Saint was standing over to the side, trying to stay out of range. “Riley you cannot go downstairs with that man. With literal explosives!”

“Why, because he is a peasant?”

“Because he’s a madman!”

     Riley was frankly paying more attention to the explosives than Saint, as she should have been. She answered, “That is the plan, right?”

     She managed to get the saber’s bell unhooked and free so she was able to rotate both the saber and the grenade to make it easier to slide the saber out.

     Saint didn’t know what to do with himself. “To spite us?”

     Riley held her breath as she slid the saber across the pile, trying not to catch it on anything else in the absurd arsenal. And she got it.

     She sat back on her heels holding a grenade in each hand, and feeling a level of power and satisfaction that a person can rarely achieve. She sat there, using this moment to genuinely try to answer Saint’s question. Was it for Ash? For Carter? For Victoria?

     The moment didn’t last. She recoiled. There wasn’t some grand answer. She was here for the same reason as the rest of them.

“I have to do something.”

     She stood up, smiling big and enjoying her success. She saw the ghost lady standing behind Saint. Riley’s face dropped and she stared over Saint’s shoulder in that way that triggered him to look over.

Initially, he got a scare, but after regaining himself, both Saint and Riley assumed the situation was as harmless as the tea party had ended up being.

     They were incorrect.

The ghost lady declared, “You can’t go into the basement.” Saint laughed in discomfort, and Riley went to walk to the basement door.

     Sweater set, not feeling much like a ghost to Riley, pushed her away from the door and into the nearby bookcases. Hard.