Page 39 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

Suddenly, she clumsily sets the fork on the plate. “How do you know what I like?” She stares at me accusingly.

Is she serious? “Don’t you know?” Apparently, she’s even more naïve than I thought.

“No!” she replies stubbornly.

“Think about it, then.” I put the chocolate donut back and look straight at her.

“Were you spying on me? Sitting in the yard with binoculars watching us through the windows?”

“Nope. But I still know.” I actually have to smile, although that’s unfair. Sharing her life with the world, she honestly thinks someone would bother lying down in the field with binoculars. No, no, Lou, you volunteered all this information yourself.

She’s still looking at me, suddenly her eyes narrow: “You followed me. When I was walking to the visitor center. You were tailing me in the woods, parallel to the gravel road.”

I have no idea how she came up with this. “Possibly.” I don’t avoid her eyes since I have no reason to lie.

“You were the shadow,” she whispers, then covers her mouth with her hands for a moment. “Which was why you knew about me and Ethan fighting about the camping lanterns. You heard. You were listening.”

I hadn’t imagined breakfast would go this way. I look out the window and mechanically nod. I don’t want to lie to her. I kidnapped her, anyway, she knows something is wrong with me. She just can’t find out how much is actually wrong with me. At least not right away, or else she’ll freak out.

“You heard me tell him that I wanted to run away.”

I look at her again and smile briefly as I think back on it. “It was convenient, yeah. It could have turned out differently though. I’d been expecting a long wait, but you were easy to catch.” While it’s true, it sounds awful.

Lou promptly presses her hand to her stomach as if she were nauseous. “How long…was I unconscious?” she abruptly asks.

I shrug in a vague gesture. It doesn’t matter now anyway; it’s better she finds out right away and then gradually forgets about it. “About five days. But it wasn’t only chloroform, that would have been too dangerous.”

She swallows hard. “What else, then?”

“Atropine, dimenhydrinate, gamma-butyrolactone, barbiturates…”

“What?”

“Belladonna, knockout drops, sleeping pills…the dimenhydrinate was for the nausea. To keep you from puking.” I look her directly in the eye and see terror spreading across her face line by line.

“You gave me knockout drops?”

I can see what she’s thinking. “A small dose,” I concede. “Don’t you remember?” Stupid question, of course she doesn’t remember! But I remember. Her arms around my waist, her cheek against my stomach. “You woke up a couple of times,” I continue. “I explained everything to you and gave you some water. Not much, just a few sips at a time.”

“Why five days?” She still looks absolutely stunned.

I shrug. “The first part of the trip was dangerous. I couldn’t risk anyone searching the RV and finding you. That’s the only reason. And I knocked you out so you wouldn’t be scared in the box. On the last day, I gave you some more chloroform so I wouldn’t give you too much of the other stuff.”

She gets up and immediately flops back onto the seat. All color has left her face, which is as white as chalk now.

“There never were any bears on the path, were there?” Her voice is dripping with contempt, oozing out of her like water from a saturated sponge. “You preyed on my fears to lure me away. You…you’re…”

A nasty pig? A motherfucker? A bastard? A piece of shit? Spit it out, Lou, I’ve been called so many names!

“Think what you want of me, I’ll still keep you with me,” I snap back when she doesn’t say anything else.

She opens her mouth, her eyes suddenly shimmering with tears. “But…”

“You’re staying with me. Forever,” I cut her off. “There’s nothing you can do about it.” I tell myself I can ignore her disgust, but of course I can’t.

A tear escapes the corner of her eye and rolls thick and round down her cheek.

Shit! My gut clenches. She looks even cuter when she cries. Shit! Shit! Shit! But she shouldn’t cry. And she shouldn’t look at me like that!

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