Page 17 of Serial Killer Games

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m bored. It’s a common problem for sociopaths.”

And then, as she passes me, she hooks one finger into my belt loop and gives me a little tug. A shiver ripples down my spine. It’s a performative gesture, one I feel like everyone in the room must have seen. When I glance at my aunt and uncle, I can see thatthey’veseen it. And then, when she saunters over to their table, I realize she meant for them to see it.

“I was early, and I didn’t know what name the reservation was under,” Dolores tells my aunt and uncle in the breezy toneof a compulsive liar casting the first silk thread of her web of lies. “So I just got a table for myself and got started. But it’s so nice to finally meet you.”

My uncle’s mouth falls open, and my aunt’s face blossoms into another sunny smile.

“How wonderful, Jake,” she says sincerely. Her eyes dart to my uncle, cautiously. He stares as Dolores sits down across from my aunt and hooks her purse on the back of the chair. In her red dress she looks like a little bomb about to detonate in the midst of my family dinner. A scarlet stick of ACME TNT.

“So you were the host body,” she says conversationally to Aunt Laura, helping herself to a pour of wine from the bottle sitting on the table. “I know Morse code. You can blink a help signal to me.”

She’s funny, but I don’t laugh. I don’t ever laugh in front of Andrew.

“I don’t know Morse code,” Laura says, shooting me a confused look, but then the waiter arrives to take our order.

“Medium rare,” Dolores requests of her steak dinner.

“Rare,” I say for mine.

“Actually, I’d like the steak tartare,” she says, holding my gaze. She wins. When I look back at Laura, there’s a strange crinkle around her eyes.

“You have a girlfriend?” my uncle asks stupidly when the server leaves.

There’s a fleeting pause while Dolores levels her X-ray vision at him to read the whorls in his brain and determine exactly what to say to annoy him the most. “We don’t likelabels.”

To be fair, there’s no label for two people who antagonize the shit out of each other and make out on the roof, anyway. And that’s when I realize the nature of Dolores’s drunk. She’snot a slurring, giggly drunk. She’s a waspish, clever drunk. A filters-off drunk. A power-crazed drunk. And as a mark of how drunk she is, her lips curl in a smile at me over the rim of her wineglass. An actual smile. Evil, and enjoying my discomfort, but a smile.

There’s that strange twist in my chest, as usual when I’m around her. The motor clunking over from idle, the default setting to get me through the day, into gear.

Andrew frowns at me. “What’s that supposed to mean? This isn’t serious?”

It’s my turn to fuck with Dolores. “It’s very serious. We’re getting married.”

Andrew’s eyebrows vanish into his hairline. Laura lets out a gasp, and for a brief second, I feel bad. Next to me, Dolores doesn’t even flinch.

“Which church?” Andrew asks with a stern look. I haven’t been to any sort of church since I lived with them.

“We’re still looking at venues,” Dolores says smoothly. “He wants his golden retriever to be the ring bearer, but I want to be married by Elvis in Las Vegas, and I can’t picture getting him on a plane. The golden retriever, that is.”

By now Andrew has realized there’s a joke somewhere here, and if he’s not in on it, he must be the butt of it. He has no problem flipping it back onto me. He makes bored, lazy eye contact with Dolores and says, “When did you and that man end things, Jake?”

Dolores cocks one eyebrow at me prettily, unfazed.

“Who?” I ask blandly.

“That man you lived with—”

“Myroommate.” It’s a conversation we’ve had a dozen times. He always saysthat man. My uncle thinks I get up to all sorts of sordid, ungodly things with Grant.

Well. Ido. But it’s different from what he thinks.

“Roommate,”my uncle echoes.

Laura interrupts. “Girlfriend, or fiancée, or neither, we’re both so happy to meet someone special to you, Jake.” She hadn’t believed Grant was just a roommate, either, in the beginning, and she’d sported a jaunty rainbow sticker on her bumper for a whole week before Andrew ripped it off. Now she’s pivoted quickly to latch onto this good news of a real, livesomeone special. She glows, and I feel another twinge of guilt in the pit of my stomach. Laura deserves better than the version of me that comes out when Andrew’s around. But he’s always around when I see her. Bossy and possessive, a fiercely jealous third wheel.

“Hopefully this one sticks,” my uncle replies, resurrecting another one of his favorite subjects: my charming, beautiful university girlfriend, the one who got away. Well, the one I broke up with when I decided someone like me shouldn’t be in a relationship. I would give my left nut not to have this conversation again in front of Dolores—I consider hoisting her over my shoulder and physically removing her—but then I see her expression. She’s fascinated by all of this. And that’s the only leverage I’ve ever had with her—her curiosity.

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