Page 3 of Wandering in Darkness
“Still no. Like a huge no. I’m not sure if I could no any more than that. The moment I start getting jealous of brownies, please promise me you’ll get out of this relationship,” Lane says.
“Oh, honey, you’re never escaping. Never.”
“You should be concerned,” I say, in case Lane couldn’t tell.
“I… realize that.”
I stretch and get up. “Well, it’s five o’clock. I will collect my pay and head home… wait… I think I made like… zero an hour?”
Felix grimaces. “You can move back in with us?”
“No, no. I will just scrape by, barely able to afford rent, only able to afford one piece of bread a day so I can keep playing this game with you.”
“Noooo,” Felix cries. “Come home with us. We’ll let you make us dinner.”
“I’m joking. I have enough money to eat.”
“I wasn’t joking about you feeding us,” Felix says.
“Please,” Lane whispers. “My mom is out of town for a week. Please… please stop by. Please feed us.” He’s clearly begging there at the end. It sounds quite desperate.
Felix’s attention shifts to Lane. “You said you liked the meal last night!”
“I did because all you had to do was warm up the shredded chicken for sandwiches.”
“Excuse me, Lane, that took a lot of work. It wasn’t an ‘All you had to do’ moment. It was life or death.”
“Was it?” I ask. “Was warming up shredded chicken comparable to life or death?”
“If you saw what I was eating before you came around, you’d agree that anything Felix makes could be life or death.”
“I would threaten you with never cooking again but I’m afraid that’d make you happy, so I’m going to threaten to cook every meal this week for you,” Felix declares.
Lane appears beyond concerned by this declaration. “I mean… do you really want to have to do that? You hate cooking. Think about how nice it’d be to just kick your feet up and watch Cal cook.”
I give them quite the look, but of course Felix doesn’t notice it.
Instead, he gets an expression of bliss on his face. “Ooh.”
“Right?”
“Ooooh.”
“Who the hell volunteered me? I never said I’d do anything of the sort!” I cry.
While I do have my own place now, I don’t have my own car yet, which means that when I get into Felix and Lane’s car, I’m forced in the back with a doganda pig. The dog I don’t mind. Copper sits on the seat like a gentleman. But the pig?
He seems to think sprawling onto my lap is ideal, while I believe that I really would like blood to flow into my legs.
“He just loves you,” Felix coos, like he thinks that’ll distract me from the way he’s just locked the car doors. Like… is there a reason he locked the doors? Does he not realize that I can simply unlock them myself, push his pig off, and take a bus to my apartment?
“What the hell, why won’t the door open?” I ask.
“I didn’t want you getting any ideas, so I put the child safety locks on,” he explains.
“My idea involved going home and sleeping my life away,” I say.
“You must eat.”
