Page 45 of The King of Halloween
The man gawped at the cut. “Okay, start,” he mumbled.
Two people ahead broke into a run, others more calmly strolled behind, puffs of vape smoke trailing into the corn. This was Raj’s chance to slip out without anyone noticing. He eased a step back, prepared to bolt for the parking lot.
The wind shifted, pulling back his scarf until the end tassels slapped…
Adam tossed the scarf away with his hand. He didn’t look at Raj, all his focus on the maze. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
“I…was in the area?” Raj scrunched his nose at that terrible lie.
Even Adam swung away from looking over his shoulder to stare at him. “Really?”
“No,” Raj confessed. For a brief moment, a smile flickered on Adam’s lips. “I, well, I was hoping maybe—”
“Come on, Chowdery.” The mayor hustled past him, his tracksuit whooshing with each step. “Let’s go before they beat us.”
The mayor caught him by the arm. “I…” Raj tried to dig his heels in, his head twisting toward Adam, but he was pulled into the corn. Adam dusted off his hands and followed after, but—while the mayor pulled Raj to the right—Adam went left.
For a time, Raj wandered behind the mayor as he led them into dead end after dead end. He didn’t care about the challenge or even the maze. His mind kept rolling over the same two thoughts endlessly.
Why did I kiss him?
And why do I want to again?
More than kiss, he’d been willing to scuba dive to suck that beanpole’s cock and, despite all evidence to the contrary, he didn’t regret it. Okay, the look on everyone’s faces when they saw his body waterlogged to his shoulders had been a hard pill to swallow.
Swallow…
Raj chuckled macabrely to himself. “I bet it tastes like candy corn.”
“What does?”
Raj jerked at the voice coming through the corn. He’d lost the mayor at another crossroads and, instead of finding him, had lingered at a dead end. This one must have butted up to another turn in the maze. “Adam? Is that you?”
“No,” he called out with a laugh in his voice, “it’s the corn. An endless, eternal field of corn.”
Raj tried to peer through the mess of stalks. He caught a hint of a shadow, but the corn was too thick to make out anything else.
“Are you lost?” Raj asked, trying to go for a laugh.
Adam’s jocularity sundered. The corn stalks shook as if someone leaned against them. “I don’t know anymore.”
“They say the trick to these is to follow the outside path, and eventually you’ll get out.” Raj offered advice even though he knew Adam didn’t mean the maze.
“So, if you were a mad genius designing a maze, you’d put the worst traps on the outside?” Adam said. “Thin the herd, at least.”
“I’m glad you didn’t catch your death in that cold water,” Raj called out to him.
The corn shifted, and the shadow on the other side lightened. “I wasn’t the one who got on my knees.”
Giggles jerked Raj’s attention to the path. A couple of kids stared at him, frowned at the dead end, then took off running the other way. Mortified that they might have overheard, Raj started to walk. “I’m…I’m sorry.” He intended to get away from Adam, leave it on nothing more than a foolish regret born from them running on adrenaline.
But Adam followed from the other side of the corn. “For which part?”
“You could have died in my basement.”
“I was the one who closed the door.”
A door with no lock. If Raj hadn’t tried beating it open himself, he wouldn’t believe it.
