59. Utah

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

utah

I couldn’t hurt New Jersey. Partially because he was an old man, but mostly because Memphis cared for him so deeply. He’d already about worn my patience down to nothing in the short time that he’d been back here, though. Everything was a fucking fight with this guy. Whether it was about the vehicles, the jobs, or just being human. All of it. A fight.

“Tell you what, old man. I’m taking Memphis to a haunted corn maze. You guys should come too. First one there wins.”

“What?” Jersey asked in absolute disbelief. “Wins what?”

“If you win, bragging rights. You can keep being every bit as annoying as you like. If I win, I just want your fucking silence.”

He laughed. “Come on, girls. Seph has a bet to win.”

“A haunted corn maze?” Memphis asked with the most epic fucking eye roll of the last century.

After I explained to them that this maze was only a couple of these absurd backroads away, Jersey walked toward his car and held the passenger door open for Trista, but he looked back at where Memphis stood completely frozen—directly in the middle of where I stood and where Jersey was. She was uncomfortable just looking between the two of us.

“Up to you, honey,” Jersey said. “If you want to go with the man who’s going to win, get in this car.”

I shook my head and laughed. I had absolutely no way to explain how I knew she was coming with me, but I did.

“Come on, angel,” I said and went back to the truck. Indy opted to stay behind to try to monitor the situations with Salem, Nevada, and Akron.

I could feel New Jersey’s eyes burning into the back of my head while I held my hand out for Memphis to use to climb into the passenger’s side. I couldn’t help but laugh once I was in the truck with her and I could hear Jersey light up the back tires of his car while it squealed halfway down the driveway toward the road. I stopped the truck at the end of the driveway to watch the Challenger disappear in the distance.

“What are you doing?” Memphis asked. “I thought you wanted to silence the man? Oh, my God. We’re not going at all, are we? That was just to get him to leave, wasn’t it?”

I laughed at that shit, because it really wasn’t a bad idea.

“Hold onto something, angel. I very much intend to silence him.”

I drove the truck straight over the road and into the field across from Jersey’s house, while Memphis promptly began to freak out beside me.

“I have no doubt that car is faster, but I’d bet anything that he wouldn’t sacrifice the car to win this. Not even for the sake of his earth-sized pride. He’ll stick to the roads to save his precious paint. Ariel can go anywhere.”

I had a good laugh at the expense of my adorable little panic-stricken passenger. After a good four million gasps, at least seventeen attempts to slam her foot down on an imaginary brake, and a white knuckled hold that shifted between the seatbelt across her chest and the handle over her head, I parked the truck in the grass lot at the entrance of the corn maze.

Jersey’s car wasn’t anywhere in sight, but I could hear it coming. I went around to the other side of the truck when Memphis hadn’t managed to get out on her own, and found myself laughing again when she still hadn’t released the handle or even taken her seatbelt off. I climbed up on the running boards to lean across her to undo the buckle.

“You sure you’re up for this?” I asked while I tried to drag her from the seat. “Haunted corn maze where the goal of everyone here will be to scare you, when you freaked out that hard over a drive through a regular cornfield?”

“I know they’re trying to scare me. That’s what they’re supposed to do. You are not supposed to just drive through a cornfield. You aren’t supposed to scare me,” she snapped.

“Oh, please. You’ll never convince me that you don’t also love it that you’re afraid of me.”

I definitely shouldn’t have said that out loud.

But I wasn’t wrong.

She knew it, too. It was painfully obvious while she froze to stare straight up at me for a second as Jersey’s car pulled in next to the other side of the truck. She glanced in that direction for just a fraction of a second before she looked right back at me.

“You cheated,” Jersey said from the other side of the truck.

I smirked. “We can finish this conversation later, angel,” I whispered to her before I took a step back to be ready to face the madman.

“I don’t think we set any rules?” I asked and looked between Jersey and where Trista stood at the front of the car laughing uncontrollably.

“He beat you here, J,” Triss added. “That was the only requirement.”

“This won’t end well for you if you take his side, baby.”

“It’s not taking a side,” she said, still laughing. “He got here first. He was parked here when we pulled in. That means he was first.”

“Triss,” he hissed and turned right back for her.

I tried to ignore whatever he was about to do to her. Their relationship was weird as fuck and watching them interact usually just made me want to hit him all the more. I turned and held my hand out to Memphis. She stared at it for a couple seconds, like she was somehow confused about what I was expecting her to do.

The smartest human I’d ever met in real life, and she still didn’t know what it meant to just hold hands.

“You ready?” I asked. She finally just fucking smiled at me before she took that whole extra step closer to be able to slip her hand into mine. I watched her while we walked toward the entrance, because I couldn’t stop myself. She was looking down at where our hands were connected; the slightest hint of that smile still present in the way that the corners of her mouth were just slightly tipped upward. She still watched our hands while she shifted her fingers from just sitting in my hand to being laced in mine. She looked up at me in an instant when I squeezed her hand, and I had the most beautiful few seconds of watching her cheeks turn pink before she looked away again.

“They have food trucks?” Triss asked. “Are those games? What is this place? I thought we were just coming here to be scared by some corn creatures.”

“It’s a Fall Festival,” Jersey laughed. “Haunted shit, fried food, carnival games. You haven’t done anything like this before?”

“No,” she said quietly.

“Me either,” Memphis added. I squeezed her hand another time.

“Are we really supposed to eat first?” Triss asked. “Because there’s a good chance I’ll throw up everywhere if it’s actually scary in there.”

“We can just go to the maze,” I smirked.

“Is it actually scary in there?” Memphis whispered.

Both girls squealed at the sound of a chainsaw somewhere nearby, and Memphis stopped moving entirely at the screams that followed shortly after.

“Maybe Memphis and I can just sit out here and eat junk while you guys go through it,” Triss suggested.

“I’m not holding his hand through there,” Jersey said quickly.

I waited while Memphis looked through the section of the corn that we could see. The sun would set soon and then we’d have to rely on whatever lighting they’d set up throughout the maze.

“Nobody in there will touch you,” I whispered. “Well, me excluded. You don’t have to be in control of every situation, sugar. I’ve got this one. Learn to live.”

I watched her eyes dart back and forth between mine while she seemed to weigh every single word. Then she looked back at Jersey.

“Nothing in there scarier than me, sweetheart,” he said quietly.

That jackass.

I couldn’t stand a single thing about that motherfucker.

Until he opened his mouth to tell Memphis exactly what she needed to hear from him.

He would always be the man she learned to trust first.

While something inside me would always be painfully jealous of that knowledge, more of me was grateful he took that role as seriously as he did.

She squeezed my hand, so I pulled her toward the little stand where a tiny girl dressed like a broken doll was taking money. The chainsaw in the distance had Memphis squishing into me a second later. The very moment I’d handed over the cash for all four of us and turned toward the entrance to the maze, a scarecrow burst out of the field and sprinted right at us.

Trista screamed loud enough to deafen everyone within earshot.

Memphis disappeared entirely to hide behind me, with both her hands dug into my hips as hard as she could squeeze them to make sure I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Fuck this!” Triss hissed. “And fuck you, man. Do you get paid for this? Or do you just do this shit for fun?”

“And here I was thinking I was about to have my hands full forcing Memphis through here,” I said and laughed at the thought of Jersey having to restrain Triss all the way through this maze. The scarecrow cackled to himself for his entire walk back into his hiding place.

“I’m smacking him if he pops up again,” Trista said.

“You’re not smacking anybody. Get over here, Rambo,” Jersey said right back to her.

I tried to shift to get Memphis at least to the side of my body so I could make her walk next to me, but she wasn’t having any part of that.

“Nope. I’m good back here. Thanks. Lead the way.”

“You’re not even going to look?” I laughed.

“No thank you.”

“Nothing in here is going to hurt you, baby. Come on.”

I forced myself out of her hold so I could get an arm around her shoulders and make her walk beside me. Memphis survived that way for longer than I would’ve anticipated. She was okay as long as we were able to approach something that she could already see. Scarecrows that weren’t alive and were just set up as distractions didn’t bother her so much. Gory scenes that were meant to look like murder and were staged throughout didn’t seem to faze her. What got her every single time were the people who ran toward us, or who appeared from the field around us. The people who popped up with no warning when she didn’t have the luxury of a moment to prepare for the jump-scare—they had her heart racing so hard I could feel it every time she pressed herself further into me.

Something seemed to shift in her when we came across the gorilla-sized man in a pig’s mask who wielded the offending chainsaw that we’d heard earlier. For some reason, he was accompanied by a Pennywise-looking motherfucker. And while I wasn’t easily scared, something in the depths of who I was disliked Pennywise at a baseline level.

While the pig-man and his chainsaw had the panic, attention, and fear of both girls, Jersey smacked me in the shoulder to nod behind us. He’d spotted the clown approaching before anybody else did. That didn’t give me anywhere near enough time to be able to prepare Memphis for it, though. She’d backed all the way into the front of me while the chainsaw moved closer. When she realized she had no more room to continue backing away, she pulled this absurd spin move to get herself moving so she could hide behind me another time. But in her desperate attempt to get space between herself and the pig-man, she crashed right into the front of Pennywise. She would’ve bounced off him and fallen straight to the ground if he hadn’t caught her by both wrists when she hit him.

But the scream that came out of that girl kicked my ass into gear before my brain could remind me that she wasn’t being hurt. Her screaming the way that she was only encouraged whoever was inside that clown-head to continue making it worse. He was leaning down slowly to get closer to her face while she started to squirm to try to get out of his hold.

The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but time sure as fuck felt like it stood still between me ripping Memphis away from him, shoving her back toward New Jersey, and tackling that clown straight into the dirt. Hearing him thud and yelp beneath me made me feel a little better at least, but by the time I was raising back up on top of him and planning to start swinging, I felt arms scoop under both of mine to drag me backward.

“It’s not real, kid,” Jersey said and spun me the other direction, so I was looking at Memphis before he released me. “She’s fine.”

I looked back at Jersey quickly. He’d planted himself squarely between me and the clown who was being helped off the ground by the pig-man, who’d abandoned his chainsaw entirely. Jersey nodded back toward Memphis to redirect my attention where it should’ve been.

Those green eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them. She was breathing hard enough that I could hear her from where I stood, and her little hands were constantly shifting between being balled tightly and shaking out her fingers.

“I’m sorry, angel,” I said and went right to her. I squeezed her against my chest as hard as I could. “Are you okay?”