With every man she’d been with, Sabrina had done what they asked her to do. The tunnel was no different. She needed that direction, craved it like air.
It was direction she wanted. She needed. It was Tristan.
She crawled for what seemed like hours, time stretching into an infinite loop the way a long hospital shift might feel like three days. Her knees ached, tired of the pressure on them, yet she didn’t reach an end. Her breathing came faster, and she couldn’t tell if it was from a lack of oxygen or a surplus of fear. The air tasted stale, and her knees left a trail of blood behind, scratches marring the skin she worked so hard to keep soft and perfect.
Out of breath, Sabrina rested, letting her heavy lids close. The tunnel’s floor settled under her, whispering against her skin as it rippled around her. The smell consumed her: earth, wet dirt and rot and a hint of decomposed green, the smell of an old antique store, dead things, the smell of old insulation. She couldn’t crawl through walls. That was fact, wasn’t it? They were solid, the same as her. When she let the laugh she’d been holding in escape, the sound surprised her. Her eyes shot open.
Tristan perched over her. She lay on the floor of his room, curled into a shivering ball. He wore no shirt, his chest slick from a shower, water droplets drying in the ridges of his sculpted muscles. Men shouldn’t be made like this. He should be impossible.
“Sabrina,” he said, frowning. “You can’t come into my room whenever you want.”
She hadn’t. Had she? She sat up, folding her legs underneath her as the room spun.
“It’s not fair to the other women.”
“But—” She should argue. He’d given himself permission to sneak into her room. It hadn’t been fair to her. Or to Marion, if she was honest with herself. Instead, she struggled to her shaky feet. Her knees throbbed. “I don’t know what came over me.” She winced. Everything she said in this moment would be permanent. “I was asleep, I think.”
“You sleepwalk?” He sounded disappointed.
“A little,” she lied. “Only under stress.”
“You never told me that.” He crossed his arms. “Dangerous to sleepwalk on a farm, you know. Just look at what you’ve done to your knees.” He gestured to the bloody scratches. Sabrina licked a finger and tried to rub the red away, but there was too much of it.
“I haven’t done it since I was a little girl.” She rubbed harder, and a little more came off. “Maybe it’s this haunted house?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in it.” He didn’t either, she realized as he took an uninterested step toward his wardrobe.
“I said I did and I didn’t.” She wrung her stained hands. She had to turn this around. Everything had been going so well, and now… What was his problem?
“Hard to keep track.” He rifled through his shirts. “Which one of these do you like?” He pulled out a blue button-down and an identical blue button-down.
Her chest ached. She pointed. He shrugged into the shirt, then modeled it for her. “I guess I can’t blame you,” he said, crouching to hover over her like a child. “I’ve showed you a lot of affection. It’s easy to get confused and think you’ve already won. But you can’t assume you’re going to win, Sabrina. There are still three women in the game.”
“Game?” Sabrina’s stomach lurched. “This is a game?”
He stood, offering her his hand. “Not game. You know what I mean. Journey. Whatever.”
Sabrina’s body flamed, not from desire but from embarrassment. The two heats were nearly the same.
Tristan glanced at his bed. “I suppose we could—” His eyes traveled down her body.
She shook her head. “I’m tired.” She faked a yawn, then scurried to the door. “I’m so sorry. Truly. It won’t happen again.”
Day Four
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sabrina
Hints of light leaked from beneath the bedroom doors as Sabrina crept down the hall. Tristan was a farm boy; he woke at sunrise. She was a nurse; she kept odd hours, too. After the show, she could fix coffee with cow-fresh milk for him before sliding into her pickup and driving thirty minutes to the nearest hospital. He could shake her awake when her naps turned into post-shift comas. They could watch every sunrise over the flat Iowa farmland. But she’d fucked it up by crawling into his room in the middle of the night like an overeager whore.
She’d never done anything like that before. She hadn’t been drunk. Tristan had brought mimosas to their picnic, but it was interrupted by Linda and Charity’s botched escape before they drank any. When the women returned, Deja banished Sabrina to her bedroom, later delivering a dinner tray. As Sabrina pulled the tray into the room, feeling more like a prisoner than ever, Deja promised she’d given Linda a talking-to and that no more escapes would occur. Sabrina must have seemed skeptical, because Deja went on: she’d hidden the motorcycle, for one thing; and for another, Linda had learned there was no getting out until the week’s end, when the roads were cleared and the bus returned.
Despite Deja’s unnerving presence, her visit left Sabrina more relaxed. She tried to settle in for a nice evening alone, but her stomach didn’t rumble until midnight, when she finally wolfed the cold mashed potatoes. As the moon pulsed outside her window, she turned over and over, but couldn’t make herself sleep. It would have been simple enough for Deja to hide something in the food. A stimulant, a hallucinogen. Deja had missed out on evening drama, after all, and with Brandon around, she wrung her hands more than usual.
Instead of returning to her room after Tristan kicked her out, Sabrina marched to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and grabbed a plastic container of leftovers, opened it, and inhaled. It didn’t smell off. Drugs would betray themselves with a bitter smell or taste, but if it were LSD or some tasteless compound, Sabrina would have no way of knowing. What she’d seen in that room, what she’d experienced, was not reality, and it had sunk her into hot water with her future husband.
“I overheard him yelling at you.” Tatum’s surfer voice traveled from the doorway. “He’s a fuckface, Sabrina. Don’t let him get to you.”
“He’s my boyfriend,” she said, surprised at how small her voice sounded. “I love him.”
“You think you do.” Tatum took the container of mashed potatoes from her. “It’s engineered that way. They work with psychologists, you know, to create the perfect conditions to evoke limerence. Isolation. Shared fear. Intense experience. Jealousy. Alcohol.” He grabbed a fork and shoved it into the potatoes.
“Wait!” Sabrina knocked the potatoes out of his hand. They fell to the ground, white goop flying in all directions.
“The fuck did you do that for?” Tatum threw up his hands. “I’m hungry as balls.”
“It’s got hallucinogens in it,” she said.
“Please. I ate like a whole plate of these potatoes last night. I know my hallucinogens. These are just potatoes.”
Sabrina scowled, then bent at once to the floor and began scooping the potatoes with her hands, cleaning the mess she made. Tatum’s hand closed around her arm. He held a towel in his other hand and draped it over the soiled floor.
“This is fine,” he said. “I got this.”
Sabrina leaned back on her heels and let her ass hit the floor with a painful thud.
When Tatum finished cleaning, dumping the leftover potato mush into the trash can, he offered a hand to Sabrina. She took it and stood, unsteady on her feet.
