Page 3 of Don't Scare Me, My Love

I turned to him. “Happens.”

He wrinkled his nose.

I knew what he was going to say. After all, everyone commented on it. “My eyepatch scared you?” I said, beating him to it. I rang up the beef jerky and the nut-filled candy bar he’d picked out.

“The whole combo,” he laughed. “The eye patch, the spotlight behind you, the rain. Only the murder weapon was missing. It was like a scene out of a movie. I wish I could’ve taken a picture.”

The machine behind me beeped, announcing that the second coffee of the day was ready. What an excellent opportunity to turn away and hide the fact that I didn’t know how to respond to his last sentence.

I put the coffee in a paper holder and set it on the counter in front of him. “Milk and sugar are on the side. That’s eight dollars and eighty-nine unless you want to put some money on the gas meter. But they also take cards.”

He shook his head and tossed ten bucks on the counter. “Do you like horror movies?”

I raised an eyebrow at him as I took the bill.

“This place,” he gestured around, “looks like something out of a horror movie.”

My left eyebrow went up even higher.

His neck lengthened as he must’ve realized how this sounded. “In a good way, though.”

“How can it be a good thing that the place where I work every day is scary enough to be the set of a horror movie?”

“That didn’t sound as flattering as I thought, did it?”

“Not really.”

“I sometimes forget that not everyone loves scary movies.”

I didn’t know what to say. This place didn’t look like a horror movie set to me. It was just an aging gas station in the woods, surrounded by mountains…okay, maybe I understood where he came from.

He sipped his coffee without adding cream or sugar. “Sorry, I thought you were into it, too,” he said, looking at the eye patch again.

One thing I hated was when people asked me about it.

Yes, I only have one eye. No, I don’t want to talk about what happened. Yes, I also have a prosthetic—four of them, to be exact—and could wear them to avoid questions. But since the tissue in my eye socket healed strangely after I lost it, the prosthetics are uncomfortable to wear.

“And why would you think that?”

“You’ve got all these decorations up,” he pointed at the severed hands, “much more gory than most stores for Halloween and—” he pointed at the eye patch when suddenly his eyes went wide as if he had an epiphany. “Oh bloody hell, the patchisn’ta costume?”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. Please accept my apology.”

I waved him off. “Well, you’re not from around Seastone. You couldn’t know that my sister gouged out my eye with a pencil and fed it to our dog.”

That was a lie. I don’t have a sister, and my family never had a dog. People asked me so many times that I started telling the craziest shit to get them off my back. Seeing their faces freeze in shock felt like all the retribution I needed. Was I an asshole for it? Maybe. But people should learn to mind their own business. It was not like I was running around and asking everyone about their medical history.

I opened the till, tossed his ten dollars in, and grabbed his change, preparing to see his horrified face when I handed it over—only to find him smiling.

“That is so disgusting. I don’t even care that it’s a lie.” The grin on his face was so broad that my heart skipped a beat.

“It’s not. I only have one eye,” I replied.

“That I believe. Not the part about your sister feeding it to your dog.”

“Why not?”

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