Page 134 of Live for Me

“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.

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