Page 136 of Live for Me

“If you want it to be, angel,” Utah whispered on his way behind me.

“Oh, fuck. He’s good at this,” Trista said and laughed. “You’re in trouble, my friend.”

“Better get moving, Fancy Face,” Jersey called from somewhere very much in a different direction than where he’d disappeared. “It’ll be dark soon. And I’ll be right behind you.”

I could hear Trista try to breathe in all the air available in this state. I looked back to where I thought Utah might’ve been, but he was already gone too.

“Are we supposed to stay together?” I asked, suddenly a little concerned at the prospect of being alone out here.

“Were you paying attention to the route we took to get back here?” she asked, ignoring my question entirely.

“I didn’t even have my eyes open for most of it!”

“We shouldn’t stay on the trail,” she said.

“We’ll get lost, Triss.”

“If we just pick a direction and keep moving, we’ll eventually end up out of the field, right? Then we could just walk around the edge of it until we make it back to the parking lot.”

“That’s not really the best logic to—” I tried to say but she’d already made up her mind. She picked a direction, and she was moving.

“Go your own way if you want. Jersey won’t give me much of a head start,” Trista called back and laughed while she bolted into the fucking corn.

I took off after her a second later.

“Is he seriously going to fuck you out here in the dirt if he catches you?” I asked once I caught up to her. “I have so many questions about whatever this is.”

I could hear her giggle. “Are you having fun, Memphis?”

I considered that question for a second because I felt like a crazy person for the answer.

But I was having fun. I was running through a cornfield with my only friend, being chased by her boyfriend, and my…Utah…just for fucking fun. Just because it gave every single one of us a crazy high to be playing this game where the idea was fake danger. We spent so much time dealing in real danger that the knowledge that this was the safest I’d been in a long time was like being able to breathe deeply for the first time in years.

“Yeah,” I finally answered. “I am.”

“Then shut up, and run,” Triss said with another laugh. “They’ll catch us that much faster if they can hear us.”

But didn’t we both actuallywantto get caught?

It took a lot of restraint not to ask that question.

I still had so many questions about the logistics of this game and how little sense it made if I thought too hard about what we were doing out here. I knew this was primal play. The concept wasn’t new to me. I readPen Pal. But actually being a part of this in real life did not feel anything like I’d imagined it would based off my books. No amount of ghosts chasing each other could’ve prepared me for the way it made my heart beat in my throat to prevent me from breathing just because I knew Utah was out here in the near darkness, intending to catch me and fuck me regardless of how I reacted to it.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

utah

Of all the things that I imagined might’ve happened on this night out, coming to a silent agreement with Jersey that we were about to embark on a joint effort to scare these girls right into getting the other man laid tonight was not even in the top million.

But there was no denying that it excited Memphis. I wouldn’t have guessed she’d be ready to try games quite on this scale yet. She was still learning what she liked, still working her way through the emotions that came with certain things, still up for experiencing new things. This one, though. This felt like it could be way more intense than the other things we’d experimented with so far. Finding the middle ground between being the crazed predator that wanted only to make her mine out here in the fucking corn and still making sure she could see through that to the man I really was underneath, so she’d know she’d be safe through every part of it, felt like an impossible balancing act. It would ultimately just come down to whether or not she trusted me yet.

I froze right where I was when I heard movement behind me. The girls wouldn’t be anywhere near me right now, and I was starting to wonder just how many people were in this field in Halloween costumes for this maze. That could complicate this game in weird ways once I caught Memphis.

I couldn’t hide even a single bit of the shock that must’ve been on my face when Jersey popped up in front of me. He’d gone theotherdirection when this started.

“How the fu?—”

He smirked. “Marine, junior. Here,” he said and held something toward me. “Paid a couple of kids for these.”

---