Page 11 of Now That It's You
“Heat-seeking missile!” Meg shouted, hurling her marshmallow at a man charging her from the left. The man raised a foam shield and the marshmallow bounced off. Kyle leapt forward, stretching with his palm out.
“Got it!” He caught the marshmallow in one hand, throwing his body in front of Meg as he took aim and hurled the weapon again. “Tell your dragon to cover me!”
“Fallopian—sic balls.”
“Aaaargh!” Their newest attacker fell to the ground in front of them, pantomiming a hideous and painful death.
To Meg’s right, Ufnar screamed and clutched his shoulder. “My arm! I’ve lost my arm! Do something!”
Meg and Trinity rushed toward him, then dropped to their knees in the dirt as Ufnar fell to the ground. “Can you reattach limbs, Empress Cattywampus?”
Meg nodded, trying to remember what she’d learned watching the TV special about LARPing. Trinity pulled a ribbon from a small silk pouch around her neck and handed it to Meg. “Take mine.”
“Thank you.” Meg laid the ribbon on Ufnar’s shoulder, hoping this was more or less how things were supposed to go. “By the power granted to me by The Great Spatula and Lord Kumquat, I command thee to heal thine limb and be made whole again.”
Ufnar blinked, then looked from Meg to Trinity and back to Meg again. “My lady, you have saved me. I owe you my very life.”
“’Tis nothing,” Meg assured him. “You would do the same for me.”
“That’s it, run away!” Sir Reginald shouted, and Meg looked up to see the last of their attackers fleeing the way they’d come.
Behind her, a shrill chime echoed through the trees. At first, Meg thought it was somehow connected to the game, but she turned to see Kyle pulling his phone from a pocket. He scowled at the screen and muttered something under his breath.
Ufnar sat up and frowned. “Sir Tonsillectomy Xanthan Gum—you have broken the cardinal rule of technology.”
Kyle turned away, putting a hand over his left ear as he raised the phone to his right and said, “Hi, Mom.”
Ufnar began to protest, but Meg shushed him. “His brother just died,” Meg whispered as Kyle walked into the trees murmuring into the phone. “It probably has to do with funeral arrangements or a memorial service or?—”
“You’re reviewing the will now?” Kyle growled, and Meg looked up to see him scowling with the phone to his ear.
“Or a will,” Trinity whispered.
“Or that,” Meg whispered back.
“Mom, I don’t really think now’s the best time to get into—right. I know. I get it.” Kyle fell silent again, his scowl deepening as he listened to whatever his mother was shouting. Meg could hear Sylvia’s voice from fifteen feet away, though she couldn’t make out the words.
Kyle shook his head, then looked up from the tree branch he’d been stripping of its needles. His gaze locked with Meg’s, and she started to look away, but something stopped her. Something in the intensity of his expression, or maybe the fact that she was almost sure she heard the word Meg from the other end of the line.
“I’m with her right now, actually,” Kyle said, his eyes never leaving Meg’s. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Chapter 3
Meg twisted a damp tissue in her hands and thought about prison interrogation and Chinese water torture. Anything, really, would be more pleasurable than this conversation with Matt and Kyle’s mother.
“So what do you have to say for yourself, young lady?”
Sylvia peered at her over the top of her glasses, a look that had not failed to disarm Meg since the first moment she met Sylvia after her fourth date with Matt. Back then, Sylvia had called Meg “cute” for ordering a margarita with dinner, and Meg had promptly knocked the beverage into her own lap. The fumble made her look incontinent as well as classless.
Things hadn’t changed much in ten years.
Meg forced herself to meet Sylvia’s gaze across the spotless Midland family living room. She ordered herself not to cry, not to slouch, not do any of the things her body desperately wanted to do.
Like flee.
Meg cleared her throat. “I’m aware of the debt,” she said. “Matt took the photographs for my cookbook a few months after we got engaged. He offered it as a favor at the time.”
“At the time, you were planning to actually marry my son instead of leaving him brokenhearted at the altar.”
