Experiment in Terror 07 Come Alive (5 page)

“Just cute?”

“Hey, you think
I’m
cute.”

I shook my head. “I think you’re cute and sexy and gorgeous and outstandingly fuckable. You meet all the requirements for one infuriatingly hot piece of ass, an ass that I’d love to shoot hot—”

She shot me a warning look. The mother of a family of four across from us was giving me the stinkeye. Whoops.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized to the mother. “It’s our first date.”

“And will probably be your last,” she muttered to herself and turned back to her kids. One was still staring at me with a frightened expression. I’d forgotten I had that effect on children.

“I get it,” Perry said quickly, bringing my attention back to her. “Though I have to say your wooing skills need some work.”

“These are my wooing skills,” I said, raising my hands and wiggling my fingers, “and from what I can tell, they work just fine.”

“Dex.”

“Miss Palomino.”

We watched each other for a few moments before breaking out into simultaneous grins. For a first date it was going pretty well. For Perry and I, getting to know each other on another level, it was going spectacularly.

And we hadn’t even gotten to dessert yet.

CHAPTER THREE

I woke up in the middle of the night noticing two strange things while my brain struggled to catch up. One was that the clock radio was flashing at 3AM, as if the power went out at that time, bathing the bedroom in sporadic hits of red. The other was Perry sitting on the edge of the bed.

I blinked hard and eased myself back on my elbows. My mouth was dry. “Baby? Are you okay?”

She didn’t move. Her long dark hair covered her back and she was facing away from me, her face obscured. She was wearing a long white nightgown that had frills at the wrists. It was weirdly familiar but I knew she hadn’t gone to sleep wearing it.

My chest started to feel tight.

“Perry?”

I didn’t want to reach over for her. I was too afraid of what I might find.

“Answer me, please,” I said, my voice shaking. I sat up straighter and stuck out my hand, reaching very slowly for her shoulder.

She felt like ice. I tightened my grip.

“Perry?”

She twitched. I held my breath.

Then she turned around.

It was the face of my mother.

“Declan,” she said in an inhuman voice.

I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Everything went black.

Then I was waking up again in my bed. The clock wasn’t blinking and I was alone in the room. My mother wasn’t at the end of the bed anymore but Perry wasn’t next to me either. I looked at the clock. It was 3AM.

I touched my forehead and found it was wet with sweat. I exhaled slowly, gathering my strength and wits, then got out of bed. I slept bare-ass naked so I slipped on a pair of boxer briefs that were lying on the floor and went out into the apartment. The bathroom was empty.

“Perry?” I asked quietly. Fat Rabbit looked up from the couch, his white head glowing in the darkness, then went back to sleep. I moved closer to the kitchen and saw the balcony door was open a crack, cold air flowing into the room.

I opened it and poked my head outside. Perry was sitting on a chair on my small rounded balcony, bundled in my house robe, staring at nothing. She was smoking a cigarette, her hair being whipped around by the wind.

“What are you doing?” I asked, more horrified that she was smoking than anything else.

She gave me a tired smile. “I just needed to clear my head.”

“Well, clear it inside where it’s not freezing cold,” I admonished her, motioning for her to come in.

“It’s almost Spring.”

I shook my head at that. “Why are you smoking? Where did you get that anyway?”

“Sorry. You had a whole stash hidden in the den in one of your hollowed out books.”

“Ah fuck. Well…please come inside, I’m worried about you.” I stepped out and reached for her arm, ignoring the split second hesitation, the fear that she might turn into my mother. But that was a dream. This was real.

And she felt like Perry, warm and solid underneath my robe. She got up, stubbing out the cigarette on the railing and flicked it over the edge. I didn’t like this one fucking bit. Not just the smoking itself but that it was so unlike her to smoke.

I ushered her inside and brought her over to the couch and took her hands in mine.

“Now talk,” I told her, her face dimly lit by the streetlights outside.

Her eyes darted to my crotch. And no, this time I did not have a boner. I’m not an animal.

“It’s hard to talk to you when you’re in just your underwear. Makes me want to do things to you.”

And shit. My dick twitched.

No, no, no, focus, she’s just trying to distract you with sex
, I told myself. I shook my head vigorously and squeezed her hands.

“Later, Perry. I want to know what’s wrong first. Why are you sitting on the balcony at three in the morning smoking? I’ve never seen you smoke before. And why were you going through my books?”

She shrugged but looked slightly chagrined. “I knew that’s where you used to keep your pills. I thought that’s where your pot was too. Didn’t find that either, so I went for the smokes. I don’t know, it calmed me down.”

“Calmed you down from what?”

She sighed and laced her fingers through mine. “I’m just sad, that’s all.”

For a second there I thought she was going to tell me she saw my dead mother too, but this was much worse. It broke my heart in two to hear her say that. And, selflessly, it stung a bit, because if she was sad, it meant I wasn’t making her happy.

I chewed on my lip before asking, “Is it because you’re homesick?”

She nodded, her eyes shining. “Yeah. I guess I am. I just miss…I don’t even know what I miss. I miss Ada. I miss the way my parents used to be around me. I’m…” She sighed loudly, looking up at the ceiling. “I hate that I can’t have everything. I hate that I can’t have both you and them.”

Ugh. It felt like my gut was being filled with rocks. I found myself asking a question that was probably better left unasked. “Would you rather go back to them and leave me behind?”

She looked at me sharply, a pained expression on her brow. “No. No, Dex, I chose you because I…I know you’d never make me choose. And my parents, well, they made it pretty clear what they think of you, think of me, and think of us together. And hell, even if they didn’t have a problem with you, I’d still have a problem with them. As long as I’m seeing ghosts and acting like Pippa, my mother is always going to be afraid of me, a hair-trigger away from trying to get me help. It’s just…it’s not fair. I want that normal life and to be treated normally and to be loved.”

“I love you,” I said quietly, blurting it out more than anything. I remembered what I’d told myself about not scaring her or pressuring her, but fuck, the words kept wanting to come out all the time. It was taking over me.

She swallowed. “Oh, Dex.” I could tell she was fumbling for words, searching for something to say that would placate me but nothing else would do. We both knew it.

“It’s okay,” I told her, bringing her hand up to my lips and kissing along her knuckles. “I just want you to know that I’m here for you. And I will do what I can to give you a normal life here.”

“Thank you,” she said softly. Then she smiled. “Though I don’t think normal is in the cards for us.”

I got up and loomed over her. “That’s true. But do you know what
is
in the cards for us?”

I stripped off my underwear and threw them across the apartment. From serious to hard-on in zero point five seconds flat.

I reached down and scooped her up in my arms. She squealed with delight, scaring the crap out of Fat Rabbit, and I carried her over to our bedroom.

***

Normal definitely wasn’t in the cards for us. Not when you went to a meeting with your boss and he was trying to tear you a new asshole because your footage of Sasquatch had been confiscated by Canadian authorities.

“You seriously fucked up this time!” Jimmy barked at us from behind his desk, his face red and contorted. We’d only been in his office for two minutes before the obscenities started flying out of his mouth.

I looked over at Perry who was wringing her hands together, looking wary of the big bad Korean man who only recently begged her to come back to
Experiment in Terror
. What a fickle fuckhead.

“Hey, Jimmy, hey,” I said, jerking my head at Perry. “How about toning it down a bit in front of the lady?”

Jimmy looked at me as if I had a cock growing out of my head. “Tone it down? Christ, Dex, the girl works with you. Or she did.” He glared at the two of us and leaned across his glass desk. “You can’t possibly think that going all the way to BC on the company dime and not coming back with an episode is okay.”

“We didn’t think it was
okay,
but—” Perry started.

He raised his hand. “Stop. I don’t care about your excuses. For once you actually had something—evidence
—and it was taken away.”

“Oh fuck that,” I exclaimed. “It was the police, it was evidence of a fucking murder.”

“Murder?” Jimmy scoffed.

“I don’t know, maybe not murder, but the thing was definitely related to us in some X-Men mutant type of way. Whatever. An attack. The man died. Of course the damn cops are going to confiscate it.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You should have lied. You should have said you didn’t have any evidence.”

I glared right back him. Jimmy had always been a bit of a dick, but this level of dickishness was new.

“Well, maybe, Jimmy, we thought it was in bad taste to air the episode anyway.”

“That is not your call,” he seethed. Then he straightened up and walked over to the window with its view of Elliott Bay. It was overcast and blustery but the rain had held off today. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth on his heels.

“The economy still hasn’t picked up yet,” he said to the window. “And I’m having to take a long hard look at the lineup and figure out what’s worth it. Some shows are doing really well with hits, others are tanking. You guys were doing really well but I don’t think I can rely on you anymore.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Perry said rather snidely. “This show was dead and buried.
You
resurrected it.”

“I assumed you wouldn’t be wasting my money. Obviously I was a moron and now I’m in the hole because there’s no show to air. So the resurrection is on hold until I figure out what to do with you.” He finally turned around and eyed us over his glasses. “This isn’t the first time you’ve nearly gotten hurt or lost most of your footage. What you do is entertaining, even when you have nothing to show for it, but it can’t survive in the long run. I was this close to getting a big fucking sponsor for you guys, I was counting on it. It would have meant better pay, better technology. But you two just aren’t professional enough.”

I felt my blood begin to boil. “You hired us because we aren’t professional. I recall you throwing around words like real and believable.”

“No, Dex. That’s what you said. That’s what you wanted. If we’d done it my way, it would have been Hollywoodized.”

“And shitty.”

He raised his shoulders. “Perhaps. But people like shit if it’s shiny and covered with glitter.”

I sighed, feeling like we were on the short end of the stick here. How many times had Perry and I had this same damn conversation with Jimmy? To be honest, I was getting kind of sick of it. Obviously I needed to talk to Perry about our strategy, but I felt like things were finally coming to a head. That said, like fuck I was about to bow out on account of Jimmy Kwan. He and Shownet could go fuck themselves. They weren’t telling us what we could and couldn’t do.

“All right, well how about we compromise?” I suggested.

Jimmy laughed unkindly. “Right. You, compromise.”

“Hey, I compromise a lot.” I could have gone on but I shut my mouth right on time.

He sat back down, leaning back in his seat, and studied me.

“Do tell, Dex, what is your compromise?”

I exchanged a quick look with Perry to make sure we were on the right track before I said, “Give us one more chance.”

“No.”

“Just hear me out. Give us one more chance. We’ll pay for the whole thing out of our own pocket.” Perry stiffened beside me at that. “We’ll arrange everything. We’ll shoot the episode and we’ll get that sponsor. If the sponsor doesn’t come on board, then we quit. We’re done.”

I could feel Perry’s eyes on me. I knew she was going to flip out over the whole paying for it thing. She had no money anymore, not really. Jimmy had been her only source of income and it was a shitty income at that. But I had money, money from my inheritance, money I’d been smart with over the years, and I’d take care of everything for her. If she’d let me.