Sweet (True Believers #2)(34)
Author: Erin McCarthy

After an excruciating minute, I let myself take another piece. Riley didn’t say anything, which I appreciated. I was struggling, and I didn’t want to hear the typical male attitude, which was “dieting is stupid,” yet they could not deny that they wanted women to look a certain way.

All these various thoughts I was having were all just a little too heady for a Sunday afternoon.

Fortunately, Riley pulled my hand into his, which sufficiently distracted me. He also gave me a buttery and salty kiss that had me leaning extra close to him, tucking my feet under my legs.

“Mm,” he said. Then he popped a piece of popcorn into my mouth and I didn’t even count the calories.

I just giggled as the opening credits started.

Twenty minutes later there was no giggling going on. The movie was creepy. Like hide-my-eyes, suck-my-soul-out-of-my-chest, whimper-in-the-dark scary as f**king hell. I was practically sitting in Riley’s lap. He had put his arm around me and tucked me into his chest and armpit, but it wasn’t enough to combat the freaked-out factor as the girl in the movie screamed the eeriest scream in the history of screams. A demon was possessing her, and in the most horrific of ironies, her name was Jessica.

“Really?” I had asked Riley when we had first learned her name.

He had just laughed. “It’s a common name.”

While I had never seen The Exorcist, this seemed to me like that movie, but with modern special effects and camera angles. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed in demon possession, but I couldn’t say with any certainty that it didn’t exist, and if it did, I imagined it would look exactly like this. Snot and sweat and weird limb angles.

Something shot across the room in the film, and I jumped. I may have whimpered, because Riley moved his popcorn to the opposite side so that he could pull me closer. “You okay?” he whispered.

“I don’t think so,” I whispered back. “I think I’m going to run out of the theater screaming.”

“Just remember it’s not real. It’s just a story.”

Someone in the theater shushed us. I was tempted to throw popcorn at them. I was having a crisis here, a little sympathy, please. Besides, what did you need to hear in a horror movie? The dialogue all focused on the normal people being disbelieving, i.e., “Just go back to bed, Becky. It’s the wind.” And then the evil creature/character whispering ominously, “Murder, murder, murder.” Or whatever the case was.

In this movie it was things like, “I’ve been watching you, Jessica” and “We’re in this together, Jessica, in your body and your soul.” What, like I needed that?

By the three-quarter point, I had my head buried in Riley’s shoulder and I was clutching his shirt with both hands.

It wasn’t pretty.

But neither was Satan.

By the time the lights came on in the theater, I was sweating and breathing hard, my hands clammy. When I released Riley’s shirt, there were wet spots from my anxious fists palming him.

“Maybe this wasn’t the best choice,” he conceded, rubbing my arms. “I stand corrected.”

“You think?” I said, actually shivering from fear.

“You really are afraid. I thought you were exaggerating.”

“I don’t exaggerate,” I said with great dignity.

He snorted. “It’s the sledding all over again. I didn’t know you were really such a chickenshit. I thought you were making it up.”

Oh, yes, the sledding. I didn’t think it was that weird to be twenty years old and afraid of flying down a hill on a piece of cracked plastic, but he had seemed to think I was just stalling to be annoying. So Riley had pushed me, and I had almost fainted from lack of oxygen, a scream frozen in my lungs. “Well, from now on, you should believe me.”

As we stood up and left the theater, I added, “And I’m not a chickenshit. There are just certain things I’m afraid of, high speeds and demonic possession being two of them. You have to be afraid of something too, everyone is.”

“Nope.”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes for emphasis. “You’re not afraid of heights or small spaces or spiders?”

“No.”

“Flying?”

“I’ve never been on a plane, so I’m not one hundred percent sure, but most likely no.”

“Death?”

“Not particularly. I’m too busy trying to live.”

“You’re unnatural,” I declared. “Everyone is afraid of something.”

Riley held the door open for me as we stepped out into the heat and sunshine. “You know the one thing I’m afraid of.”

I glanced back at him, and I knew what it was—losing Easton. “That’s not going to happen,” I told him firmly. “The house looks great and Easton is happy. He feels safe with you, and he’ll tell the social worker that.”

Riley nodded. “And demons aren’t going to possess you, Jess. I don’t believe in guarantees, but in this case I’m willing to guarantee it.”

“I’m willing to guarantee that you’re going to hang those blinds when we get back to the house.”

He made a face. “What are you majoring in? Management? Because you’re really good at telling me what to do, while you watch me and point.”

“Ha ha.” I hesitated to tell him my major, because it sounded so stupid to me. Like a waste of a giant pile of money. For more than a year, I hadn’t even told Kylie and Rory that I was doubling with Religious Studies. They had just thought I was a design student until Rory started to get suspicious as to why I was taking so many theology classes and I had confessed the truth.

I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do post-college exactly, and that felt like such a failure. It made me feel guilty, too, that other people didn’t have the luxury of going through the motions of a degree. They had to pay bills and survive and here I was, getting a degree to placate Daddy.

The freedom I was working so hard to ensure wasn’t really all that freeing if I was going through the motions with my classes, and aimless otherwise. I was halfway done with college and knew less about my future than I had when I’d graduated high school. Scary shit.

Fortunately, Riley was not the kind of guy who wanted me to cough up all my personal details or my feelings. Probably because he didn’t want to do that in return.

There was a safety in spending time with him, laughing and eye-rolling and teasing, with occasional moments of serious conversation. But there was no prying, no judgment.