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“Oh, yes. The internet that we don’t have,” Bellamy said, giving me a grimace.
“It is going to be creepily quiet out here. We could probably hear the wolverines breathing and plotting our demise as we try to fall asleep.”
“I think you’re overreacting to the wolverines and under-reacting to the bears. But there are TVs and these antiquated things called DVD players. I can’t speak for what kind of movies Bob would have stocked the place with, but whatever it might be, there will be noise.”
“Oh, now I have to know,” I said, giving the pasta a stir then moving off into the living room, going down on the floor in front of the TV cabinet to open it and check out the choices.
“What?” Bellamy asked, coming up behind me as I let out a laugh.
“Bob must be an interesting sort of guy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there are copies of some 80s action movies all of a hundred people have ever seen. And then two different copies of You’ve Got Mail. Oh, this might be a score. It’s some kind of boxed set,” I said, feeling in a darkened, far corner for a giant collection of some sort, and pulling it out. “Oh, the plot thickens.”
“What is it?”
“Tru Calling.”
“And why does that thicken the plot?” Bellamy asked.
“Because no one knows what this is. It only got like two seasons.”
“What’s it about?”
“Some pre-med woman who needs a job, so she goes to work at a morgue. And when she is working alone at night, the bodies come alive, grab her, and tell her to save them. And then her whole day restarts and she has to try to save them before they die. It’s actually really good. We’re going to watch it while we eat dinner,” I informed him, leaving the DVDs on top of the cabinet as I hopped up to go stir the pasta.
“You seem to know a lot about movies and TV.”
“One of my mom’s… boyfriends,” I said, and I was using that term very loosely, “sliced into a neighbor’s cable. TV was literally all I had to do growing up if I wanted to stay safe. Don’t give me sad eyes,” I demanded, pointing the spoon at him.
“I’m not sad for you, the ravishing creature standing before me,” Bellamy said, and damn if my heart didn’t do a freaking little flutter at his words. “I’m sad for the little girl who wasn’t safe,” he said, shrugging.
“Stop,” I demanded, turning away, a little more uncomfortable than I probably should have been at that moment.
See, that unsafe little girl, she developed a lot of coping mechanisms to survive. What she didn’t get to cultivate, though, was a healthy relationship with her own feelings. So whenever someone who was an outsider to my childhood felt empathetic toward the things I went through, I felt almost alarmingly uncomfortable about it. My skin felt like it was crawling. My stomach tied itself into knots.
“Stop what?” Bellamy asked, coming closer as I pretended to look around for the colander even though I’d already seen it in the same cabinet with the pots and pans.
“Being, you know…”
“Human?” he filled in.
“Yeah. You’re supposed to be a rich asshole.”
“Because it would be easier than for you to deny that something is going on between us?” he asked, making my stomach drop because he was spot-on about that. Damn him.
“There’s occasional sex going on between us,” I said, grabbing the colander because then I could move to the sink. And away from him. “Oh, and running for our lives because some guy wants us dead. We have that too. But that’s it,” I insisted, wincing when I slammed the strainer down a little too hard in the sink, a move that seemed to immediately undermine my words.
“Okay, love,” Bellamy said, but everything about his tone said he didn’t agree, but that he was choosing not to press the issue. “So, explain to me about this liquid cheese again.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bellamy
Admittedly, I was dubious.
About the so-called cheese.
About the TV show.
About our ability to be alone in the woods together and not get into an argument.
But, as it turned out, there hadn’t been anything to worry about.
Except, maybe, whatever plaque that had built up in my arteries from the half-congealed, bright orange cheese mix.
I couldn’t be too particular about it, though, since I’d once taken a pill from a DJ in Russia, not having a clue what it was for.
I woke up under a bearskin rug, cradling an empty bottle of vodka, lying next to an actual sack of potatoes.
The potato mystery has yet to be solved. And I never took party drugs from someone I didn’t know in a club again.
But the macaroni & cheese and the show was almost as good as the company of a woman who seemed to relax more with each passing moment with her comfort food and her comfort show. Though whenever she thought she heard a noise, her head whipped over to the windows, eyes wide, and her hand grabbing her fork a little more tightly.
