Slow Burn(109)

    She put one finger on my father’s chest and pushed him back through the door. “Let’s not talk about this here, okay?”

    The door slammed shut after her.

“Griffin?” I said.

    He didn’t speak. He was still shaking.

    I went to him. I wrapped my arms around him. He didn’t seem to notice I was there. “What did she mean about gassing us?”

    He didn’t say anything.

    I remembered that Griffin had told me about a gas room when we were at Blackwater Falls, when my biggest problem was trying to figure out why Griffin didn’t want to mess around with me. “Are we in that room you told me about?”

    “Doll,” he whispered.

    “Are we?”

    “Yes,” he said. “They’re going to kill us.”

We sat there, huddled together against the wall, quiet and frightened. Neither of us spoke or moved for a long time.

    “Maybe they aren’t,” I said. “Wasn’t Caldwell saying something about wiping your memory?” I also remembered Griffin telling me about that back at Blackwater Falls—it was something my father had also worked on.

    “It would be the same thing,” he said. “If I lose a year of my memory, I lose all memory of you. It would be like we never met. And that would be like dying—to go back to being the man I was before I knew you.”

    I knew what he meant. Griffin and I had changed each other. I held him tight.

    “Probably, they put us in here to decide what to do with us,” said Griffin. “But either way, once that gas goes on, we’ll be dead to each other.”

    “We should escape,” I said. Then I peered around the room. “Or are they listening to us? Are there cameras?”

    “They can’t see or hear us,” he said. “They’re sick, but not so sick as to enjoy watching people die.”

    “Then, how do we get out of here?”

    “We don’t,” he said.

    I didn’t want us to die. Honestly, when I tried to think about it, it was too big, too much. I couldn’t even really conceive of the idea of just... ending?

    I took Griffin’s hand. “We’re not dying.”

    He touched my face. “Oh, doll.”

     “This isn’t the end.” I kissed him.

    He kissed me fiercely, his tongue claiming my mouth. Then he broke away. “It’s not working.”

    “What isn’t?”

    “I can’t get French’s voice out my head.”

    “Griffin, she was—”

    “She was right, you know. When you tried to go down on me, it didn’t work.”

    “Don’t listen to her.”

    He turned away.

    I thought about being dead again. It made me feel crazy, like there were little needles inside me pushing on the inside of my skin. I needed to get out of here. I needed to live. I was alive. Griffin and I weren’t dead. I wouldn’t let us...

    I moved his knees wider apart, settling in between them. I reached for his zipper.

    “What are you doing?” Griffin tried to push me away.

    I didn’t let him. I unzipped his pants. I unbuttoned them. “I’m going down on you. We didn’t get to do it. Not yet. And I don’t want to die until I...” I yanked his clothes out of the way. “Besides she was wrong. You don’t belong to her. You belong to me.”

    Griffin looked at me with terror in his eyes. “Leigh, that’s crazy.”

    He wasn’t hard. He was lying soft against his leg, but he wasn’t covering himself either.

“You said they couldn’t see us or hear us,” I said.

    “Yeah, but doll...” He swallowed.

    I pulled my shirt over my head. I tugged off my bra. He liked to look at me. “If we’re crazy enough, then we’re alive, Griffin. Dead people don’t do things like this.”

    The sight of my bare flesh was arousing him. I could see him lengthening. I put my hand on him, wrapping my hand around him, stroking him.

    He stopped me. “No. I can’t.”