Chapter 9
Kayla
I’ve had men react to me in a lot of different ways. Fear. Disgust. Panic. But never… curiosity. But the way Ethan continues to look at me is pulling at my nerves. I cut away another piece of meat from the man’s arm and salt it on the table. “You realize you should be afraid of me, right?”
Ethan shrugs from the corner of the table he’s perched on. “Why?”
I look at the dead body, then back at him. “Um, well, obvious reasons, and I have a knife.”
He smirks. “You haven’t stabbed me yet, so I think I’m safe.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m still debating that.”
He hands me a ziplock back when he sees I’m struggling to open my own and holds it open so I can drop the salted meat into it. Our eyes collide as I watch him zip it up without hesitation about getting blood on his fingers. “You realize that normal people don’t act like this.”
He places the bag onto the table and readies another one for me. “Normal people don’t eat human flesh… but you do.”
“Okay, but I’m not claiming to be normal.”
He chuckles. “Neither am I.”
This stuns me into silence because he’s not wrong. I am the one who put him in a normal category. He just said he was curious. But it's still fucking weird, and I’m confused, so… sue me.
Then a thought dawns on me, and I turn toward him with my hand on my hip. “Wait a second. Are you not weirded out by this at all?”
He looks around the space before stepping closer to me. “Should I be?”
“Yes?” I hesitate because I feel like that’s the right thing to say.
“Who says? You? Or society?”
“Everyone. Everyone says this is weird. Even I think it’s weird.”
He inches closer, so close that our chests nearly touch now. “And what if I tell you that it just makes me more curious about you. What you’re like inside here,” he taps my head, and I scowl.
“You know what they say about curiosity, right? Curiosity killed the cat.”
He barks out a laugh before wrapping his arms around my waist and yanking me toward him. “I like living on the wild side if it means you’re on it.”
I don’t even know how to begin to feel about what is happening. I just came up here for meat. I wasn’t expecting someone to see me for all of my damaged parts and still want to get to know me. I think that confuses me more than anything.
I slip out of his grasp and grab another strip of meat and lay it flat against the table. I drag my blade down the muscle the way my father taught me when I was seven years old. Clean cuts mean no wasted meat.
Behind me, Ethan watches. I can feel the way his eyes drill into me. “You’re staring again,” I grumble, not taking my eyes off my work.
“I’m learning.”
“Learning what?”
“How you separate the meat from the muscle, obviously,” he scoffs.
I raise my brow but don’t turn toward him. “Are you planning on starting up your own cannibalistic hobby?”
He laughs. “Probably not.”
“Then why bother?” I glance at him this time, and his steel blue eyes stare back at me.
“Because it matters to you.”
My heart pounds in my chest, tightening just slightly as his words land deep somewhere I don’t want them to. He wants to learn how to do what I’m doing because it’s important to me. This isn’t some regular hobby.
We continue in silence. Me cutting away the meat, and him closing the bags behind me until he wipes his hand on a rag I have laid on the table. “So… question.”
I sigh. Wiping my brow. “What now?”
He nods toward the body. “How much of him are you actually taking?”
“All of him.”
He raises his brows. “All?”
I nod. “Meat is meat.”
“How big is your freezer?” he laughs nervously.
I smirk. “Big enough.”
He sets the bag down beside the others and looks at the growing row of meat like he’s mentally doing the math. “You’re going to need help carrying all this back,” he says.
“I don’t need help.”
He gestures toward the table. “There’s at least forty pounds of meat here already.”
“I’ve carried more.”
His eyes flick back up to mine. “That wasn’t a challenge.”
“It sounded like one,” I grumble.
He chuckles quietly and grabs another bag, holding it open while I drop another strip inside. “Let me rephrase,” he says. “You might not need help, but you’ve got it anyway.”
I glance at him again. “You’re really committing to this whole accomplice thing, huh?”
“Is that what I am now?”
“Yes.”
“And here I thought I was just helping a girl with dinner.”
I roll my eyes and shove the bag into his chest. “Hold that.”
He obeys without complaint. Then I hear voices. They aren’t too close but close enough that I can hear them, which means they are walking in the woods. Ethan looks at me with wide eyes. “People are coming.”
“No shit.” I start grabbing the bags and tossing them into the cooler I stored under the table. I have to move fast. Once the cooler is full, I grab onto Ethan’s sleeve and drag him to me. “Grab the other side. We have to move.”
He says nothing as he grips the other handle, and we drag the cooler and my tools into the tree line. Let’s just hope they don’t walk into the clearing. I still need to bury the rest of the body.
“You know,” Ethan says, as we set down the cooler. “This is the weirdest first date I’ve ever been on.”
I swat at him. “This is not a date.”
He chuckles. “Hey, you kissed me first.”
My mouth falls open. “I fucking did not!”