CHAPTER 38 #2
And that is the plot twist he did not see coming. His face loses its swoony, infatuated expression as if I’ve slapped it off. When he takes another step forward, it’s longer, quicker than the others, and I have to stop myself from taking one back.
He needs a little more time to mull over that bit of information, head tilted like he must have heard me wrong. “…You what?”
The hypocrisy is out of this world. His body count doesn’t matter, but suddenly mine does?
“I thought you were dead,” I say, as he pauses. I think he’s trying to recalculate the fantasy, reconcile what I’ve told him with how he wanted the story to play out and still come up with a happily ever after.
“Well then, I guess—”
“But I would’ve done it anyway.”
He is so stoic. We’re well into “Love Story”—the drum really kicks in at this point and the beat resounds throughout the club, so it’s more the fact he’s closer, he looks somber, that makes it feel like the volume drops.
“Why would you do that?”
Without his mask—not the pink, bloodstained one hanging out of his pocket, but the nice-guy one he wore when we met—it isn’t hard to imagine him fileting strangers for the better part of the night. Without the head tilt and reluctant smile and imploring eyes, he’s… scary. Terrifying.
“Honestly?” I release a heavy sigh over the roses and the moment of faux contemplation draws him closer.
“After everything that happened tonight, I just needed a distraction. And Wes, well…” I let the pause extend, let John fill in the blanks and watch as his shoulders rise before I say, “He delivered.”
He shakes his head, disheartened, disappointed.
I’m just like the five other women who didn’t make the cut.
Five beautiful, vibrant, innocent women who didn’t love him back, so he had to take everything away from them.
And that thought steels me, because they didn’t deserve it—I don’t deserve it. None of us deserve that.
“Everything I did, I did for you.”
He takes another step forward. My hands tighten around the stems and the divots of the removed thorns press into my fingers.
“I would’ve been happy with just the roses.”
I nick my thumb on something sharp, something cold, something unyielding among the dying stems, but I ignore it as he exhales a heavy breath and looks back up at me, determination cutting across the hurt.
Our love story isn’t over yet.
“Say you’re sorry.”
I blink innocently up at him as he takes the penultimate step. Maybe this whole time he’s really wanted the doe-eyed dream girl. I can give him that. Especially if it draws him closer. I just need him to take one more step toward me.
“For what?”
“For—For—what you did.”
This isn’t playing out like he planned, and it flusters him. The shards of light from the disco ball skim across his face, and I spot the color rising underneath his skin.
“What did I d—”
“You fucked him!”
His roar cuts right over the music. He’s so angry, so disgusted with me that I can see his teeth.
They’re white, straight, a fantastic example of dental work, but he bares them like fangs.
It makes sense why he only smiles with a closed mouth.
I would’ve known he was a serial killer in the first five minutes of our date if he’d grinned at me.
I’m glad I learned that about him before things got too serious between us.
I click my tongue, narrowing my eyes in thought when I say, “I think it’s more accurate if we say he fucked me.”
And as if on cue it starts raining.
It’s like the perfect end to a rom-com, but instead of pattering around us it sprays out in random arcs across the room, and instead of thunder we’ve got a persistent out-of-time alarm bell that cuts into “Love Story” intermittently.
It’s an instant reminder that while I’ve been down here, the others have been working at clearing the door to the roof.
Many hands must make light work, but I can’t be too happy about that because it means Wes might be on his way to us right now.
There’s no way John is going to gracefully bow out when he sees who stole the show from him.
“Jamie—” John’s chest is heaving. Even as the cry of the alarm builds, you’d think he would notice, but he’s too far in the love bubble. He’s too deep in his own delusion.
“Jamie, you’re my dream girl.”
He really believes it. So much so he still wants to give me a chance.
He still wants me to turn around and say I’m sorry, I love him, it was a mistake and he’s the only one for me.
So when I look up at him, release one of my hands from the bouquet, and grip his shoulder, he sees what he wants to see.
He misinterprets my pity for regret, manages to twist his lips into one more soft, crooked smile, and takes a final step until we’re standing chest to chest.
In the theater elective I took in my first year of college they had a name for this, when the actors are so close to each other the audience knows there are only two possible outcomes:
Kiss or kill.
“Oh, John… No.” I shake my head slowly, tightening my hold on his shoulder, tightening my grip on the handle tucked between the stems. “No, I’m not.”
I shove the roses into his chest, buds first, and his eyes go wide as the blade glides right up underneath his ribs.
I’ve heard the telling wet thud many times tonight, but it’s the first time I’ve been on the other side of it, and the action feels just as foreign as I thought.
It’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined, but when I pull the knife out and the crimson rose petals burst across his chest, it looks exactly like I pictured it.
We’ve got the wrong Taylor Swift song playing—we should be listening to “Red.” Because when the rose petals fall away from his shirt and scatter on the floor around us, that’s what spreads across his chest.
She’s All That red, Funny Face red, Cher Horowitz reluctantly lying on the ground in Amy Hecklering’s incomparable classic, Clueless, because “This is an Ala?a!” red.
The stems peel away from the knife as he staggers back and falls to the ground, but I just step over them. Because a good Leading Lady always goes after her man, and a good Final Girl knows that one hit, one shot, one cut, is never enough.
So among the wail of the alarm, the pounding of water, and Taylor singing about Romeo falling to his knees, I drop to mine, pull John into an embrace, and give him the ending he deserves.