CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - MASON

 

Lyssa doesn’t take her chances and drive off in the Mercedes. She comes inside, unpacks all her bags, oohing and ahhhing at all her purchases, and smiles the whole time as she puts them away in her room as I watch.

She looks happy and I think maybe she is. Maybe our little talk helped her in some way. She seems… normal. Like herself. Even though I have no idea who the real Lyssa is.

Maybe this is her?

“I’m not going to sleep up in that room tonight,” she says. “Where have you been sleeping?”

“The last room at the end of the east wing. You wanna sleep in there with me?”

She nods her head. “Yes. I do.”

“OK,” I say.

Then she goes silent.

“Well, are you tired now? We could watch some TV. That’s why I picked that room. It has a TV.”

“TV,” she says. Like this is some foreign concept for her. “What would we watch?”

“Who cares,” I say. “We’ll be together. We can channel-surf and make fun of infomercials for all I care.”

I wait for her to come back with some not-so-thinly veiled sexual innuendo, but she doesn’t.

“You OK?” I ask.

She nods. “Yes. I think I am.”

“OK. Grab some night clothes and I’ll meet you in there.”

My bags are in the hallway just outside her room, so I pick them up and take them with me. I bought some sweat pants to sleep in, and even though I’ve been sleeping nude this whole time and now Lyssa is gonna be sleeping next to me, I put them on anyway.

Something still bothers me about this girl. Something is off. But I figure, these rich people, ya know? They’re all weird. They live in a whole other world than the rest of us. So it’s not her fault, not really. She was just brought up in this alternate reality. She really, truly doesn’t know any better.

I turn the TV on, pull the covers back, and get in.

I expect her to show up wearing the nightie she bought today. Or one of the bra and panties sets. Or hell, naked. But she shows up in her Disney-princess night shirt.

I frown at her. “What are you wearing?”

“This is what I always wear.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

She told me she sleeps naked. And then all week she’s been wearing the Disney princess nightshirts. But I don’t want to bring that stuff up. Not the naked part and not the princess part either. So I say, “You bought all that new stuff, Lyssa. Don’t you want to wear it?”

“Oh,” she says. “Did you want me to wear it?”

Does she really not know how to make a decision? Or hold on. Did she make one? And this is it?

I can’t fucking tell.

“No, it’s fine,” I say. “I was just asking. Come on get in.”

She walks over to the bed, slides in next to me, and I cover her up, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her close.

She’s stiff for some reason. “God, relax,” I say. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“Sorry.” She laughs. “I’m just not used to sleeping with people.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“You know what I mean. Not sex, just sleeping.” Then she frowns. “Unless you want to have sex?”

“Uh… I mean, we’ve had a lot of it today, so I’m good. But I can go again if you want.”

She relaxes a little and leans up to kiss me. “That was not a yes or a no.”

“How about you decide?” I say.

“Me. Hmmm. OK. Well. Hmmm.” She takes a moment, then says, “No, I’m tired.”

“OK,” I say, flipping the TV off. “Let’s go to sleep then.”

We snuggle down deeper into the bed and each other and she sighs. “This is kinda nice.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“OK. Well. Good night, Mason.”

I smile in the dark. I can’t help it. She’s so… calm and different.

“Good night, Lyssa.”

When I wake up in the morning she’s not in the bed. “Lyssa?” I call, sitting up in the bed. She’s not in the en suite bathroom because the door is open and the light’s not on.

So I get up and start walking down the hall. I check her other bedroom, the one where the wedding dress lives in the closet, but she’s not in there either.

I go downstairs, make my way into the kitchen and find it empty.

“Lyssa?” I call, walking out in the main foyer.

Then I panic and go over to the front door and pull it open. Because I made a point not to lock her in last night.

But the Mercedes is still in front, parked a little ways behind the van.

I check the garage anyway, because there are more cars to choose from, but the other two are there as well.

“Lyssa!” I call, closing the door to the garage and backtracking through the house.

I go upstairs and start pulling open bedroom doors. But they’re all empty.

And then I see the door to the only place I didn’t check.

The princess room.

I find her sleeping in the bean bag chair wearing the… teenager clothes. Tight, sporty pink shorts, tight, white tank top, no bra, peaked nipples pushing into the fabric, and the thigh-high tube socks. She has pigtails again. Messy, crooked pigtails like she did her hair in the dark. There is a half-eaten pink sucker on the little table next to the bean bag chair and a pink landline phone next to the sucker.

What the fuck is going on here?

I look around for a cam, because I am one hundred percent sure that’s got to be one of her other secrets. She’s a cam girl with a teenage fetish specialty. Because that’s what this looks like. It looks staged. Like a set. And who the hell uses a landline these days?

She must have clients and they must call her.

I am so convinced of this scenario, I pick up the handset on the phone and dial *69, but there’s no dial tone. Fucking thing doesn’t even work.

“Lyssa,” I say, placing the hand set back. She doesn’t answer so I shake her. “Lyssa.”

“Hmmm,” she says, turning over in the bean bag chair.

“Wake up.”

She draws in a long, sleepy breath and rubs her eyes. “What?”

“What are you doing in here?”

She looks around then frowns. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“So you came up here?” I ask her. “And put on these clothes? And did your hair… in the dark? What the hell is going on? Are you a cam girl?”

She blinks at me. “What?” The sleepiness is gone as she squints her eyes. “A cam girl? Why the fuck would you think that?”

“Uh…” I laugh. “Because that’s what this looks like.” And also you were arrested for prostitution, pimping, and pandering. That’s why.

But I don’t say any of that out loud. Because something is off about her right now.

I’m leaning in her face as all these thoughts run through my head and she pushes me away, then gets to her feet.

“What were you doing on the bean bag?” I ask.

“What the fuck does it look like? I was sleeping.”

“Lyssa,” I say, grabbing her arm and giving her a shake. “There’s a fucking bed right there. You could’ve just slept in the bed.”

“The sheets,” she says. Like this explains everything.

“What?”

“The sheets are dirty. From that first night we were here. No one came to change them.”

I want to pull my hair out. “You’ve been sleeping up here in this bean bag the whole time? What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you change your own sheets at home?”

“Sometimes,” she says.

“So…” I open my hands in a what-the-fuck gesture.

“I just didn’t think of it.”

I have a million things to say back to this idiotic answer. Mostly mean things. Things like, Are you a moron? Are you so spoiled that you’re helpless? Incapable of formulating the simplest of solutions?

I really want to say all that. And I almost do. Because it makes no sense. This girl, right here, in this room—she is not the girl I met in that club a week ago. She is not the girl in the gold dress. She is not the girl who kneed me in the balls and punched me in the face. Who ran, who fought back, who…

Something is wrong with her.

Or no. Because it hits me.

Something is wrong with this place.

“Pack a bag,” I say. “We’re leaving.”