Shared Guilt- A Knives Out Story

Chapter 3

Marta woke up to the sun lighting up the room in a gleaming orange light. She stretched and was met with someone else's leg. It took her brain a short while to register who that someone was, but when it did Marta abruptly sat up and frantically looked around the room.

This wasn't her bedroom.
She didn't go home last night.

Her head hurt, she remembered the drinks she had and she remembered everything else.

Ransom.

Shit.

She looked to the left side of the bed where Ransom was laying on his stomach, tangled in the silk sheets and equally as naked as her. Marta immediately grabbed for something to cover up with, but Ransom was still sleeping soundly.

"De puta madre!" Marta exclaimed with a sigh, while rubbing her forehead.
Since her first party in nursing school, Marta knew that she couldn't tolerate a lot of alcohol. But last night, after coming clean to Ransom about Harlan's death, she felt like having a drink.
And another one.
And another one.

So that's how she must've ended up in bed with Ransom.

She needed to get out of there and luckily, there was a bathroom adjacent to the bedroom where she could try to steady herself. Marta locked the door behind her.

Having noticed Marta's reaction and her quick escape to the bathroom, Ransom grinned from one ear to the other. He had been awake for a little while, but pretending to be asleep had seemed like the better option.

This definitely had not been part of his plan.

Like,not even a little bit.

It wasn't Ransom's first drunk one-night-stand, but the other girls he's been with hadn't told him their deepest secrets before getting it on.

Not only had Marta confessed to him that she was partly responsible for Harlan's death, but a couple of drinks later, she told him how her mother was an illegal immigrant and she would be deported if anybody ever found that out.

He himself also didn't hold back, telling her about Meg. Goddammit, why couldn't he keep his mouth shut. He hoped that at least he could ease Marta's mind a bit, knowing it wasn't her fault.

What the shit? Why would he care about easing Marta's mind!? She was still just part of "the help", a foolishly naive and innocent young woman, who was an illegal immigrant raised by a single mother in a poor neighborhood of Boston.

Well,well fuck me well, Ransom thought to himself.There his plan went, to shit.

He laid back down,muffling another exclaimed "fuck" with his pillow.

Today was the will reading and he wasn't prepared at all for the mess it would turn into once his greedy bunch of relatives would find out Marta was inheriting everything. In an agitated state,they might as well eat poor little Marta alive, no exaggeration made as recent events had proven.

As if that weren't enough he also had to work on presenting an alternative suspect to the pesky detective he unfortunately had hired himself.This was just a bigass clusterfuck.

Ransom got up and padded to the bathroom, being reminded that Marta was hiding in there when he found the door locked. He knocked.

"Come on Marta, it couldn't have been that bad." Ransom joked, but got no answer from her.

Instead, he could hear the lock click and Marta emerged from the bathroom,weirdly wrapped in a crumpled bed sheet.

"Can we just please not talk about this." Marta said, she was standing in front of him, not daring to look into his steel blue eyes. He wasn't wearing anything but his boxers which made not focusing on him an almost impossible quest for Marta.