Why Won't You Fall Into My Arms?

Chapter Three

It was odd that I hadn’t noticed the heat before. Sure, I’d known it was sunny and had felt the sun beating down on my neck like a spotlight but I hadn’t properly taken into account the sweltering air. The heat rolled down and across my skin so sweat danced along the rim of my clothes. I blew my fringe from my eyes and that was when the piercing siren ceased.

It was so sudden and abrupt that it made us both stop in our tracks. Silence. Complete silence. It shortly became more deafening and painful than the previous siren had.

I glanced over unsurely at Jack to find him frowning around, as if the culprit of the siren would suddenly jump out of the bushes and surrender. Without the background noise which had almost become familiar, the very air between us was awkward. I found myself wishing for the siren to commence again. Everything felt overwhelmingly more dangerous now that there was only the bleak hush.

“Come on,” Jack’s voice was almost a welcomed break from the nothingness “we’re nearly home unless you want to stop here and collect a pool of your sweat.”

Almost a welcomed break, but not quite.

               

“Shut up,” I retorted childishly, still spooked from the siren’s departure. “It’s really hot and you’re sweating buckets more than me.”

His brow glistened with the perspiration and his hand continuously twitched at the hem of his t-shirt until finally he wrenched it off. The movement moved over his body like water, one fluid motion. I got a glimpse of tanned, muscled torso before I closed my eyes tightly.

“I’m blind!” I shrieked, coughing on my shock and laughter.

“Very funny,” I just knew he was smirking into the sunshine “you love it really.”

“Oh yeah, I just love guys who take every opportunity to strip off their clothes,” I murmured sarcastically.

“That’s right baby,” his booming laugh was contagious and, no matter how hard I fought it back, I couldn’t help but let the small smile slip. It was the first time in years that Jack and I hadn’t been at each other throats for more than two minutes. In fact, it was the first time I could remember in a long while that I’d smiled while Jack was anywhere near my vicinity.

 I put it down to our fickle human nature trying to block out what we both feared to acknowledge: that we were alone. We were joking and fighting and laughing, we were being what we usually were and what we usually weren’t just so that we wouldn’t have to recognise how our situation could be a lot worse than anything we’d ever experienced in our short lives.

After walking for more than ten minutes in an uncomfortable silence (with my eyes still refusing to take in Jack without his shirt on) what I took to be Jack’s house rose before us.

It was a large thing with beautiful white panels and red brick, traditionally American. It was in the wealthier part of town, in a neighbourhood I could only dream of ever affording and had only been close to when passing quickly through.