FLOWERS

Pretty Flower

"How are you feeling?" Sam spoke from the front seat of the taxi.

Lilly smiled at Sam through the reflection of the front window mirror.

Sam knew the smile was fake but decided to believe it anyway so he didn't have to think of the real feelings behind it. Lilly hadn't been acting right. She had been ignoring reality... Somehow that made things scarier. More real. If Lilly was too afraid to accept a situation for what it was, that meant the situation was worst case. And if that was true, Sam knew for a fact that they'd be dead within the day.

When Sam watched that first restroom, when all of this had started, he knew he was getting into a dangerous world. A world out of his control. The thing he feared more than anything. Chaos. Something Alonzo seemed to strive in. Sam was a 19 year old kid with an eyepatch. There was nothing more to him than that. Even his darkness couldn't compete with real darkness. Sam was no psychopath. Honestly he never thought there would be a day that he wanted to be. But the truth was, he was a messed up kid from Ohio. A kid who had been through things that most couldn't dream of. Shit that would mess up anyone, but that didn't make him a killer. That made him a hallow shell. Sam didn't know what he was, but he could only act like he was something he wasn't for so long. The honest truth was that Sam was afraid. He didn't want to die.

This was refreshing to Sam because for the longest time, that wasn't the case. But for the first time ever, he had something the was bigger than himself. Lilly. And he didn't want to lose that.

Peggy was dead. Lilly looked down at her phone again to make sure she had read the message correctly, but yeah. That's what it said. Her college had emailed her to let her know that her roommate had been found in the dumpster just outside her dorm building. She had no sign of struggle or suffering. According to the school, the death had seemed to be peaceful. The cause of death had not been released yet, but Peggy was dead.

Lilly didn't know how to feel about this. She had been very angry at Peggy. That much was true, but she had not wanted her dead. Atleast, not by anyone else's hands. Honestly, Lilly found it relieving that she hadn't been the one to kill her. She was so sure that she'd slip up again. But it seemed that wasn't the case. She had almost done it, but no. Peggy was killed by someone else. Lilly smiled, joyfully. The news almost excited her. She hadn't killed her friend! She was innocent. Clean of her blood. The police had penned the stabwound as being done by her attackers and then penned Peggy's death on them too. The situation had cleaned itself up. She was untouched by it. Free. If Alonzo was going to try to kill Lilly, he needed to do better than that. At the moment he was making Lilly's life a lot easier. Lilly had to write down a testimony about the attack and no further investigation was needed. That was all.

Lilly had never gotten off that scott free before. It felt good. She definantly felt need for celebration. The one thing she was not happy about was that she'd be getting a new roommate. Honestly she'd rather just live with Sam, but that was against campus policy. Bullshit in Lilly's opinion, but not her call. She was also offered counseling from the school, but she declined it. She did not want a therapist anywhere near her head. There were to many valuable secrets hidden away that did NOT need to be dug back up.

Lilly had actually had quite enough college. It had done her no good at all. She'd gotten anything important done. She barely went to class and honestly it just distracted from what she really wanted to do.

Kill.

She needed to talk to Sam about it, but Lilly had already made up her mind. The two of them would get out of shitty Ohio and find a place where the two of them could be alone. They would live in a small town or in the country. Somewhere where they could be off the grid. Somewhere where they could be free. They'd run their own redroom. That could be their source of income. They could be happy. They could live their own life. All she had to do was prove it. Sam was obviously distracted at the moment. He was scared. She would show him that he didn't need to be.