To Break

IV

It has been forty minutes of frosty silence. Forty minutes of me texting my friends to tell them I’m okay, and making sure that they are too. Forty minutes of asking Quinn to cover for me if my parents ask about the party. Forty minutes spent wasting time on my phone, avoiding the glares being shot my way by the dark haired boy in the opposing corner of the shed.

“Ugh. Why couldn’t I at least be stuck in here with someone who talks?” Reece’s voice sounds from the darkness, not sounding at all affected by the cold that is making me shiver. He just seems like his usual self; grumpy and pissed off.

He gets up from the spot he made his over the last forty minutes and paces over to the side of the shed facing the house. There are tiny gaps in between the wood which make the house in the clearing visible. As soon as Reece turns away and begins pacing the small, three by four farm house, I get up from my place behind the door to look through the wall.

At the manor house there are still a variety of authorities with their cars and flashlights, poking around in the place that was alive only an hour ago. The fire is out thanks to the fireman and the house is dead now, with no signs of life other than the policemen inside. Everyone else must be hiding as well, though probably in the trees and not in a shack. They must be freezing.

A clearing of a throat brings me back to reality and I whip around to find Reece still a few metres away, eyeing me with suspicious brown eyes. I make a gesture with my hands asking him ‘what’, which I know he understands.

“Nothing,” he grumbles automatically. With a roll of the eyes he turns around and starts pacing again, creating a cool layer of tension between us.

Everything was turning out just as I had hoped. The party has been abandoned, my friends are hiding somewhere outside and I’m stuck with a guy who hates my guts. At least the feeling is mutual, otherwise the night will have been so much worse than it already is.

The silence continues, with only the sound of the trees brushing against each other in the wind and the distant sound of the policemen searching around the house.

After another stony silence that this time lasts twenty minutes, Reece breaks it with a curse.

“Shit,” he says, a word of which I ignore just as we’re ignoring each other. “It doesn’t look like the cops are ever gonna leave.”

He’s got that right. Every now and then I’ve gotten up to look and they seem to find more things to poke around at. I don’t acknowledge his comment though, and I definitely don’t give any suggestion to the fact that he’s right. It’d just go to his head.

The quiet ensues once again but what starts the conversation this time is the sound of tires on the dirt driveway. Reece and I both race to the wall facing the house just in time to see the police cars leaving our line of sight, down the dirt track until we were left with the noise of the cicadas and the trees in the wind.  A small smile springs to my face as I realise I’m almost free of the company of my demon, but Reece is more eager and races to the door.

I stay where I am in the cramped shack and wait for him to leave first. His olive-skinned hand reaches the door handle and his fingers slide over it. It doesn’t budge, even though it’s clear he is trying to push it down.

Panic rushes through me as I take a step towards the door, eyeing the unmoving door handle.

“No no no no no no no no,” Reece chants under his breath with every attempt to open the door.

No no no no no no no no. We are not stuck in here. I am not stuck in this farm house all night with Reece Parker. No.

After a final push on the handle Reece backs away, running a hand through his hair. “It’s locked,” he huffs, before a lightbulb seems to go off in his head and he turns to me. “You. You got us fucking locked in here.”