Chapter Nine: Jigsaws and Ice Cream

I was wasting away, alive. Time was just running away like that. The worst part was, I couldn’t do anything about it.

After locking me up that night, I was allowed to roam the house the following day; I had no idea what to make of it. Tommy was never around. They said he had things to do and he always brought Bruce out with him. Which was good. I suspected one or the other had coaxed him into letting me go, meaning that he still would get irritated if I were to accidentally get in his way. Kieran and Adriel were with me; I had games and food and movies; I had the dogs and freedom to use the bathroom as many times as I wanted but nothing could allay my frazzled mind because I didn’t know what I was feeling, or how to feel, for that matter. Fear was definitely one of them. Then there was the awful normalcy of the entire situation, how the guys were treating me like a friend when their psycho leader wasn’t around, when they weren’t threatening to kill me. What was I supposed to feel?

I wanted to go home, back to my life, back to college. I was missing out on so many classes. It was going to take me forever to catch up if I wanted to stay one step ahead. And what about my friends? I hadn’t been around for days. Surely they must have felt that something was off by now. That spark of hope I had at the mall was flickering to its death. Escape was pointless when the guys were at home. When they weren’t, I was locked in my dungeon of a room, tied to the bed.

Some things were just too awful to change.

“Your cuts are healing up real good, love,” Adriel said one day. We were both sitting in the living room, trying to figure out a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a bear and her cubs. The guys had already completed several and they were all framed, hanging on the walls. I recalled coming down here for the first time and seeing all those puzzles. They were mostly scenery, each possessing a sort of entrancing beauty to them.

I raised a hand to my cheek, gently grazing my fingers over the tender skin there.

“I’m still not forgiving him for slicing me up like that,” I pouted. Adriel picked up a piece of the puzzle and held it up, studying it intently.

“Do you know he uses me for accuracy training?” he said. “He legitimately uses me as his dummy.” Upon realizing the piece didn’t match the part he was trying to fix, he set it down and picked up another piece. I squinted at our work so far, not reacting to what he’d just revealed to me. As of now, I had ready accepted the fact that Tommy was a sociopath who needed medical attention but was too stubborn to go get it.

“Did you die?” Sarcasm tainted my words.

“Nah. Kieran did distract him once and he lodged a knife right in my arm. Look.” Adriel pulled up his sleeve to show me the scar he had obtained from his friend. It was a dark pinkish-reddish colour, raised up from the rest of his skin about four centimeters long.

“How many stitches?”

“Five.”

“Wow.” I clicked my tongue on the roof of my mouth. “Your friend has some serious issues.”

Adriel gave me a cheeky grin, pulling his legs together, rocking back and forth, much like a child would. “When you’re doing jobs like ours, nothing is ever too crazy.”

“What is it that – “

“I did it! I’m a fucking genius!” Kieran burst out from the kitchen, holding a lime green bowl in his hand and waving a spoon about. Before any of us could say a word, he’d bounded over, swept all our hard work off the table and slammed his bowl in the middle. Teddy and Snow’s heads perked up from their resting spot beside the sofa, disturbed by the commotion that was Kieran. Adriel and I stared at the creamy content of the bowl disbelievingly.

“Once you guys try this, i guarantee you will never want to buy ice cream from outside again!”

“Kieran!” I screeched.

“Kieran!” Adriel echoed after me, his voice much louder than mine.

“What?!” Kieran screamed back.

“You idiot! We spent the past three hours trying to fix that – “

“And you freaking swept it off the table like it was nothing!”

Snow, excited that the humans were all making loud noises, joined in with his own voice.

“It’s just a – Hey!”

Adriel had lunged for his friend. They both toppled to the ground with a thud and began to scuffle. I watched with amusement as they each struggled to strangle the other.

“Do you think it’s easy to fix a puzzle like that?” Adriel rolled over Kieran and locked his legs around his friend from behind, his arms around Kieran’s neck.

“I can finish it in one day! It’s not my fault you’re colour-blind!” Kieran responded to Adriel's offensive by rocking forward onto his knees then falling back onto Adriel, who grunted in pain upon impact.

“I’m not colour-blind! The pieces are tiny as hell and they all look the same!” Adriel let out a frustrated scream and loosened his hold, resorting to pummeling Kieran with his fists instead. Snow decided right then that barking was not going to be enough. He somehow picked up that this was a challenge, leaping into the fray, playfully tugging at Adriel’s shirt. Teddy was more cautious in approaching the tangle of bodies and limbs.

“They each have their own special shape!”

“They’re all the same!”

I sat crossed-legged on the table, gleefully scooping ice cream into my mouth. Kieran wasn’t kidding. This was some good stuff, almost better than industrial-grade ice cream. If only it had crushed cornflakes, it’d be the food of the gods.

“You always ruin my puzzles!”

“No, I don’t! Quit being a baby!”

“Quit pulling my hair!”

They rolled about, knocking into furniture and rebounding onto each other, making me wonder if these guys had any pain receptors. One would assume they were two eight-year-olds stuck in grown men’s bodies. Neither of them looked like they were ready to give in to the other and I was running out of ice cream. Entertainment was not half as good without food to go with.

“Is this going to last long?" I asked, scraping the bowl clean and licking the spoon for good measure. Kieran heard me at once. His eyes found me, zeroed in on the utensils in my hands, and they widened.

He scrambled to his knees in the split second that Adriel was distracted. “Adriel! The ice – “

“Stop trying to escape, you chicken!” Adriel leapt onto him. Unfortunately, Kieran had already crawled out of the way and Adriel ended up kissing the floor, most likely breaking his nose once more. I winced as he groaned, limbs splayed out like some grotesquely deformed starfish.

Then everything stopped: the yelling, the scuffling, the insults. Adriel lifted his smushed-up face from the floor and we all looked at each other in turn before Kieran collapsed on the ground, defeated.

“We were supposed to share that,” he muttered, wiping some drool from his chin. I looked down at the empty bowl I was cradling in my hands.

“Isn’t there more in the kitchen?” I was confident, in the history of the world, that no one ever made such a small amount of ice cream. There had to be more.

“It’s my prototype batch,” he groaned. “That was the one and only.”

I stand corrected.

“You can make more, right?”

When neither of them answered me, I scrambled down from the table to lean over them. I poked Kieran’s arm as he stared blankly up at the beams crisscrossing over the ceiling. He didn’t respond so I turned to Adriel and poked his cheek instead.

“Your nose looks dead,” I deadpanned, jabbing my finger into his cheek repeatedly.

Adriel blinked. “Deidre, I will give you a three second head start.”

“For what?”

“One.”

“Are we going to start the puzzle again?”

“Two.”

I scratched my head, baffled beyond words. “Is this a new game?”

“Three.”

Adriel’s hand shot out to grab my left ankle; Kieran had my right foot. My eyes darted between the two guys at my feet and my slow brain finally started to click.

“Uhh...”

Setting my feet into motion was a grave mistake. The moment I attempted to lift one foot, Kieran tugged at the other and pulled me down. I fell face first with a thud.

“Oof!” Falling down in the movies looked painless. Everything was toned down for the screen. There needed to be more emphasis on how falls could rob you of your breath for the next few minutes.

“Get her!”

As the boys scrambled to climb over me, I clawed my way forward, using my forearms to drag my body away from their grappling hands.

“Let me go!” I shrieked.

“Never!” they screamed in unison, tightening their grips on me. I squirmed, wiggled, kicked but nothing worked. Their combined weight on my lower body was restricting my movements. I could only flail my arms around like a useless chicken.

Someone’s hand landed flat on my bum. Out of reflex, I kicked or at least, I tried to kick. I couldn’t move my leg and the hand was still on my bum.

“Hands off, pervert! Snow!”

“You have a really nice butt,” Kieran said, giving my bum a smack. The Malamute lowered his head to my face, happily licking a wet stripe up my cheek. He completely misread my intentions.

I yelped, horrified that he was touching my rear. “Kieran! Damn you!”

“Key, have some respect,” Adriel chided. Then another hand landed on my other bum cheek. “Oh, this is a nice bum.”

I screamed once more, furiously wiggling my way out like a worm, failing to understand why they were attacking me when I had done nothing wrong.

Eating ice cream was not a crime.

“I’m innocent!”

“No one is innocent in this world,” Adriel proclaimed, crawling on top of me. It was getting hard to breathe; the guy was heavy.

“What about babies then?” Kieran suddenly asked. For a moment, we all stopped moving: Adriel lying flat on my back, Kieran attempting to free his hand from between Adriel’s legs and me squished beneath it all with Snow still licking my face and Teddy pawing my foot to get my attention.

Aaaarrrggghhhhh. These idiots.

“I think – “

Bruce made an appearance right at that moment, bursting in through the front door through a hatch at the bottom. Immediately, Snow and Teddy forgot about us and bounded over to their friend, sniffing him eagerly. Bruce was obviously happy to be home, something his tail clearly showed but his body language was off and he wasn’t returning the eager licks the other two were covering his face with.

“Hi, Bruce.” He wasn’t as much of a jerk as his master. I reached out a hand to him, beckoning him to me. He looked at me, then back at the door, shuffling on his paws, like he was nervous about something. Snow and Teddy picked up on their companion’s anxiety and bounded back to nuzzle my palm before nipping Kieran’s arm for attention.

Tommy shuffled in then, movements sluggish. He shut the door, turning to take in the human sandwich that was us.

“Oh, hey, man,” Kieran greeted his friend, finally freeing his hand and noticing Teddy. “Got the thing done?”

Tommy nodded curtly, swinging his bag down from his shoulder. He had on a leather jacket but I noticed something shiny on it, near his shoulder, almost like it was glistening with some sort of liquid. His expression was empty, as usual. Bruce rushed back to Tommy, sitting by his feet, prompting him to reach down to pat the dog on the head with an indecipherable murmur.

Summing up all of my energy, I pushed myself up on my elbows to get a better look at him, gut churning uncomfortably. Something was wrong.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Adriel said, rolling off of me. Then his features lit up. “Did you get spooked by that new system I installed for the entrance? Took me weeks to get it right.”

When Tommy didn’t respond, Adriel got up, as did Kieran. It was then that they got a good, proper look at their friend’s face.

“Tommy?”

He collapsed before his eyes could finish rolling back in his head.