this. Think of how much better your life has been since I arrived.”
He holds up his wrist, automatically yanking my arm up with it. “Is it? I’m trying to find the positives to any of this.”
“Just being around me has to be making your life better.”
He looks amused even though he says, “Does it?”
“I’m positive it is.” I look around for something worth doing. “Want to play cards?”
“Fine, but this time, you’re respecting the rules.”
“I’m fighting for the bed this time but we’re playing Bullshit.”
“Can you play Bullshit with two people?”
“Yeah, there’s a way. My friend R… Robbie taught me.” Fuck. I almost said Rose. Imagine if I fucking said Rose. Although there is more than one Rose in the world.
“I do like how you had to make up a name for a fictional friend and that makes me really sad for you, so I’m going to let you pick the game. But I am more than amused that you think you can keep a straight face.”
I ignore him. “The way to play it with two people is that the cards are dealt differently.”
I deal out the cards and put mine in order before looking up at him.
“So the goal of this is to go in order from ace to king, right? And then if you don’t have the card, you try to lie your way through getting me to not call bullshit, right?”
I glance down at my cards. “Yep. If you’re right, I take all the cards. If you’re wrong, you take all the cards.”
“This is kind of hard to hold them with one hand attached to you.”
“I guess we just have to get really close,” I say as I get even closer to him. “You can start.”
“Alright, two aces.”
I doubt he’d lie on round one so I give him a nod before laying my cards down. “Three twos.”
“Bullshit,” he says, so I flip them over, revealing my three twos. “Dammit, why’d you have that stupid look on your face then? Are you lying to me?”
“Clearly, I’m not,” I say as I merely collect the cards and shove them into his hands.
We play through the game, and while I wasn’t perfect at noticing Shepherd’s lies, he was awful at catching mine.
After I go out, he tosses his cards onto the table. He has a lot of them to toss. “What the fuck, man? I thought you’d be horrible at this.”
“Guess who gets the bed to myself tonight?”
“Not to yourself. Best two out of three, remember?”
After three games, I’ve won them all just because he became more determined to catch me in a lie. “Why are you so good at this?”
“What you don’t know about me is that I’m actually a pathological liar. I have a lot of lying experience.”
“What do you lie about?”
“Everything.”
He snorts. “That proves nothing.”
“Maybe everything I’ve said to you is a lie so far.”
He points at me. “The thing is, I’m not dumb. I know there’s something more going on, but I don’t know what it is yet. I can’t tell if your father just doesn’t give a flying fuck about you or if there’s a reason why he’s not trying too hard.”
“Oh, he cares about me, Shepherd. Because he’s a controlling asshole. Even at twenty, I wasn’t allowed to leave home. He hated me there as much as he refused to let me go because I was his property. I was his punching bag. I was the thing he came home to and would yell and tell me that he fucking hates me because I’m worthless and useless.”
He’s watching me closely. “Your father? The chief of police? The whole fucking city loves him.”
I smile at him. “Got ya. I told you I liked lying. It was a joke. I don’t know how he’s planning to get me free, but I believe that whatever he’s doing is going to bring me home safely.”
He shakes his head. “Now that is a lie. What you first said was actually the truth for once.”
Why was I stupid enough to say that shit? It just tumbled out for some reason. “I said I was joking,” I say quickly. “It was a joke.”
“It’s not. You’re getting flustered now that I’m refusing to believe it was a joke.”
“You really think my father beat me?”
“I know your father beat you because you’ve known how to protect your body every time you’ve been beaten. And you aren’t even half as fucking scared as a normal person in this situation. For some fucked-up reason, you