I was both surprised and unnerved to see that this time she had company. There were about a dozen other people out there with her, all with green eyes, and all carrying small paper bags. I didn’t want to know what that was all about, although I had the sneaking suspicion I would find out all too soon.
“Damn it,” Luke said under his breath. “I have to learn to shoot. I hate feeling so helpless. You can teach me, can’t you?”
I made a noncommittal noise. There was no way my dad would let Luke carry a gun around in the house. He’d seen far too many accidental shootings in his life to let a novice carry, and he would consider Luke a novice for a long time, even if he started hanging out at the range for six hours a day. Besides, I had a gun and knew how to shoot it, and I still felt pretty damn helpless.
Piper noticed us watching through the window and waved cheerfully. “It’s time to come out and play, Becks,” she yelled. “You know you want to.”
I answered eloquently by flipping her the bird, because I didn’t trust myself to speak. The only thing I wanted was for her and her friends to go away, but of course they didn’t.
“Suit yourself!” Piper yelled, then threw something at the window.
Luke and I both leaped backward instinctively, but whatever it was hit the window with a splat. It was quickly followed by another splat. And another. And another.
“Seriously?” Luke said with a shake of his head. “They’re egging the house?”
I hadn’t immediately recognized the sound, but of course that was what it was. Luke stepped closer to the window to take a quick peek out.
“Looks like a couple of them have spray paint,” he told me.
A hint of sulfur in the air told me the eggs they were throwing at the house were rotten. Of course. I bit my lip.
“Should I go out and try to scare them off?” I asked, brandishing the gun. But I already knew the answer to my own question.
“There are too many of them,” Luke said. “The last thing we want to do is open the door.”
Outside, Piper and her friends were having a blast, laughing and cheering at the mess they were making. Downstairs, Bob was barking his head off.
“I guess getting some sleep tonight is out of the question,” I said with a resigned sigh. I was too wired to feel sleepy anymore, but I felt the heaviness of exhaustion in my limbs. I entertained the brief thought of opening the window and firing a couple of shots, but it wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t going to shoot people to stop them from egging my house, and I was sure Piper knew that.
“Yeah,” Luke agreed. “Probably the best thing to do right now is try to ignore them. Letting Piper know she’s getting to us will only encourage her. Wanna go watch another movie?”
My first reaction was to look at him as if he was crazy. How the hell were we going to be able to watch a movie with all this noise and commotion? But then I had to acknowledge that we didn’t have a whole lot of options. Standing here in the dark in the study was already getting old, and if we watched a movie we could at least pretend we were ignoring Piper and her friends.
And so we went downstairs in our bare feet and pajamas and turned the TV to some movie we had no interest in and couldn’t hear anyway. Someone out there had a portable stereo, because when they ran out of eggs to pelt the house with, they started blasting awful heavy metal full of screeching and wailing.
I crossed my arms over my chest and shivered. I was dressed to cuddle under my sheets and blanket, and I debated running back up to my room to grab a sweatshirt. Even with all the noise and chaos outside, I was still painfully aware that I was sitting next to Luke wearing my pj’s and no bra. Maybe, instead of grabbing a sweatshirt, I should go get dressed.
But Luke was sitting pretty close to me on the couch, his arm draped casually across the back, behind me. He wasn’t touching me, but it was like his body was a magnetic field and I was made of iron. Even reminding myself how unavailable he was, I couldn’t motivate myself to get up, to lose