“He’s out?”
Breath whooshes out of Zoey as Charlotte crowds her against the front door. Her hand on Zoey’s jaw, the other on her hip, pressing, breath, God, she can feeling Charlotte’s breath on her cheek—
“Yep. For the whole night.” She says, low and breathy, trailing a finger on Zoey’s jaw as her breath falters. “Crap after the Honey Queen Festival, he needs to clean up the cowboys.”
Zoey licks her lips, trying to get rid of the roughness and dead skin that accumulated there after the entire shift behind the bar. No matter how many times Charlotte told her she loves the rough, Zoey will continue to mindlessly do it.
“Not like we care, do we?”
Charlotte smiles, wicked. “Absolutely not, darling.”
(Zoey’s chest burns, half happy, half disgusted with herself.)
They stagger into the bedroom upstairs, the jog up the stairs and down the hall to the bedroom taking them way longer than it should. (It’s partially their fault for attempting to still kiss while walking up, but, honestly, who could deprive themself of spending every second together kissing Charlotte Sweetly.)
The house is entirely dark. It’s never dark when she lays with Sam, because he is confident enough to keep the lights on. “To see her beautiful body,” he says, putting the oil lamp on before diving on top of her on his and Charlotte’s marriage bed, covering it with reckless love bites and fingerprints.
Charlotte is more sneaky, more cautious, always making sure they’re out of everyone’s eyes’ reach, and the thrill of the secrecy of their relationship makes Zoey’s skin cover with goosebumps and that pleasantly strange, thrumming feeling.
It’s never like this with Sam. He’s duller, he’s more part of a routine to her, even with all of his outbursts and things she can’t really explain him doing. (It used to be thrilling, at the very beginning. Something inside of Zoey aches at the thought of the feeling Charlotte brought back to her passing.)
Zoey has to trust Charlotte with leading her through the dark halls, and she’s almost sick with excitement as they finally reach the bed and Charlotte oh–so–horrifyingly–gently lowers her onto the mattress.
Charlotte’s shoulders are soft and warm, with a light layer of freckles over them. Her skin is smooth when Zoey brushes her hands over it, the shoulder of her undershirt slipping off.
The sheets are quickly warming up under Zoey's increasingly naked body
She still feels guilty in moments like these. When it’s quiet, late, and just the two of them, Zoey’s brain finally unwinds and the thought that Charlotte is just doing this to take her revenge on Sam comes. Because that’s what she’s probably doing — she’s so beautiful it’s breathtaking, so kind and generous, true to herself, and everything Zoey is not — and she could have anyone, but she chose Zoey.
Zoey feels her teeth worry her lower lip as Charlotte kisses down her neck.
“Charlotte?” She hums out, almost faltering halfway through.
“Yeah?” Her voice is gruff as she tears off Zoey’s skin with a soft pop. “‘Sup?”
“I’m just—” she makes a non–committal sound in the back of her throat, waving her hand. She moves up the mattress a little, mourning the loss of Charlotte’s strong hold on her waist. “Nothing. Forget it.”
Charlotte makes a weird, scowl–like face at her, like she wants to keep the conversation going, but doesn’t question further.
(Why would she?
It’s not like she’s planning on staying with Zoey. Caring about her feelings. It's just playing revenge on her scumbag of a husband, plain and simple.
Whatever. Whatever.)
Instead, she turns her attention back to gently kissing down her neck. Zoey lets herself melt back into the affection as much as her constantly–overloaded brain lets her, and she’s almost there, almost completely focused of Charlotte’s thin lips and chin brushing against bare skin, and her hands, God, these sinful hands down her leg, and lower, lower, hiking up her dress skirt up, and Zoey smiles at the ceiling,
“Charlotte?”
Zoey feels like the dead have spoken.
Suddenly, she’s cold, and Charlotte is off her, supporting herself with her arms, turning around, and,
He’s there.
“Sam!” Charlotte squeaks, nervously breathing in and beginning to scramble off the bed, towards him. Zoey recognizes the scared smile dancing on her trembling lips immediately. “Sam, I—”
In the doorway, he’s lit only by the moon outside. He has an empty expression on his face, but, oh God, there’s pure rage — the one he usually reserves for arrests, for busting smugglers and criminals, beating them in jail cells, because who are they going to tell, the sheriff? — simmering right beneath the surface. Pot on open fire.
And Zoey promised herself to never end up on the receiving end of it.
“You fucking— You’re— In our bed?” His jaw shakes as he speaks, and then his eyes snap over to— “Zoey?”
Her breath whooshes out of her within seconds with the unmistakable noise of Sam’s pistol clicking.
“Why?”
He sounds betrayed, the last thing he should fucking be.
The pistol clicks again, and Zoey shakes her head frantically, fingers twisting in the sheets.
“Sammy, I—” Charlotte crawls over to him, closer, and Zoey forces herself to not try to drag her away from that man because that man has a gun and she’s lost enough people.
She doesn’t want the last person who doesn’t spit on her when she walks the main street to die.
Because of her.
Because of her.
Because of—
“Charlotte!” The gun is there, and he’s rising it up, and, and— “You fucking—”
Gunshots ring out, one, two, the curtain rod makes a metallic screaming sound, and Zoey only catches a fraction of Charlotte’s terrified face before trying to scramble backwards.
Her escape is thwarted immediately, Sam is there, on the bed, kicking and screaming, shoes dirty with mud on clean sheets, and still with the gun in his hand,
She makes a run for it before her mind catches up.
His hand is hot against the cold pistol, and so much stronger — yet she uses the moment of distraction and digs her fingers into his skin, until his attention is turned to her.
“Sophia!” The voice, fuck, God, the voice she hates, it’s like— like Devil himself has overtaken him, rough and deep and scratchy, and she digs her nails into the skin between his pointer finger and thumb.
“Give me it back, the fucking—”
She tries to drag the pistol to herself, and almost succeeds because Charlotte is wrapped around Sam’s waist, half–looking like she’s going to bite his hand just to drag him away,
Then it fires off, into the ceiling.
An empty blast that makes Zoey freeze in the worst possible moment. Her vision blurs with white-hot fear, but goes back to normal just when Sam rips the pistol from her hand.
“You fucking bitch! I’ll fucking kill you!”
The pistol goes off right next to Zoey’s head. Charlotte screams something, an amalgamation of Sam and Zoey, and then the pistol slams against Zoey’s temple.
Everything goes black within seconds.
She hears her head slamming against the nightstand more than she feels it. It’s like a gun going off once in her head — and then her body hits the floor, but it’s an empty thud, and she doesn’t even register that it’s her who is falling like a ragdoll.
Her hand is lifeless, in the forefront of Charlotte and Sam to the ground in a mangled mass of limbs and screams.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” His hands are on her neckline, he’s tearing it, material ripping like it's nothing, knuckles almost white and Zoey can’t move.
Something is damp.
Zoey’s tongue is heavy like lead where it’s stuck in her mouth. She tastes blood and chipped molars and the dirt of a wagon trail she died on too many times.
“Get the fuck off of— me—!” Charlotte gets one kick somewhere into Sam’s stomach, making him howl in pain. Then the pained sound turns into an animalistic roar, and he brings the pistol hand to her leg,
Something cracks.
Charlotte screams.
“SAM!” She howls, and it’s something animalistic, high and shrill and like she’s fighting for her life. It makes Zoey’s head rush with cold water, suddenly vital, suddenly trying to move move do something please can her body work please she can’t die not here not now
Then Charlotte makes a choked noise and a wheezing breath, and it’s like a hurricane’s eye in Zoey’s spinning mind.
A sudden clearing. (No thoughts in her head, none at all, just a raw desire to live.)
She crawls over, on her knees — her whole brain is rattling his her skull, pounding against it like a hungry woodpecker — and the oil lamp, it’s just in her reach, her hand just needs to raise up to the nightstand where it’s been knocked over, please, just a little higher, Charlotte is still gasping for breath behind her, Sam is talking, she needs to push through the pain—
“And then—” Sam gruffs, his forearm across Charlotte’s neck as she claws at the bare skin, “I’ll fucking kill her too, that stupid cunt, nobody will find your fucking bodies, I’ll make sure of it, two whores, daughters of Satan—”
The strike is almost silent in the screaming of the room, but Sam’s body thudding against the floor isn’t.
He’s—
He’s there.
He’s unmoving. He’s, he’s just laying there, unmoving, dead, body without a spirit, and it’s so strange and freeing and terrifying, all at once, that Zoey has bile up in her throat and a rock sack in her stomach.
Zoey — her body, at least, — stands over his limp form, hands still wrenched around the oil lamp like it’s the only thing keeping her alive. She’s panting, her shoulders rising up and down, but her chest is so rigid she can’t feel any air entering, or exiting.
It’s like Sam’s last breaths are taking her air, too.
Because he’s still breathing. She can see him shaking, trembling violently, weakly coughing up blood, like he’s having a fit — but it’s all meaningless, because the gash of red and black and brown in the back of his head is more than surely going to kill him.
Going out like he lived. Violent.
“Zoey?”
Her head snaps up to Charlotte. She still doesn’t move, but her head bobs up and down, out of any rhythm as she gasps frantically for breath, eyes glued to Charlotte.
And she starts moving, once the one moment too long without Zoey responding passes.
This beautiful woman crawls over to her, one leg completely limp and twisted in a gruesome way, with a clear, red imprint of his hand on it, around Sam's body, pushing herself on her hands.
She’s crawling over to Zoey like she’s something important enough to warrant this. (She almost gags again, the burning forest fire in the back of her throat intensifying with Charlotte’s each move.)
Zoey falls to her knees at the first motion from Charlotte.
Her knees hurt, and the floor is cold and unrelenting as they hit it, but any second more away from Charlotte could make her die alongside Sam.
Something hollow pokes and prods at Zoey’s chest when Charlotte hands caress her face. She’s not gentle, not at all, and her fingers dig into the skin there, but maybe that’s exactly what Zoey needs.
To be held like she’s loved and cherished enough to have someone worry about her. To the point they’re rough with her, just to make sure she’s here, she’s safe, and Zoey herself has done this a thousand and one times with Emma and Nora when they came back behind the bar from aggressive clients, checking if they weren’t beaten bad, but never thought this would come back to her.
“We’re— We’re—” Charlotte stutters, her jaw going up and down.
Just like Sam’s did earlier.
She’s floating, somewhere far away. Her body is there, yes, but she—
She’s—,
Not there. Definitely not with Charlotte, with her rough hands on her cheeks she’s been craving more than she can comprehend, and not with Sam’s corpse mere feet away from them.
“We’re alive, Zoey.” Charlotte’s eyes are big and terrified but bright in the darkness of the room — almost like Archangel Gabriel has stepped down from the Heavens to tell Zoey she needs to push on, that she can’t waste the second chance she was given. “We— Fuck, you did it.”
“Yeah.” She breathes out, blinking, eyelids heavy with Sam’s blood on them. When did it get there?
She’s alive.
Fuck, why her?