Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 144(@200wpm)___ 115(@250wpm)___ 96(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 144(@200wpm)___ 115(@250wpm)___ 96(@300wpm)
This version of Ace was restrained.
Angry.
Bossy.
Cocky.
Resentful.
I sighed and shook all the thoughts away. This wasn’t about us, it was about my student loans and about getting out of this escape room with him unscathed.
I needed to seriously stop traveling down memory lane every single time he touched me or seemed like he wanted to talk about the past.
The past belonged exactly where it was—it was too painful to bring up and I was too much of a chicken to admit that I was at fault for so many of the things that went wrong during that time.
Fear does that to a person, it chokes you and then convinces you the only way you’ll be able to breathe again is to believe the lie it tells you, at first it’s incredible because you can inhale, exhale, until you realize it’s been poison all along and nothing was ever solved, no, the fear just dug you deeper into the darkness and laughed while you smiled over the lie of being rescued.
Yeah, I knew fear well.
“This is bullshit.” Ace groaned. “We need a hint, something, anything.”
A knock sounded at the door, and then a piece of paper slid underneath the ASME door.
Ace walked over and grabbed it and brought it back to me, we read it together.
“Do the Macarena—correctly—and we’ll give you a hint.”
“Double shit!” Ace groaned. “I did that when I was like seven, I barely remember it.”
“I know it.” I shouted, he stumbled back. “What?”
“You yelled it like an inch from my face!”
“Sorry! I got excited.”
“Clearly.”
“Okay, so we start like this, hands down, then up, then across the body, then behind the head, hips, oh, oh, oh, oh! Then your ass and you do like this little hip circle and go to the right!”
Ace stared me down, his expression unreadable. “Will you also be humming during this demonstration?”
“No. You will.”
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
I snorted. “You barely speak English, color me shocked. Now just hum! Like dun dun dun dun dun dun Macarena, dun dun dun—“ I stopped when he started laughing behind his hand. “What?”
“I thought you said Dung.”
“Are you five?”
“I think even five-year-olds have graduated to shit by that point.”
I lifted my hand to smack him, then faced the door. “Come on, we have to go fast, we need that clue!”
Ace let out a sigh. “Fine. Dung, dung, dung, dung,” He really was saying dung not dun.
We made it shakily through the chorus and, thank God, received another note underneath the door.
I snatched it and ran over to Ace.
“Beware the stapler, number two used several…”
Ace frowned. “Doesn’t everyone use several staples?”
I thought about it. “I think I use one, unless I’m pissed, then I double it and then get pissed it’s a double, then pull them out, then do one again, is that five?”
“Four.”
I waved him off. “Okay, so I think we need to grab the stapler, it said beware, not that we couldn’t grab it.”
Ace looked at the clock above the door. We had five minutes left. Running his hands through his thick dark hair, he sighed out a. “Okay.”
I moved in front of him and reached for the purple stapler; it didn’t budge right away. Ace moved behind me and helped me jerk it off the table with a thud. We fell backward, stapler in hand, when a sudden crack sounded in the ceiling above us and a giant replica of the woman in the photo dropped down with rage in her eyes, she was also holding a stapler and blood dripped from her mouth.
“SON OF A BITCH!” Ace shouted. “Run!”
“THE DOOR’S LOCKED!” I yelled back, scrambling to my feet.
“Staple!” He grabbed the stapler from my hands and held it out in front of us and started stapling the air. “Be gone witch!”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“She used multiple staples!” he yelled. “I’m stapling her to death! What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Going crazy!”
I hid behind him as he finally pulled open the stapler and pressed it against her chest, she jerked back and flew into the ceiling while the door unlocked behind us.
We both scrambled out and ran down the hall, more zombies tried to pass us while Ace waved the stapler around in front of me.
What happened next really couldn’t be planned, not by a long shot, just as he reached the exit he slipped and fell backward, the stapler went flying toward my face.
Next thing I knew, I heard a crunch, felt a bit of blood, and was staring up at Max, Dustin, Ace, and some random EMT who was holding out three fingers. “How many?”
I tried to widen my eyes and only got out. “Three staples.”
Max’s reaction… “Oh thank God, she’s fine most of my employees count with staples and paperclips, it’s healthy company culture.”
“She has a concussion,” the EMT said while my head pounded.