Are You Scared?

Chapter 1

The Worldwide had once been a casino, and if Frank knew Connie, now that she’d purchased it, it would serve that function once more, and then some. The rooms above the gambling room floor would need a lot of work before they were ready for rent to a likely disreputable public, and the lobby was in dusty shambles, but below the main structure, the bunker was intact.

Its tunnels dated back to the era, not to mention the purposes, of Prohibition bootleggers, and it was there that Frank and Connie now retreated every night after fulfilling a day’s criminal itinerary. Even as their escapades tested his mettle–hell, in the three weeks since they’d made their home in one of the underground chambers, she had taught him how to follow her lead on midnight burglaries and broad-daylight pick-pocketings alike, and even allowed him to take the reigns a couple of times. Bank heists would be a lesson for some soon day, but he wasn’t scared.

It was hard to feel scared of anything, when she took the time to fill his evenings with veritable feasts concocted in the bunker’s commercial-grade kitchen, even if she insisted they ‘weren’t that good’, which was saying a lot for her humility, because Connie was a self-proclaimed braggart. She was the dastardly Crime Brulee, never apprehended, never outmatched, her birth-bestowed gift of pyromancy indexing in at an impossible 11 on the power scale, if you were well-read enough to know what that meant. High-flying in the streets and feared by the local authorities, she ran the city’s criminal underworld, answering only to Don Corpulone, Blackwater’s most notorious mob boss.

But if you asked her, her pasta sauce was ‘just from a jar’ and she couldn’t take the credit, she ‘didn’t do anything’ and that’s how all those pasta bakes kept on coming out of her crockpot, and as for dessert, she ‘read the directions off the back of the box’, so ‘it can’t be THAT good’.

And yet, every night she fixed him something not only new, but more delightful than he’d ever known. She didn’t need to be a Michelin star chef to make him like it. Her presence alone stirred a warmth inside him he’d never known he was missing until he met her, but for the record, he loved everything she whipped up, especially the sweets.

Friday, it was cheesecake, Saturday, chocolate mouse, Sunday, lemon loaf with blueberry buttercream on top.

Back when he’d owed a seasonal flesh sacrifice to a literal demon, all this indulgence used to be a necessary chore–a dreaded one, even–but Connie had taught him, between her exploits as a criminal mastermind, to enjoy it…and enjoy her enjoyment of the…ahem…consequences.

And now that the curse was broken, they finally got to enjoy it all to the fullest.

It was Monday now, and as the TV in front of their bed flickered in the dark before them, Frank took his eyes off the movie to hand Connie the last slice of her latest creation, a banana pudding pie, as per his special request, still in its tinfoil pan. “Last chance, Sweets. You sure you don’t want to sample your own handiwork?” Like all of her desserts, it was delicious, if a little misshapen, but even its lopsided, melting coating of whipped cream wouldn’t stop him from claiming it if she refused it.

“I already told you, I hate bananas,” she told him. “All yours.”

“There’s not even any real bananas in this, though,” he pointed out. “It’s just sugar, cornstarch, and yellow dye 5. You might like–” The rest of his sentence got lost as the protagonist onscreen shoved her newly wedded groom into the hotel elevator mid-argument. “Don’t go in the elevator! There’s probably a corpse in there!”

“Duh. It’s Corpse Elevator 3,” said Connie. Leaning against him, she forked the remaining piece of pie into his mouth, bite by bite, the bright burn of intrigue in her wide, brown eyes a welcome distraction from the ominous music obviously building up to a jump-scare onscreen. “All done…good boy,” she crooned, but just as she stacked the empty pie plate on top of the flattened bag of chips and deflated, spent popcorn sack on the nightstand on her side, the film’s wedding pianist returned as a snarling, mindless zombie bursting through one of the titular elevator’s floor tiles. Frank let out an involuntary gasp and clung, hard, around Connie’s waist with both arms.

“Seriously?” she sighed, shaking her head. “Bones, I need to get rid of the trash.”

“But it’s the FIRST ELEVATOR CORPSE! It’s just gonna get creepier from here!”

“You’ve–killed–people!” she reasoned, attempting to wriggle out of his grip. But either he’d picked up strength, along with the weight he’d put on, or she wasn’t trying very hard.

“That doesn’t make it NOT scary!”

“WHY do you keep renting these movies if they scare you that much, huh?” she asked.

“Cause you like them?” he said, but that wasn’t the whole truth, was it?

With a sheepish grin in her direction, he sunk backwards against the pillow he’d propped up against the headboard, still clinging to her like a lifeline. “And…because you let me hold you like this at the scary parts?”

“Oh, honey…” Smirking, she abandoned the pile of trash, on the end table on his side now, and curled in closer. “I’m the one person in the world you can’t hypnotize with your powers. What makes you think you can bribe me, even with your cuteness?”

“Right you are, you maniacal genius,” he concluded. “I guess I’ll have to use force…” With that, he turned her over, squeezing a squeal from her lungs as he pinned her to the mattress with his belly, which she’d told him time and time again was his best feature. To think, back when they’d first met, he’d been such a scrawny little thing, requiring her help to lift trays at the restaurant where they used to work…and decidedly forgettable to her.

And now, she wasn’t going anywhere unless he said so.

He’d let up at her signal, of course. But by the way she gripped down into the softness of his hips–more of her careful handiwork–she had no problem with their current arrangement at all.

“See? You’re not as scared as you think, huh, big guy?” said Connie, laughing through a playful gasp.

“Me? I’m scared of a lot of things,” he confessed, his voice now a low murmur as he nudged a stray curl of her hair aside with his nose to nuzzle against her neck.

He could feel that scared person he used to be fading away every night, though, replaced bit by bit by the newer, braver one he was becoming alongside her.

“But it’s a good thing I’ve got you.”