Nick hushed me without ever breaking his gaze.
“Because the walls are only a single portal. If she destroys that, then he has no way of contacting her and all those Christmas lights were for nothing.”
I sat for a minute, considering this.
“Yeah, but why doesn’t she just—”
“No, I thought of that. But it would require a comb, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” I chewed my lip for a second, thinking. “But what if she just—”
“No more idea, okay sweetheart?”
“But they’re good ideas, Nick!”
“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows defiantly. “Like when you told Barb to go outside and wait by the pool? That turned out to be a great idea!”
I threw up my hands.
“How was I supposed to know the thing was waiting for her—”
A throat cleared softly behind us, and we whipped around to see the most bashful pizza delivery man in the entire city. He grimaced apologetically at startling us, then gestured to the frozen characters on the screen.
“Episode six?”
We nodded silently.
“Yeah—me and my girlfriend started fighting around that point too.” He held out the box with a good-natured smile. “Large pepperoni? Extra cheese?”
For a second, the two of us simply stared. Half horrified at the atrocities we’d just witnessed on screen, and half stunned senseless at the man’s automatic assumption.
Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Couple’s television fight.
There was nothing remotely normal about those words when applied to us, and yet somehow, that happened to be exactly what we were doing.
Maybe this was turning out to be a normal day after all?
As I glanced nervously down at the sofa, Nick sprang to his feet to pay for the pizza. He left a rather outrageously large tip, and the guy left with a grin. A grin that I saw mirrored on Nick’s face as he set the pizza on a coffee table and sat back down beside me.
A grin that abruptly made me suspicious.
“Did you pay that guy to say that?” I asked suddenly.
Nick’s head jerked up in surprise. “What?”
“Oh come on.” I folded my arms across my chest with a grin, tossing my dark waves of hair back behind me. “Like it would be a stretch to assume you’d coached the pizza guy? Like you haven’t gleefully manipulated situations before just to fuck with me?”
I expected a triumphant confession, but Nick just threw back his head with a laugh.
“You—Wilder—are entirely too suspicious, you know that?”
My eyes narrowed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “That isn’t exactly a denial...”
He laughed again and took a bite, before pulling off another piece for me.
“No—alright—I swear. He was just a random pizza guy.”
I studied him for a moment, a very long moment indeed, before taking the slice with a reluctant smile. I had to admit, when the guy first said it, Nick had looked as surprised as I was.