Page 7 of Rent a Masked Duo

He disappears up the stairs, where a door opens. A drawer slides, and then another one, while he mutters to himself. He doesn’t exactly sound happy. When he comes back, he’s carrying a folded gray T-shirt and a pair of drawstring shorts that I can tell just by the first glance are going to be too big. Still, I’m so grateful to see them that I take them with the closest thing to a smile I’ve managed all day. Like, an actual one. “Perfect. Thank you.”

“Bathroom’s that way,” he grunts in reply, jerking his chin toward a door just past the stairs. I hold the clothes tight to my chest and shuffle that way, dragging what feels like forty pounds of skirt behind me. Wiggles follows at a determined little trot, which is deeply supportive of him. I wait until he enters the bathroom before stepping in myself, then closing the door.

And right away, I freeze in a mixture of surprise and concern for whoever decorated this place. Rose-colored tile. A soap dish shaped like a swan. There’s a framed cross-stitch above the toilet that reads Bless This Home. Given the current occupants of said home, it feels like a piece of situational irony I can’t find it in me to appreciate right now. Someday, when I look back on all of this, I’m going to laugh at that cross-stitch.

Right now, I’m a little too busy trying to get out of this dress. To call it an ordeal would be an extreme understatement. There are hidden clasps everywhere. A zipper that fights me the entire way down. There’s one moment where I have the entire skirt over my head like a very expensive garbage bag, and I briefly consider whether it would be easier to just die in here.

But no. Wiggles needs me. So I eventually wrestle my way free. The dress collapses onto the tile in a heap of polyester and shame. I kick it into the corner, relieved to be rid of it.

The shirt is soft and worn thin at the collar. It smells like detergent and maybe cedar, and when I pull it on, the hem lands around the middle of my thighs. The shorts are big enough to fall below my knees, and still much too big even when I pull the drawstring as tight as it will go. They’ll have to do. “How do I look?” I ask Wiggles, who watches me from the bathmat with what I read as grudging approval. “Don’t start with me,” I warn.

I pick him up after deciding to leave the dress on the floor. They can flip a coin to decide who deals with it for all I care. I’m not touching it again.

When I return to the living room, walking on the ball of my injured foot, the tackler is on the couch, and the driver is in the armchair. Both are still wearing their masks, which is silly from where I’m standing. Then again, what do I know? Maybe they’re hideous under those things—they could be doing me a favor. Neither of them says anything about my new outfit, though the tackler’s eyes catch on my bare legs for maybe half a second before he looks somewhere else.

“Food,” the driver announces as he stands. “Sit down.”

“I’ve been sitting down.”

“Sit down again,” he retorts on his way to the kitchen. I sit while he opens the refrigerator and sets food out on the counter. So it’s stocked. Is this where they live? Well, there are clothes here. Maybe this is their actual house. Either that, or they stocked the place while preparing for their kidnapping adventure. I guess I’m just grateful either way, since it means the promise of something to eat and the lack of a dress that was swallowing me.

Something starts to sizzle, and soon, the smell of actual food fills the air. I didn’t realize until this exact second that I was hungry. Now, I realize I’m the kind of hungry that could probably eat an entire chair and not be satisfied.

The tackler, meanwhile, is settled on the opposite side of the couch. He drapes an arm along the back of it, though he keeps his hand away from my shoulder. I’m extremely aware of the distance between his hand and my body, though I refuse to look at him in case that would somehow make the distance shorter. “Are you always this bratty when you’re kidnapped?” he asks.

“I don’t exactly have a large sample size to draw from,” I retort.

“Fair enough.” Wiggles turns in a small circle in my lap and lies down like this is a perfectly normal day.

The driver comes back with what I can only describe as heaven on a plate. Maybe the most perfect grilled cheese in existence. It’s browned exactly the right amount and glistens with butter while cheese oozes from the sides. I didn’t expect the perfect grilled cheese from my kidnapper. I also didn’t expect to be moved by grilled cheese from a kidnapper.

And yet, here I am, getting all choked up while my mouth waters. “Thank you,” I tell him, and it comes out more sincere than I mean it to. I shove the sandwich into my mouth before I can do something stupid like start to cry over this tiny bit of kindness.

It takes all of four bites to wolf the entire thing down. No one comments on my speed, for which I am grateful. I didn’t realize just how hungry I was until I took the first bite, and when I’m finished, I’m more than a little disappointed to set the empty plate on the coffee table.

When I sink back against the cushions, I discover something else. The human body, given food, rest, and a break from adrenaline, can betray you very quickly. Because I’m now exhausted. So, so exhausted. The sort of wiped that makes your eyelids feel like lead weights and leaves you wondering if you could, in fact, fall asleep in front of a pair of kidnappers without anything bad happening. Sort of like the first person to fall asleep at the sleepover. Though I doubt they would, like, draw something on my face or put my hand in a glass of water.

Though, who knows? I’m sort of winging this whole thing.

“You should go to sleep upstairs before you fall asleep down here.” The tackler stands, which is equal parts a relief and disappointing because apparently, I’m into being in close physical proximity to someone who kidnapped me and tackled me to the ground. “I’ll show you the way.”

“I’m sure I can find the bedroom.” Though I really have to wonder as I force myself to stand, then to bend over and pick up Wiggles. I’m so completely drained of energy, the stairs might as well be Mount Everest.

“Second door on the right,” the driver tells me. “The sheets are clean.”

“Which one of you slept in there last?” I ask, looking back and forth between them.

“Neither,” the driver grunts. “Nobody’s been here in a while.”

“So this is your, what? Secondary lair?” I ask.

He snorts. “Something like that.”

My legs feel like they belong to someone else, but I force myself through crossing the room and taking the stairs one at a time. I mean, that’s how you always take stairs, of course. But right now, I literally have to tell myself each step is the last one. That’s the only way I can drag myself up there to the small, clean little bedroom. Once again, there are way too many floral patterns going on, but the queen-size bed is made up neatly, and the sheets are, in fact, clean. I pull back the quilt and slide in before Wiggles curls up next to my ribs.

All things considered, I should lie here in a state of frozen fear until morning. Instead, I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow. Call it an adrenaline crash or simply the result of a string of sleepless nights leading up to the wedding.

And when I wake up, it’s because Wiggles is standing next to my face.