Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (18 page)

I was completely
naked. Bryce, asleep, had collapsed on one of my legs. His head rested on my
breast. Morning sunlight was falling on his bare ass.

The woman screamed.

“You have
got
to be kidding me!” she yelled
through the window. “Are you
kidding
me?”

She stomped across the
porch and threw open the front door, oblivious that anyone was asleep in the
house…or she just didn’t care.

Bryce looked at her,
groaned, and then let his face fall onto the sofa pillow.

The woman stormed
toward us.

“
Seriously
?!
” she screamed, even louder
than before.

The boy in her arms looked
like he was on the verge of crying, but his face was frozen.

I scrambled to wrap
the sheet around my shoulders, which left Bryce uncovered.

He tugged on his
pants, taking his time to zip them. He left his belt unfastened.

“Lindsay,” was all he
said.

I saw that the woman
was wearing a wedding band and a huge engagement ring. Now it was
my
turn to yell at Bryce. “Are you
kidding
me
?” I screamed. Everyone in
the house had to be up by now anyway.

Bryce looked at me,
defeated. He shrugged.

“Yeah,” the woman
yelled at me. “I’m his wife. He’s fucking married. With—” she gestured
silently at the boy in her arms, obviously Bryce’s son. She smiled acerbically.
“Surprised? I fucking bet.”

“Lindsay,” Bryce
repeated.

It was like he was
capable only of repeating his wife’s name. He just sat back in the couch,
shirtless, with a surprisingly unapologetic expression.

“I came all the way
out here looking for you,” Lindsay screamed, nodding indignantly. “And then
they tell me I can’t
leave
town
? I spend a week in a shitty motel, then
finally track you down, thinking these fucking Nazi
robocops
are after you, and here you are with—” she shook her head, finally
whispering as she pointed at me, “
her
?”

“The phones were
down.” Bryce stared at his wife with a strange confidence. “I tried to call. I
couldn’t.”

Lindsay just stared at
him, speechless, shocked at this response. Finally, his son started to cry.

Bryce looked slowly
from Lindsay to me. Again, he just shrugged.

I slapped him. I
slapped him really hard. I cuffed him across the jaw with the full weight of my
arm. I couldn’t believe how he was acting. I didn’t even recognize him as the
Bryce I’d known.

For a brief moment, he
looked at me with an expression of shame and contrition.

“I just—” he
began, but he couldn’t complete his sentence.

Suddenly, I
understood. I backed away from him instinctively, horrified, gathering the
sheet around my body.

When Bryce had just
tried to speak, but couldn’t, he’d made this quivering jerk of the jaw
just like Morgan did
when she’d tried to
speak in the silo.

Bryce was infected.

I had no doubt. He’d
been so charmingly talkative before we’d gotten trapped in the coffin. But ever
since then, he’d hardly said anything. I’d thought it was because of the trauma
he’d gone through, but I’d been wrong. Bryce had been speaking in shorter and
shorter sentences, until finally this morning he’d gone into this strange,
sexually charged state of speaking only in very terse phrases. He wasn’t just
infected. He was moving into stage two.

Even as I grew angrier—and
more heartbroken—I felt a sudden, intense urge to fuck him again. What
was I thinking?

I was still holding
the tissue I’d used to wipe his semen. I held it to my nose.

It smelled like honey.

“That night?” I asked
him. “In the hay loft?” I was crying now. “You
slept with Morgan
that night?”

He stared straight
into my eyes. “Couldn’t help it.”

Somehow everything he
said when he spoke this way sounded so
reasonable
and forgivable, even when it obviously wasn’t.

It had to be the
effect the pheromones were having on me. And his beautiful blue eyes. I
actually felt a little tingling between my legs again. My pulse picked up.

What was happening? It
was like a spell. I was dizzy…

I forced my thoughts
away from sex with Bryce. It was surprising how difficult it was, until finally
I remembered what he’d done to me, and I snapped out of it.

“You slept with
Morgan,” I said. “And you didn’t tell me about it, and then you slept with
me
?”

“Couldn’t help it,” he
repeated, again as if this were the most reasonable response in the world.

I felt another wave of
pheromone-induced dizziness in which I wanted to kiss him and slap him all at
once.

Bryce just sat there
on the couch staring unapologetically at his wife, his baby son, and me.

The sad thing was that
when he said he
couldn’t help it
,
he’d been telling the truth, in a way. The pathogen was affecting his
consciousness. It was making him want to have sex with as many partners as
possible in the shortest amount of time, no matter the cost.

And yet my feelings
for him had felt so
real
. I’d even
thought that maybe I was falling in love with him. Was that just an effect of
the pheromones, too? How could I know for sure?

I backed away from
Bryce, trying to distance myself from whatever strange effect his physical
presence was having on my body.

As soon as I was more
than a few feet away, my feelings changed. Suddenly, it seemed absolutely crazy
that I’d had sex with him on the living room couch. My family
must
have heard us. What had I been
thinking? I tried to remember the moment when Bryce came. Thank God I’d pulled
away. But had I pulled away in time? Had some of his semen ended up inside me?
I didn’t think
so, but I couldn’t be
sure.

It was only now that I
realized my entire family—all of them—was watching from the
kitchen.

Even Tyler and Haley
had appeared, but Danielle was trying to pull them away from the scene we were
causing in the living room. My mom was speechlessly shaking her head, both at
me and at the strange woman who had barged into her house with a toddler. My dad
was averting his eyes. Ian was pacing around the kitchen, trying to decide
whether or not to intervene.

I pulled the sheet
more closely around my shoulders. Underneath, I was wearing nothing. I had no
choice but to gather up my clothes and hurry away to the bathroom, horrified at
what had I’d done.

* * *

After I washed up and
dressed, I sat alone on the front porch steps.

I couldn’t face
anyone.

Not yet, anyway. I’d
never felt so mortified.

I’d lost control of
myself with Bryce, my entire family knew I was cheating on my husband, and I
couldn’t find out whether I was infected because I had no way of testing
myself—Chris and Ian had used their last test applicator on Morgan.

Someone opened the
front door behind me. The screen door banged shut.

I still wasn’t ready
to see anyone. I hoped slightly that the person approaching would turn out to
be Ian, but I wasn’t sure if I felt like speaking even to him. I was so
embarrassed.

“Your mom wanted me to
give you this.”

It wasn’t Ian. It was
the last person I expected: Bryce’s wife.

Lindsay sat beside me
and handed me a cup of coffee. I took it tentatively.

“Look,” she said. “I’m
sorry I barged in on all you guys.”

She was really
strikingly attractive. Dark blue eyes, dark hair, sharp features, a perfect
body…perfect everything. Why would Bryce have shown any interest in me, with a
wife like this?

“You’re apologizing to
me
?” I asked.

I was ready for the
woman to tear me to pieces now that she had me alone, but she didn’t even seem
angry. She actually sounded like she felt sorry for me.

“Well, yeah,” she
said. She didn’t have her son with her. My mom must have had him inside. “I
just came screaming and yelling into a house full of total strangers. I’m lucky
I didn’t get shot.”

“
I’m
sorry,” I said. I imagined what Lindsay must have seen through
the window: her husband sprawled out naked with a strange girl. “I’m so,
so
sorry. Bryce didn’t say
anything
about being married.”

“He never does.”

Lindsay blew on her own
steaming coffee, wrapping her hands around the mug. It was a cold morning.

“This isn’t exactly
the first time,” she said. “I can only blame myself for staying with him as
long as I have. After I got pregnant, his last girlfriend tried to warn me
about him. I didn’t listen, but she was right. He’s just an egotistical asshole.
He always will be.”

The thing is, though, Bryce
didn’t seem like an asshole. It was true that he didn’t tell me about his wife
and son—which, I had to admit, was an extremely asshole-
ish
thing to do—but he seemed so kind. He hadn’t ever
come off as egocentric. He was charming, but in a really sweet way. Was it
because of the pathogen that he’d been so irresistibly charming? If so, that meant
he’d been infected even before sleeping with Morgan. Had he been in stage one
when I’d first met him? He must have been. I remembered him mentioning that
before his concert he’d been hospitalized overnight and had walked out the next
morning feeling fine. He must have died that night in the hospital.

Someone else came out
onto the porch. The screen door slammed shut.

It was Bryce.

He sat on the porch
swing behind us, still wearing nothing but jeans. He clasped his hands behind
his head. He had a really amazing body. Even the way he planted his bare feet
against the porch boards was cute.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I wasn’t sure whether
he was apologizing to me or to Lindsay. It looked like he wanted to say
something more, but his jaw only made the same quivering jerk as before, and he
gave up trying to speak.

“What are you sorry
for, Bryce?” Lindsay was already seething again. “Are you sorry for sleeping
around? Again?”

I realized she had no
idea that Bryce was infected. I wondered if that’s what he’d been trying to
tell her when he hadn’t been able to speak.

“Don’t be sorry for
sleeping around,” she said. “Okay? Sleep around all you fucking want, because
it’s over between us. Got it? Over. You want to be sorry about something? Be
sorry that your wife—your
ex
-wife—came
to look for you, with your
son
, after
you disappeared. And then I got stuck in this shithole town for who knows how
long.
Forever
, for all I know. Be
sorry for
that
. Don’t be sorry for
sleeping with Ashley or whoever else you fucking want.”

“What the
hell
is going on here?”

My attention had been
focused so intensely on Lindsay and Bryce that I hadn’t noticed someone coming
up the driveway behind me.

It was Shawn.

He wasn’t wearing his
Home Guard combat gear. He was in his old street clothes. At his hip, though,
was a very large handgun.

And he’d just heard
everything Lindsay had said about Bryce sleeping with me.

“What are you doing
here?” I asked Shawn in a panic.

“Breakfast!” Shawn
said, glancing from person to person on the porch. “Your mom’s making me
breakfast
. It’s my morning off. She
didn’t tell you?”

My husband looked hurt
and confused as he tried to make sense of Bryce Tripp sitting shirtless on the
porch swing. I could tell he was struggling to process everything he’d just
overheard Lindsay say.

Bryce stood and held
up his hands defensively. “We’re all just le-le—” he stuttered. But he
couldn’t finish his sentence.

“What the
hell
is going on here?” Shawn repeated,
now shooting me a mystified look.

He stormed up the
porch, slipped his gun from the
holster,
znd
stared at Bryce as he tried to say something. But once
again Bryce failed to get the words out, his jaw quivering.

“This is bullshit!” Shawn screamed like a
distraught child. “You’re
all
obviously at risk!” He turned to me,
disgusted. “Especially
you
! You fucking slut!”

Ian rushed out to the porch.

“Shawn,” he said. “Let’s just calm down a
bit. You’re upset. I understand that. But let’s just calm down.”

“Calm down? What the fuck, Ian? I’m doing my
job. This overrides
any
clearance you got! They’re no doubt
a
‘contagion threat’ now!” Shawn wagged his gun between Bryce and me. “That means
it’s up to our discretion to expire them or arrest them. Period! And this
fucktard
is well on his way to stage two!” He raised his
gun and pointed it straight at Bryce. “What were you thinking keeping them at
the house, Ian? I should have done this a
long
fucking time ago.”

I leaped onto my feet and put a hand
gingerly on Shawn’s shoulder.

“Shawn,” I said.

He whipped around, facing me. Tears were
starting to well in his eyes. “Fuck you, Ashley,” he whispered.

“…Shawn.” I didn’t know what else to say.

He gave me a heartbreaking expression of
hurt, then spun back around, and, with a terrifying, primitive scream, fired
his gun at Bryce.

Ian lunged forward, drawing his own gun, but
he was too late.

Bryce collapsed backward onto the porch
swing, sending the chains bouncing and jangling as he rolled to the ground. He
clutched at his stomach, writhing in pain. Blood spilled between his fingers.
For a moment he tried to pull himself up with his arms, smearing the porch
boards with blood, but then he collapsed backward again.