“What? Did you get it?”
“No!” I screamed in horror. “My arms are stuck!”
“What?” She wiggled around, trying to see what I was talking about. “How can you be?—”
“My arms are stuck around my ass cheeks!”
“That’s just ridiculous. They can’t be.”
I tried to move them this way and that way, but they wouldn’t give. My ass was so scrunched in between my arms that I couldn’t move.
“Oh, God. I’m losing feeling. My wrists are going to snap off!”
“That’s just ludicrous. They won’t snap off because of your ass cheeks.”
“Yes, they will! I’m stuck, and when they come in here, I won’t be able to defend myself because my ass is too big to save me! I never thought that would be a problem!”
Claire burst out laughing, only making me feel worse about myself. The whole thing was absurd. I should have known it wouldn’t work.
“Instead of laughing at me, why don’t you try helping me!”
“Okay, alright,” she chuckled. “Roll to your side and I’ll press my foot against your ass. Just squeeze really hard.”
God, this was so mortifying. I did as she said, rolling uncomfortably to my side, then squeezed for all it was worth. Claire’s foot landed on my butt, and then she counted down.
“Just do it!”
She pressed hard, and my arms popped free, relieving the tension in my wrists as much as they could. My shoulders screamed in pain, but that just pushed me to get out of here. I would not be a victim.
“This is ridiculous! What would the guys do?”
Claire blew an errant strand of hair out of her face as she stared up at the ceiling. “They would have some hidden weapon that could immediately cut through the ropes.”
“And did you happen to hide a knife in your boobs?”
Sighing, she shook her head. “Sorry. I left my boob knife back at the compound.”
“Okay, then what else would they do?”
Groaning, she rolled toward me. “Why can’t we just wait for the guys?”
“Because we are not helpless women! We don’t need to be rescued by men! And what if those men come back before your husband arrives? What are we going to do then?”
I knew she didn’t want to admit I was right, but the fact was, we needed to get ourselves out of this.
“Fine, if they couldn’t do that, then…I guess they’d make sarcastic jokes to one another.”
“And that would accomplish what?” I asked, stunned thatthatwas her answer.
“Well, they’d wait for the bad guys to come back, and then they’d banter with them until they annoyed them into submission.”
She had to be lying. That sounded like the worst plan ever. Who would actually do something like that? Then again, we were women. We could annoy people with the best of them. Not because we were actually annoying, but because we were evil geniuses at knowing what buttons to push.
“Then that’s our plan. If that’s what the guys would do, we can do the same thing, and probably better.”
“It won’t work,” she sighed.
“Oh, please! You were annoying me with that whole tirade about books being the best thing in the world. If anything is going to make someone want to blow their own brains out, you’ve got it in spades.”