"I'm going to bed."
"It's eight forty-five."
"I'm tired."
"You took a nap on my shoulder this morning."
His eye flickers. The tiniest crack in the wall.
I reach out and grab his wrist.
He resists for exactly one second. Then I tug, and he lets himself be pulled forward, stepping onto the mattresses with the reluctant grace of a cat being lowered into a bathtub. His feet sink into the layers.
"This is absurd," he mutters.
"Sit."
He sits.
I immediately pull the weighted blanket across both our laps and nestle into his side before he can change his mind. His body goes stiff.
Then, degree by degree, he settles.
The lights go off. The TV bathes the room in blue.Blood Mealopens with a synth score so cheap it sounds like it was recorded with a potato and a Casio keyboard, and a title card in dripping red font.
"Oh, this is going to beterrible," Raf says happily. He reaches into the popcorn bowl, throws three pieces at his own face, misses two.
Phoenix catches one of the strays and eats it.
On screen, a woman in a crop top investigates a noise in a basement with all the survival instincts of a lemming.
"Don't go down there," Phoenix says immediately.
She goes down there.
"Called it."
"They always go down there," Raf mutters through a mouthful of popcorn.
The basement scene involves a rubber monster suit that's clearly being operated by someone hunched inside it, the zipper visible along the back seam. The kills are spectacular in their incompetence. Fake blood splatters across the lens. An arm detaches at the elbow and wiggles independently.
Phoenix blanches.
"Not how arms work," Rex says.
I grin into his shoulder.
He's watching.
The bastard iswatching.
Twenty minutes in, Phoenix has migrated closer to Raf. Their shoulders are touching. Phoenix's hand rests on the blanket between them, and at some point during a particularly terrible jump scare, Raf's hand lands on top of it and neither of them move away.
I pull my legs up and tuck them underneath me, leaning harder into Rex's side. His arm is braced behind me on the pillow bank, not quite around me, not quite not.
I snuggle deeper against Rex. His arm drops from the pillow bank to my shoulder.
Light.