Sour Sweet Love

Chapter Nine

                "LOOK at this one! It's so fucking hot!" Joey exclaimed, beaming as she held up a skin-tight black dress.

"So buy it," Molly retorted, receiving a laugh from me.

It's hideous, I thought. I considered saying it aloud before hushing altogether. 

"But I have no one to seduce," Joey muttered, placing it back on the rack. She picked it up again just seconds later, biting her lip. "Avery, you try it."

"I don't have anyone to seduce either," I stated monotonously. 

"But it fits you! Like, your figure," Joey reasoned.

I gave the dress a once-over before dismissing it. "I'm not wearing that thing."

I ended up wearing it. My best friends were more stubborn than I was. They were pervasive of my desires and oddly successful at convincing me to do the very things that I vowed not to do. As I removed my clothes and slipped onto the dress, I slackened despite it clinging onto my skin.

"Hot as fuck," Joey commented when I walked out in uncertainty.

Molly agreed. "Buy that and seduce Liam," she encouraged tentatively, "and then when he's on the verge of cumming, leave him. Destroy that self-righteous bastard!"

I laughed, waving her off. "You're too much, Molly."

"Seriously, though," she pressed.

Dismissing her, I reentered the dressing room. It was then that the lights began flickering on and off. Grabbing my stack of clothes, I cleared my throat; it was precisely as I was preparing to remove the dress from my body that a pitch darkness overcame the room. In a frenzy, I sauntered out of the dressing room. I was unpleasantly surprised to find no one there.

Wondering where Molly and Joey had gone, I called out their names. Receiving no response, I followed the faint light trickling into the store from the front door to find my exit. I pondered the possibility of a gunman being in the mall; I could have been on the brink of death if I could not escape. I wondered if all of this was just a nightmare that I would awake from in due time.

As I stepped out of the store with a shoplifted dress clinging onto my body, I spotted Liam from the peripheries of my vision. He saw me too. I knew because he began approaching me, a taut boy trailing behind him. Razor, I came to know, was his name.

"You okay, Avery?" Liam asked me once mere inches deemed us apart.

I nodded, wanting nothing more than to brush past him into another existence. "Fine."

He took cautious steps toward me. "You look pale."

"I'm fine," I said snidely. "I need to get back to the campus."

"Me too."

"So I heard."

"Joey?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Joey."

"Sorry that you had to hear it from her," he said sincerely. I was almost fooled.

"You know, Liam," I began, my gestures a paroxysm of my pent-up resentment for him. "Standing in this forsaken mall lot and having a small-talk with you isn't really my idea of an ideal day off. So please, with your permission, may I leave?" I felt my jaw clench then.

He moved to the side apologetically, revealing a pathway to an escape. "But at least let me drop you off in campus," he offered. "I have a car."

"And I have public transport."

"Don't tell me you came alone," he murmured in—concern?

"I lost Joey and Molly in the blackout."

"So would it hurt you let me escort you? You don't even seem like you have a purse."

I looked down at my hands, where my clothes were. Of course I didn't have my purse; I had given it to Joey to hold while I was changing in the fitting room. Fuck.

"Um," I drawled sheepishly, swiveling on my heel. "On second thoughts..."