The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn

keep a relationship, and maybe that was his problem—his inextinguishable drive, his determination to be something bigger than himself. Maybe that resolve eclipsed everyone around him, dooming him to a life of solitude despite his smile, despite his undeniable appeal. “You were down there a lot longer than it takes to stick dishes in the washer, and I know that look.”
    Jane stepped out of the bathroom, tossing her clothes onto the floor next to her bag before crawling into bed. Lauren slid back onto the mattress as well, fluffing her pillow before sticking her legs beneath the sheets.
    “If you know that look, then you shouldn’t be asking,” Jane told her.
    “Did he stay down there with you?”
    Pressing her lips together in a tight line, Jane offered Lauren a hesitant smile.
    “Seriously?” Lauren asked. Jane slid beneath the comforter and grabbed the Vogue from the center of the bed. “What did he say?”
    “Nothing.”
    Lauren snatched the magazine from her grasp, and Jane chuckled at her insistence.
    “Don’t be an ass,” Lauren told her. “Spill it.”
    Jane lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug. “How about this; I won’t ask you what Ryan said when you both end up behind a tree.”
    Lauren rolled her eyes, but Jane didn’t give in. She pulled the sheets up to her chin and shut her eyes shut against the light. Lauren tossed the magazine onto the floor and followed suit after clicking off the lamp next to the bed.
    They lay in the darkness together for a long while, the wood crackling in the fireplace, the flames casting weird shadows across the walls. Eventually, Jane’s voice whispered through the shadows.
    “We have the same problem.”
    And for a while Lauren couldn’t put together what Jane meant—not until she remembered what she had said the second Jane had stepped into the room.
    I’m in love.
    Except that Lauren had mostly been joking, and Jane was heartbreakingly sincere.
    “It’s interesting,” April said, pulling one of Sawyer’s old T-shirts over her head. “I expected them to be…I don’t know, more…” She hesitated, searching for the right words.
    “Like us?” Sawyer asked, sliding the can of Coke onto a side table.
    April shrugged her shoulders. Stepping over to the window, she parted the slats of the blinds to look outside—nothing but night.
    “I guess,” she said after a moment, tossing a look at him over her shoulder. He was throwing cushions onto the floor, their bed a foldout couch that would have her hunchbacked and sore by morning. She had been irked when Ryan had led them to the farthest room down the hall, away from everyone else, parking them in a room that was more a makeshift library than it was meant for guests, but she’d held her tongue. She hadn’t mentioned that it seemed like they were being quarantined from the rest of the group, doubting that if Sawyer had come alone he’d have been stationed so far from everyone else. Sawyer hadn’t mentioned their room assignment either, and April wondered if he simply hadn’t noticed or was keeping quiet like she was.
    “It just seems like something you would have told me,” she said, stepping across the room to grab the can of soda while Sawyer unfolded the bed, the stiff metal springs creaking in the quiet of the room. She cracked the can open and turned away from him, her gaze scanning the spines of hardback books squeezed tight onto a shelf. They were all classics—Austen and Brontë and Sir Walter Scott. Her fingers drifted across Stoker’s Dracula , one of the few she’d read. All those books made her feel small, uneducated, but they also made her inwardly grimace at how ostentatious they were. Not a trace of King and Koontz, of books people actually read and enjoyed.
    “Does it?” Sawyer asked, stepping away from the couch as if to assess his morning back pain. April frowned as she tugged down on the hem of her shirt, her bare legs growing cold.
    “Don’t get mad about it,” she said.