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“Can we just talk about it, Nes?”
Cassian pulled his hand back from where he was about to touch Nesta’s shoulder as she whipped around, gray-blue eyes blazing with a fury that hadn’t been directed at him in a while. Not that he didn’t deserve it this time. Still…he hadn’t meant for it to wind up like this. He rubbed the back of his neck and grinned instead. “So that’s a no.”
Nesta’s mouth twisted into wrathful scowl. She turned and started marching again, following a long path through the hollow, dry corn stalks. It looked just like all the other ones they had walked down. The withered leaves whispered as the wind blew.
There was a rustle sound nearby. He couldn’t see what made the noise. There was only corn, endless rows of it, and no one else in sight. The stalks rippled and moved.
Something softly cracked.
Cassian rushed to catch up with Nesta. “I’m sure we’re close to the exit.”
“Stop. Opening. Your mouth.”
Biting down on a fun suggestion about what they could do with their mouths instead if she didn’t want to talk, Cassian put his hands behind his head, threading his fingers together as he walked beside his extremely pissed off fiancée. He didn’t want to make her even angrier right now. Overhead, the clouds were turning orange and golden, but in the maze it was getting dark.
Shadows, deepening as the sun set, were stretching out into the field and across the identical paths.
It had started out as an awesome day. He and Nesta had gone out with a bunch of their friends, most of them members of the wedding party, to a local farm that did Fall/harvest time stuff. There had been apple cider (hard and not), huge pumpkins to choose from (he had bought two for carving later), and cutouts for you to stick your head in. He had forced Azriel and convinced Rhys to do that with him since Nesta wouldn’t.
The maze had been on their to-do list. It was massive, stretching across a few different corn fields, and it was supposed to be one of the hardest to get though in the state. Gwyn and Azriel had instantly wanted to go in, giving each other the “I Will Beat You So Bad You Cry” looks. Feyre, too, was interested, which meant Rhys, who was secretly enamored with Nesta’s sister, wanted to go too and he gotten himself paired with her when they picked teams (because Emerie said they had to have teams so no one got completely lost all alone).
Cassian thought that maybe Nesta would prefer to be alone right now, even if they were terribly lost.
She probably thought she would be less lost if she was on her own instead of with him and maybe she was right. Because he was the one who had left the super bright emergency flashlight and the help-me flag back at the starting line. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. They didn’t need those. The flashlight and the flag were basically cheating.
But now, after an hour and a half of wandering and sun sinking lower by the second, he didn’t think he would hate cheating so much.
“Who do you think already made it out?” he asked, wanting to at least talk.
Maybe if they talked, someone would hear them. At night, the corn maze became a “haunted” corn maze. At least a worker might find them then, but if the worker was dressed like a clown or something, it wasn’t going to be Cassian’s fault if he got startled, took a swing, and accidentally broke the person’s nose. Just saying. He’d feel bad about it.
“Everyone,” Nesta said, each word rimed with ice.
“Naaah,” Cassian said, “No way we’re last. We’re like…next to last, you’ll see. Rhys and Feyre will fight so much we might never see them again.”
Nesta was silent. Rage emanated from her in waves. It was like getting repeatedly smacked. Her shoulders were so tight he was afraid she was going to pull a muscle.
They kept walking, Nesta leading, unlike earlier. He had so sure that he knew exactly where to go. Take right turns. But then there had been a three-way split and then a four-way intersection, and he had sort of kept taking rights even when Nesta suggested going a different way, certain that it was going to work out, and yeah… He had just wanted to show her that he could get them through a corn maze. But all he had proven was that he could get them really lost without any hope of getting an easy rescue.
Not only that, but they didn’t have signal on their cell phones. It was why the corn maze sent you out with the flag and the flashlight.
Damn.
“Hey, Nes?”
More silence.
Cassian frowned. “Can you yell at me? Get it over with?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you want me to yell at you, and I’m not doing a damn thing you want right now,” Nesta snarled. She walked like she was imagining herself stomping on his toes with each step.
“Okay, then don’t yell at me. But I don’t want you to be mad at me forever, so we’ve gotta talk eventually.”
Nesta swung back around, fists balled at her sides. “Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you left the flag and the flashlight at the start of the maze!”
“I said I was sorry,” Cassian said, flinging his arms up, “Twice!”
“Did your saying sorry magically make the flag appear? What about the flashlight? Because we’re going to need the flashlight soon just to see.”
Cassian grabbed his phone out of his pocket. “We’ve still got these.”
Nesta narrowed her eyes at him. “Great, so we can drain the batteries?”
“They don’t work here anyways. What do you want me to do?” Cassian asked, exasperated. He couldn’t do anything besides apologize, and he had done that. He couldn’t help his teasing grin. “Get on my knees and beg? Do more than beg?”
Wrong thing to say.
Nesta made a frustrated, aggravated sound and started stomping away again, rigid and now Super Pissed. She flung up a middle finger at him.
The corn stalks nearby waved in the wind. One brushed his arm. Cassian bolted after her.
“Nesta! Can we at least come up with a plan?”
“What happened to right turns only?”
Cassian winced. “That might not have been the best idea…”
“So you want my opinion now?” Nesta didn’t look back at him. “Ooo, I feel so special and respected, almost like your equal.”
“I’m sorry—”
“You’re saying sorry a lot now that we’re so fucking lost we might have to join the Children of the Corn to survive.”
Cassian grimaced. “It’s not that bad.”
“How?!” Nesta demanded, “How is it not that bad, please tell me, explain.”
“Let’s walk right through the corn,” he said, getting annoyed as he shoved through some of the stalks.
Nesta grabbed his arm. “You can’t just do that, we have to figure out which direction the entrance is! The maze is over a hundred acres!”
“I don’t want to sleep here!”
“Then you shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t say it again, sweetheart, I can only tell you I’m sorry so many times,” Cassian said, pushing through the corn.
“Fine.” She let go of his hoodie.
The dry stalks scratched at his hands as he held them up, keeping the corn out of his face. He didn’t like this. It was worse than being in the maze corridors. There were dead plants all around him and under his feet. They were pressing in on him. When he made it to the other side, he turned to look at Nesta.
Except she wasn’t there.
He couldn’t see her through the small gaps in the dry stalks. Why hadn’t she come with him?
“Nes?” he called. “Come on, Nesta. Not funny.”
She didn’t follow him through the stalks.
“Nesta!”
Growling, Cassian shoved his way back through the stalks to the path he had come from. But Nesta wasn’t there either. The hair on the back of his arms began to rise. Had he gotten turned around? Dusk had fully fallen and now the cornstalks were all blending together and the shifts in the path were hard to see. Cassian turned one way and then the other.
He couldn’t see Nesta anywhere.
“Nesta!” he called again. Even if she couldn’t see him, she would be able to hear him, right? He started jogging down the path and then stopped. He didn’t know if he was going the wrong way. And what if the haunted corn maze workers showed up? Cassian spun back the way he had come from, half expecting a life-sized creepy doll to be standing there.
Instead there was an empty pathway.
Cassian took a deep breath. Okay, she was really mad at him.
He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight, shining it into the cornstalks.
Cassian was not a scary movie kind of guy. He felt like he was stuck in one right now. If something popped out at him, he was going to destroy it and also have a heart attack at the same time.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek as he walked back through the stalks, jerking his phone each time he thought he heard a noise.
The silence was dull, the cornstalks acting as a sound dampener. He shivered. He would very much like to have a damn flashlight right about now.
“Nesta?” he called, hoping she would at least answer him.
“What?”
Yelling, Cassian whirled around, bringing up arm at the last moment so it went over Nesta’s head. He stumbled back into the stalks and sat down hard. Nesta crouched down in front of him. Her phone’s light flashed as she took a picture of him, wide-eyed, breathing hard.
Her grin was ferocious and triumphant. “Maybe you should apologize one more time for the whole flag and flashlight incident.”
He grabbed her and pulled her down into the corn with him, trying to get the phone from her so he could delete the pictures and possible video. She kept the phone out of reach the best she could. Cassian kissed her, partly as a distraction tactic and partly because she looked hot when she was victorious but still angry. Nesta dropped her phone on the path behind her and shoved him back into the corn, deepening the kiss.
By the time the haunted corn maze workers found them, Nesta had bits of corn husks sticking to her clothes and Cassian was sporting corn silk in his hair. Their friends gave them hell when they were driven back to the entrance to the maze, dirty, tired, and content.