Quirks & Kinks by Laurel Ulen Curtis Read Free Book Online Page B

apartment. “What do you want to do now?”
    “Sleep,” I said simply. “I’m going to go to sleep.”
    Tomorrow would be another long day with Ryder.
    “I’m going to expect my itinerary under my door by six AM.”
    “Ha!” she laughed. “Let me know how that goes.”
    Great. Tomorrow would be another mysteriously long day with Ryder. I couldn’t wait.

    “I’m having the hardest time with the one with the beady eyes,” I told Ashley during our brief break from shooting.
    Anytime Howie called “cut” I added the words “and run” and got as far away from my co-star as possible. He’d already touched me several times today, and with the show we were shooting, there wasn’t even a pretense of necessity to hide behind.
    “Not the one that looks like it’s watching you constantly?”
    “Shit!” I panicked. “Which one is that?”
    I hadn’t noticed one that followed my every move. They were coming at me from every angle!
    “The one in the corner, by the one in with the buck teeth.”
    “Cripes. I hope this isn’t their actual collection.”
    “It’s not,” Ashley said, making me feel at least a little better about the situation. “Their kids are in school.”
    “Oh.” Teased with an inkling of comfort, only to have it ripped savagely away.
    “Yeah.”
    Today’s show featured more of a quirk than a kink, and for that, I was thankful. But it was outside of my usual realm of normal, and if I was honest, it was creeping me out even worse than the clowns.
    Frank and Lisa Hendross were a seemingly normal middle-aged couple. They’d been married going on twenty years, and the sight of them together was heartwarming. Very obviously in love, they actually looked at one another when speaking and touched more than necessary.
    It was the kind of thing you rarely saw in today’s world of smartphones and stupid social media.
    But they hadn’t been able to conceive children, something that devastated Lisa. Frank’s melancholy bloomed as a consequence of hers, and that led them to their circumstances today.
    Proud owners of one of the most extensive doll collections in the country, each of which they treated as though it was an actual living and breathing child.
    First confronted with the story line, I’d cringed. But when I saw the sadness in Lisa’s eyes—the truth behind the madness—and Frank’s willingness to do anything to stop it, I’d shed a few tears of my own.
    In the privacy of my dressing room with no one around to hear, of course.
    But I’d held onto that frame of mind, Frank and Lisa’s sadness haunting my every move until I’d arrived on set and seen the first doll.
    Beady-eye McGee. That’s what I’d named him.
    “Come on, guys,” Howie called. “Time to go again.”
    “Good luck,” Ashley said, sending me off with a wink.
    Evil. She was pure evil.
    Enemies starting to outnumber me, I did my best to avoid two freaky dolls and one freaky man, but I only had so many eyes for watching my back.
    Figuring the dolls were more dangerous than the man, I turned my back to Ryder as Howie called us to action.
    Sadness clung to my chest as I combed the strawberry blond hair of a doll named Belinda and wished for a life within her that would never be.
    Something about this show caused a twinge of longing, the idea that I too had no prospects for having children whispering softly at the back of my mind.
    I pushed it away, focusing on the task as Ryder recited his line at my back.
    “Did Belinda have her breakfast this morning?”
    “No. She wasn’t hungry. I hope she’s not coming down with something,” I answered, resisting the urge to mention that she probably wasn’t eating because she couldn’t.
    Leaning in closer, Ryder’s back brushed mine.
    I stiffened slightly, but relaxed quickly, telling myself I had to get over the aversion to our tight proximity. It was bound to continue for the entirety of the show, and the sooner I could school myself to accept it, the better off