"You know you look kind of familiar."

Lydia sat cross-legged on the floor of the parlor, peering over the top of an old newspaper at Tate, standing on a stack of milk crates. He had found them shoved in the corner of a shed in the backyard, another item left behind by residents who never made it out of the house alive. The realtor had come in a few days earlier with two men and had them cover the vivid, violent murals with deep red wallpaper. He was peeling it away. "Just to freak them out a bit", he'd said with a laugh.

"Do you really think that's a great idea?" She'd asked him before he began his project. "I mean what if they put this place on watch and start creeping around…find us here."

"Are you kidding me?" He scoffed, stacking the crates. "After all the shit that's gone down in this house, peeled wallpaper isn't going to warrant a SWAT team."

She wouldn't have noticed it then, but looking back on it she might have taken care to pay a little more attention to his seemingly indifferent demeanor. Eyes cast downwards, he shook his head and tried to push the hails of bullets raining on him from the SWAT teams rifles from his mind. Now was not the time to start getting sentimental. He already had enough at stake.

"You gonna pull my own lame line on me now?" He looked at her over his shoulder, moving slowly to avoid crashing to the ground. He reached up and started scraping his nail at the corner of another sheet of wallpaper.

"What lame line?" She lowered the newspaper, interested in what it was he could be referring to.

"Oh you know…so familiar yet so far away…that whole star bullshit…" He pulled at the uprooted sheet and managed to rip off at least half of it. However, it seemed his crates only gave him enough height to reveal the bottom halves of the paintings.

"Was that really just some bullshit line?"

He jumped down, realizing his efforts were going to be futile and balled up the sticky red paper in his hands, moving closer towards her. "Well it worked didn't it?"

"You can think that if you'd like."

Lydia wasn't about to lose the game that she was now very aware of. She shared a secret smile with herself, hiding it with her newspaper, feigning absorption so he wouldn't notice her own insecurity that maybe he had just been trying to make a move on her when he approached her that night.

He stood in front of her, looking down at the top of her head. "Oh, so you're not sitting here in front of me right now?"

She laughed and shook her head. "Oh admit it." He threw his head back and moved to sit down next to her. He mimicked her position and leaned his face in close to her. "You just couldn't resist my wit and charm."

Now it was her turn to laugh. "Well if I'm resisting anything, it certainly isn't that."

"Oh yeah? What is it then?"

"The real world." She turned the large page in an attempt to keep up her ruse of reading. She wasn't fooling him and she knew it, but it was too much fun keeping up with the pageantry of it all. After all, that's all they were doing anyway; putting on a show for one another, curious to see who would give in to their temptations first.

He smiled. "This is definitely the place to get away from that. Where'd you find that anyway?"

"Attic." She leaned back onto her elbows and kept it upright in her interlocked legs.

Tate paused. "You went up in the attic?"

"Are you shitting me? An old haunted house with a history of murder and suicide? Fuck yeah I went up in the attic. I'm gonna find out what really went down here too since you've offered me next to nothing on that."

"You never asked."

"Like you'd tell me anyway."

She continued to gaze over the old print. His eyes darted to the top of the page to get a glimpse at the date. 1968. The year the sorority girls got murdered. So maybe she was finding out more about the house, but Tate was still free of suspicion.

With that concern out of the way, he considered his options carefully when pressing her about what she may have found in the attic.

"Franklin murders. Nice." He nodded, referring to the large black and white photo accompanying the article. A girl, no older than eighteen, hog-tied, blood spattering her otherwise stark white nurses uniform, lay dead on the couch that used to sit in this very room.

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

He shrugged. "This place is kind of a local legend. I used to have this thing with serial killers and my curiosity couldn't really avoid its prominence. That's like the least fucked up thing that's happened here."

"You don't think two girls getting butchered here counts as fucked up?"

"They weren't butchered. One was stabbed in the back, the other drowned in the tub. Besides, Franklin was a wannabe anyway. Manson was already reigning Helter Skelter on LA by the time he got his shit together."

"Bullshit, Manson was a year later."

"What?"

"Manson was '69, dude. He barely had the family moved out to the desert by the time all this shit happened."

He wasn't impressed with her basic knowledge of the most prolific serial killer of all time. In fact the only reason he didn't know this was because he found Charles Manson to be overrated. The guy didn't even kill anyone. The girls did, he just got all the credit.

What did catch him, however, was her dismissal of his questionable interest.

On the rare occasion that Tate spoke to a girl, her usual reaction to this normally resulted in complete termination of their contact. But not Lydia. She countered his knowledge of serial killers with facts of her own rather than shuddering and writing him off as someone who belonged in an institution.

He could relate to her. He'd never been able to establish that kind of connection with another human being, let alone someone as enticing as her.

She was winning.

At least this round.

"So what else did you find up in attic?" He asked, trying to attain some semblance of detachment from the statement. This could make or break things.

Thankfully, she was too caught up in uncovering prior mysteries to be bothered with notions of what could be lurking in the upper levels of the house.

"Nothing really. Just some old photos and newspapers and junk." Relief released itself from him in waves at her careless dismissal. The spirits of this house wouldn't cling to her the way they did to the other residents. There wasn't enough time and she was simply a temporary abstract.

At least he hoped.

"Oh! And this crazy BDSM suit? It was just hanging there! Scared the fucking piss out of me." She looked over at him, wide eyed with bemusement but Tate's internal panic could reflect anything but that, anticipating yet another challenge to overcome in an already watered down version of his life.

"I mean you've been up there right? You had to have seen it." She continued on, neglecting to notice the urgency of her finding.

"Yeah, I've seen it." The admission seemed so tense. He remembered seeing it for the first time, clinging embarrassingly tight around someone else's body, the man who's relationship was suffering at his own hands.

No, the suit fitted him much better.

He remembered the first time he put it on, clean, dark and tight. Agile; quiet, even. In that suit, he felt a familiarity with his true self, the darkness that dwelled in the farthest reaches of his mind, unrelenting in their assaults on the barriers he tried to construct around them and push them away, manifesting. In that suit it could walk freely, explore the urges he had so longed to give in to. It raged and lived and breathed now, pulsing and bulging in muscle and sinew against the latex as he pulled the knife from the man's stomach and plunged it once again into his neck, the blood spattering beautifully across the hardwood floor. And before the other had time to react, his neck hung broken in a barrel.

He shrugged. "Scared me the first time I saw it too. Probably belonged to the gay couple that lived here before."

"A likely story." She cocked an eyebrow and grinned wide, and if it weren't for her expression, his heart may have dropped. "I bet it's yours. Kinda sexy."

"Oh yeah?" He thought of Chad's skin as he ripped it open, splaying in clean cuts as the blood spilled over in dark floods.

The thrill alone was enough to get him off. Not that he found any kind of sexual arousal from it; this was a much different kind. Savage and primal, screaming for release and finally it happened. It was heavy; freeing, as if a lifetime of pain and sorrow and anger was wrought upon the man. And with the rubber mask pulled tightly over his blonde curls, Tate somehow felt his true face reveal itself.

And she thought that was kinda sexy.

"Yeah." Her impish grin remained, though darkened now as she threw a long left leg across his waist and pulled herself up, straddling him, torsos pressed together. "I bet you love it. All wrapped up, just a shadow." Her voice was low and her breath was hot on his neck. "Lethal." She draped her arms over his shoulders, barely grazing the small of his back, fingering the hem of his sweater. "Preternatural." He conceded, almost as a question urging her to continue, translating some sort of recognition as he felt himself stiffen. He ran his hands up her thighs, hungry and desperate. Her hair fell on either side of his face, tickling his cheeks and neck. Her eyes slowly fell down the length of his profile, foreheads almost touching, finding reason to linger a glance on his lips and come back to contact. She was hot against him, looking into his eyes, seeing more than their vibrant blue, but the chaos clambering out of dark pupils, clawing and screaming, some sick compulsion that didn't belong there in the first place. She rocked her hips up against his and his breath hitched before she opened her mouth, letting the word hit him and slowly seep in. "Caustic."

"We're gonna need a fucking thesaurus." He said dazedly, transfixed on her stare that stood for their mutual intellect, almost begging her to go on and engage him and feel him and relate and move and breathe.

She rolled off of him laughing, on her back to the floor beside him. He watched her, not entirely realizing she had detached from him until she had already stood up again. "Well Tate, that was fun." It was almost condescending when she smiled down on him, as if entertaining his notions were a game for her.

But that was just it.

Somehow he'd slipped, forgotten the rules and let her come too close, allowed a glimpse into what was really dwelling at the core of his timid exterior.

Or was it more? Was she pushing him for release, expressing her own vulnerabilities and truths? He didn't know and by the time he'd thought to ask, she was already walking away, a certain sway in her saunter.

"Hey was that a come on?" He shouted, still on the floor.

"Ha!" She barked and turned to go up the stairs. "Why don't you try and find out?"

He had a score to settle.