“Yeah! Like, if something’s in a pile on the floor or there’s some hole in the ceiling. If we can pin down the noise, we’ll know we’re safe,” Tyler reasoned.
Even though he couldn’t see it, Zoe shrugged in agreement. Nami followed the other two, breathing in more deeply than she usually did. All three of them were.
Before long, the three had resorted to looking at different stores again, seemingly temporarily forgetting their goal of looking for the sound;s origin. It was fun playing “guess which store this used to be” without the benefit of seeing the products on display. Over time they’d learn the telltale signs of what store was what – tech stores had the remains of extra security measures, clothing stores had more shelving setups, etc.
Tyler and Nami turned away from their latest store to go look at another, but Tyler stopped in his tracks. Zoe was very good at keeping up her own pace with the others – she never fell behind. If she wasn’t with them, it was because she was blazing her own trail. Slowly, Tyler turned back to see the back of Zoe’s head, seemingly fixated on a wall.
“D’you want to stay in this store a bit longer or something?” Tyler asked her.
“Sorry,” Zoe mumbled, not even making an effort to turn back around. “I’m just feeling light-headed. Give me a sec.”
“Are you okay?” Nami asked. Immediately after, she realized maybe Zoe was feeling the same way she was. “What are you feeling?”
“I’ll be fine, guys,” Zoe half-chuckled. “Don’t fall over yourselves. Just need to clear my head a bit.” She turned around, a light sheen apparent on her face. She gave a small, polite smile, which was reserved for Zoe’s normal meaningful-smile-or-no-smile-at-all face. “All good.”
It was hard for Nami to see Tyler’s reaction to Zoe’s out-of-character break, since she was ahead of them both. Nami turned around at the same time as Tyler did, and the three resumed their trek throughout the rest of the mall.
“We’re just about near the end,” Zoe observed in a slightly higher-pitched voice than usual. “This mall only had one floor, right?”
“Yeah, one floor. Three ends though,” Tyler replied. “We came in through the west end and travelled south. There’s also a north end, if we wanted to go full balls-to-the-wall with it. This end used to be a bunch of clothes stores.”
Nami shivered. She remembered coming here before. There was an Old Navy or Hollister or something like that around here. Her old crush Jeremy would hang out here a lot, and she went to the mall a silly amount of times pretending she wanted to buy something but secretly hoping he would be here. He liked to browse, and maybe buy a few things on a whim – he seemed like the privileged rich kid type, but she liked that cocky arrogance he had in that way.
Most importantly, he bought his cologne around here. If she closed her eyes, Nami could swear she could smell his old cologne from memory. Either that or there was somehow some remnant of it in the mall. Maybe Tyler was wearing it…? No, Tyler was the ‘natural musk’ type. She was just imagining it… or imagining Jeremy. Fantasizing about him. He was the very embodiment of sexy. He was what every teenage girl wanted. What they craved.
Nami didn’t come back to reality with a start or a gasp or anything clicheed. Over time she realized she couldn’t afford to let her ‘daydreams’ get the best of her – and not in a place like this. Tyler and Zoe teased her enough for being boy-crazy as it was, and she didn’t want a reputation for being too hormonal or anything like that. She did note that she let her thoughts get the better of her – she rubbed her thighs together and realized with a deep blush that, given her ‘fluids issue,’ she may have needed a change when she got home.
One thing struck her as odd – she was daydreaming for a decently long time. She would have thought that the others would have snapped her out of her daydream, but they were actually not too far away themselves, looking at the entrance of some clothes store. She cleared her throat and joined them.
“So what are we doing? North end?” she asked.
Tyler looked around and shrugged. “I guess so. Maybe the sound did come from the north end. Maybe I was-”
He paused and instinctively held a finger up. The two girls stood there, motionless, looking at him. With the same finger, he motioned for the three to gather in the clothes store, then tiptoed in there, hiding behind the doorway’s wall. The other two tiptoed in behind them.
“Flashlights off,” he ordered.
Zoe was unmoved. “Are you s-”
“Flashlights off,” he repeated emphatically.
Zoe sighed and turned hers off, with Nami following suit. The three stood in the darkness for a few seconds, the sounds of their breathing the only things to keep themselves company, for a long while. Nami could hear Zoe breathing in to pipe up about what made Tyler do this when her answer came prematurely.
At first, the sounds weren’t pronounced. It sounded like shifting. It was unclear where the sounds were coming from, but it was definitely coming from somewhere down the hallway. Nowhere close, and yet, not too far away, especially comparing to the clang they first heard.
For the longest time, it was unclear what the sounds were coming from, with the sounds evolving from some sort of shifting movement – cloth rustling? Couldn’t have been anything that quiet – to something else. Some sound that was vaguely familiar to the three, but definitely out of their range of believability.
All three denied what the sound sounded like until it became painfully obvious with an echoey, guttural moan. A female moan. A needy, throaty, female moan.
“No fucking way,” Zoe whispered in disbelief. The three started laughing in that quiet way you laugh when you don’t want to get caught. Tyler turned his light on again but covered it with his hand, so the three could face each other.
“She’s masturbating?” he mouthed to his friends in disbelief.
Zoe nodded, still laughing. “I guess whoever’s living here thought she could get a little privacy,” she chuckled.
Nami couldn’t help but laugh too. “This is crazy,” she giggled. “She’s being, like, so loud too.”
“I almost feel bad,” Tyler laughed. “Okay, so the hobo who lives here is-”
The sound of Zoe elbowing Tyler in his hefty gut cut him off. “Homeless person, bozo.”
“Ow… the homeless person who lives here is just flicking the bean and…” He waited for the latest in a series of sexual moans to fill the air. “…howling like a banshee?”
“I guess so,” Zoe concluded. “So, I for one want to get out of here. I feel weird listening to it, I’m sure she doesn’t want an audience, and if she’s… doing this, she’s not exactly in a position to chase us down and kill us.”
“Maybe we should have just you use your flashlight, Tyler,” Nami suggested quietly, thanking the heavens that it was too dark for the other two to see how deeply she was blushing. “Keep covering it with your hand too. I think it’ll give us just enough light to see where to go, but not enough to…”
“I got it, thanks,” Tyler replied impatiently. “Follow me. Don’t speak unless you have to.”