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She tosses the vibrator on her nightstand and discards the book, reaching for her phone as she slips under the blanket. I clean myself before grabbing my own phone.
You’re so beautiful when you come.
Next time, I’m going to make you scream my name.
Her pouty lips purse when she spots the notifications from me. When she reads the texts, she lets out a small gasp and leaps out of bed. “Bastard!”
She flies to the window, yanking it open despite the cool autumn air, sticks her head out, and shouts something I can’t decipher. Probably something about how I’m a psycho and need to leave before she calls the police.
After a few seconds, she pulls back in, unable to find me waiting in the darkness, and slams the window closed. Her thumbs punch at her phone screen.
You’re a creep. You need to leave me alone.
If you wanted me to leave you alone, you wouldn’t have moaned my name when you came.
She seethes as she types back now, flicking the light switch and plunging her room into darkness.
Fuck. Off.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BRIAR
Trevor gesturesme over to his car when I reach the campus parking lot before class.
“I can’t stay for long,” I huff, struggling to balance the mountain of binders and five-page short stories from my students. Dr. Barrett is supposed to be the one reading and grading stories, but he passed the workload off to me yesterday, so I was up until two a.m. slogging through pretentious literary fiction and swearing under my breath while I read Saint’s short story, by far the best in the class.
Bastard. He shouldn’t get good looksandtalent.
His writing almost reminds me of S.T. Nicholson’s, if my favorite author opted to write literary fiction in lieu of his pulse-pounding Gothic horror romances. Saint’s diction and long-winded sentences are reminiscent of S.T. Nicholson’s books but without the heart and soul that make S.T. Nicholson’s books so addictive and memorable.
Now that Saint knows S.T. Nicholson is my favorite author, he’s probably been studying his work so he can write like him. Some twisted, insane way of making me like him more.
I still can’t believe he was spying on me while I was using my vibrator. My cheeks flush at the memory. He heard me call out his name. I can’t think of a more mortifying moment in my life, and there have been plenty.
But when I ran to the window, I couldn’t find him. Maybe he’d left once I finished.
God. I’ve never had my privacy invaded like this before. He’s the most frustrating man on the planet. He constantly crosses boundaries without an ounce of remorse, but then he sends me every book on my wishlist and says things that make my toes curl. The dissonance is driving me nuts.
“No problem. I won’t keep you.” Trevor reaches into his car before slipping a sheet of paper on top of the stack in my hands and taking the entire stack from me.
“You don’t have to do that. I’ve got it.”
“I’m not letting you walk around campus carrying all this while I’m right beside you. It would make me look like a jackass.” He flashes his golden retriever smile.
I take the paper he pulled from his car, walking alongside him to campus. “So what is this?”
“Your stalker’s background check.”
My eyes nearly cross at all the tiny words across the page. Will the background check reveal the childhood that Saint recounted for me? A life with a mother who was forced to sell her body to provide for her child, only to lose her life at the hands of a violent man.
“Thank you,” I manage. “But can you give me, like, the quick summary version of this?”
“Sadly, there’s not much.” Trevor steps up onto the sidewalk, careful to balance the precarious stack in his hands. “We know where he was born, where he grew up, and where he went to boarding school. He was taken in by his grandparents at age twelve after his mother died, but they shipped him offto boarding school pretty much immediately. After that, the guy’s managed to keep a low profile. Definitely somebody with something to hide.”
“Where did he grow up before he went to boarding school?”
“We don’t really know where he and his mother lived most of the time. The grandparents claimed she was a dropout, a drug addict. They didn’t even know they had a grandson until they got the news their daughter was dead. They lived in some small town called Nicholson, New York.”
