One night, there was a woman just like you. Beautiful, and shy, and I just had to have her. So I watched her through the holes in room four. She touched herself, and she read a book, and she watched TV, and she was so human, so perfectly human, that I knew I had to kill her.
That first kill was the hardest. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I learned so much. What I liked, and what I didn’t. What was easiest, and what was more difficult. What I wanted to try, and what would soon become the only thing that would actually get me off.
After I got rid of her, I came home, and I painted my first landscape. I’d never had the talent or patience for painting before, but for some reason, memorializing her resting place was the neat bow wrapping everything up.
When I finished, I hung it on the wall in room four, right above the bed. People would look at the painting but never give it a second thought. Most probably thought it was some generic motel art I bought in a set online.
But it was totally one-of-a-kind.
An Aaron original.
I pressed my cheek against the wood, now smoothed from years of soaking in the oils from my skin, and watched you from that secret hole in the wall. Room four had the most holes, so I usually put my favorite guests in here. Not every guest who stayed in this room died. Sometimes they were more fun just to watch, to drug and play with, to look in their sunken, tired eyes the next morning at check-out and pretend like everything was normal.
I thought about doing that with you.
Spending the night playing with you and pretending like I didn’t know every inch of your body intimately. But there was something about you…something I didn’t fully understand that was made for my blade.
You sat on the bed, typing on your laptop, the screen illuminating your face. You stayed like that for a while; your shoulders rounded in, hunched over your keyboard, typing something I was desperate to read. Eventually though, you lifted your arms above your head and stretched. Your vertebraepopped with the movement, and I knew you’d die for a massage right then.
You unfurled yourself from the bed and stood. Sometime in the last hour you’d lost your shoes, your shirt, and had taken your hair out of the braid. You ran your fingers through your hair, sighing softly as you gently tugged the tangles from it.
You stared at all the paintings on the walls. I knew ten paintings for a room this small was too many, but I wanted people in room four to see where the guests before them now rested. I wanted them to wonder if that place was peaceful, if they’d like to visit there.
I wondered if you liked what you saw. If you had a favorite.
You ran your fingers over the canvas of one, feeling the ridges from each brush stroke. I knew what they felt like, too. I’d done the same thing more times than I could count, remembering the sounds of the trees, or the waterfall, or the noises those people made right before they took their final breath.
We were so alike, you and I, looking at the world with the same-colored glasses. Somehow, I knew you liked the painting, that you thought the artist was talented. I knew you felt like this because no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t stop staring. You dissected every inch of every piece, and I knew you were appreciating my art. I took your unspoken praise and proudly wore it like a badge across my heart.
You looked at each piece of furniture as if you’d never seen a chair, or a bed, or a desk before. You savored the feel of the different textures—maybe that was your artist brain, like mine, taking stock of your surroundings. Maybe you were trying to figure out how you could possibly put these very real, very physical things into words. How could you accurately describe what it was like to be in that room that night? But now that I’ve read your work, I know that wasn’t what you were doing.
Not entirely.
You slipped out of your clothes, leaving you in just your bra and panties. They didn’t match. Your bra was black, and your panties were light pink with little white hearts all over them. Knowing you wore something imperfect made me bristle. But maybe that was part of your charm. You weren’t putting on a show. You didn’t need to. Still…my aunt had always said you should always match your lingerie—you never know who will see it.
You went into the bathroom, feet dragging along the worn wooden slats, and I followed you there, peeking through another hole. You undressed the rest of the way and stared at yourself in the mirror.
I didn’t think it was from vanity, though. You weren’t eye-fucking yourself the way so many others seemed to. Even as you glided your hands over your body, it was like you were looking at yourself from a different set of eyes.
Like you were looking at yourself frommyeyes.
Was that what you were thinking about, little doe? Were you thinking of the way my hands would feel on your body? Did you think about the roughness of my fingertips inside your tight cunt? The brutal rhythm I would set for us with each of my thrusts?
Something about the way you cupped your breast told me you liked what I did—rough. Hot.
Unholy.
Is that what you were, Lily? Is that what you’d always been? Even if you looked at yourself through my eyes, your touch was familiar. You’d touched yourself so many times before you knew exactly what you liked, what made you moan, what made you writhe against your own palm.
You were dirty.
A whore.
A filthy fucking bitch taking cocks in every hole. Allowing them to stretch you out until the next man—untilI—couldn’t feel a thing because you were so fucking used up.
A breath filled my lungs. I’m sorry, little doe. You know how I get sometimes…
You got into the shower, your movements slow and languid, and I watched as you bathed yourself. Soap foamed over the planes of your body as you cupped and squeezed your breasts, like you knew I was watching and wanted to put on a show for me.
