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Zane
My name is Zane Culvert,and I have a secret. Well, two secrets, actually.
My first secret?
I know all of Anne Johnson’s secrets.
I know that her mother sent her to kindergarten a year early just to get her out of her hair while she fucked the johns that paid her rent.
I know that because of that, Anne was always the youngest and smallest one in her class and that she always felt left behind and mostly stuck to herself throughout grade school.
I know that she threw herself into her studies, graduated early, and started attending college at seventeen instead of eighteen, hence why she’s the youngest fully licensed elementary school teacher in the city.
I know that she’s really the face behind Charlotte Locke, the famed naughty romance novelist.
I know that despite her erotic writings, Anne is really a virgin.
Thank God for that. Really, it saves me a lot of time and aggravation. I don’t have a list of men to kill now. She really did the world a service by retaining her innocence.
I know that she still feels guilty about her mother’s death. It wasn’t her fault at all, but she feels like she should have done more, sat with her more in the hospital as the cancer at away at her body.
That’s natural guilt, I suppose. When someone you love dies, you’ll always feel like you didn’t do enough, like there was more you could have done—no matter how much you did.
That’s what I’ve heard anyway. I don’t know from firsthand experience seeing as how I’ve never cared for anyone enough to care when they died.
One of my many character flaws, I suppose. A lack of empathy, the psychologists had called it.
Makes me perfect for working the unsavory jobs I do on the streets, dealing with the dregs of society.
But the nature of my work isn’t my second secret.
No, my second secret?
My second secret is this: Anne Johnson is my obsession. I watch her every second of the motherfucking day.
I’ve been watching her for two years now. I suppose “stalking” is the technical term for what I’m doing, but I don’t like to call it that.
Stalking sounds so…devious, calculated.
And while I am those things—and frequently—that’s not the case when I watch Anne.
When I watch Anne, I feel.
I feel so many things. Despair, desire, lust, pain, anxiety, fear. I feel more than I’ve ever felt in my pitiful excuse for an existence.
She gives me a reason to exist. Watching her, protecting her, guarding her from afar. She is my purpose in this life.
Anne Johnson is my everything.
And she doesn’t even know it.
I’ve thought of approaching her many times. God knows how much I long to take her in my arms, hold her against me, run my fingers through her auburn hair and along her milky white skin just to see if she’s as soft as she looks.
I want to cherish her, see her smile, be the cause of her smile, feel her light shining down on me. Have her blue eyes peering up at me behind those tortoiseshell cat-eye glasses she wears.
I would die of happiness at just one look from her.
