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I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how to save her.
“Samantha,” I whisper, the heavy weight of guilt and fear shattering my heart in my chest.
Cole slaps the shit out of me, his palm sending my face flying sideways as the smack echoes in the hallway. “No time for that right now. Pull it together, man. Tell us about Stephen. Why would he do this? Where would he go? Think.”
I fucking needed that.
Refocused, my brain starts spinning. “He’s a nice guy, one of the actual nice guys... I thought...”
* * *
Samantha
“Wakey-wakey,” a voice says from far away.
My head throbs, and I wonder how long I’ve been asleep. It’s kinda like one of those naps where you mean to sleep for twenty minutes but wake up the next day not knowing what year it is.
But this feels worse than that, and my bed feels hard as a rock, making my whole body sore as I try to sit up a bit.
I blink, trying to force my eyes open, but it’s like they won’t respond.
SMACK!
Something slaps across my face hard, popping me in the cheek right below my left eye. “Ungh!” I groan at the sharp flash of pain. That cut me, I’m certain. But it does help me get my eyes to flutter open a bit.
“There you are,” a blurry figure says.
The voice is familiar, but somehow not.
“What... what’s going on?” I mumble.
Now that I’ve pried my eyes open, I can see around me if I concentrate hard enough, but it hurts my head. Still, I force my gaze to zero in on things one at a time.
I’m in a room that looks... unfinished? Around me is raw drywall, beneath me is concrete subfloor, and there are tools and dust everywhere. There’s a work light shining creepily at the ceiling, throwing shadows everywhere. The place doesn’t look familiar at all.
But the face of the man kneeling in front of me does.
“Stephen?” I say in confusion. “Something’s wrong. My head—”
“Yeah, you hit it pretty hard when you fell.”
His voice is flat and emotionless, but for a split second, I think he’s here to help me. I don’t remember what happened or how I got here, but Stephen will help.
And then it comes back to me...
He was talking about a girl he likes being blind to what’s right in front of her, choosing to go after the asshole who treats her like shit instead of the good guy she could have. It was an all-too-familiar story, and I’d been sympathetic at first. But he kept calling her names, his language beyond the pale for anyone, but especially out of character for him.
I called him on it, saying that her not seeing him doesn’t make her a bitch.
Stephen had stood up, pacing the room angrily and saying I still didn’t understand. He’d said an acronym I hadn’t known...
What was it?
AWALT. I asked him what it meant.All women are like that, he said with a heavy sigh.
And then... darkness.
I don’t know what he did, but I realize that he did this to me. The throbbing headache, the dirty location, the bruise I can feel blooming on my cheek.
