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“All right,” she said, taking a step back from me and setting the bottle inside the dye box, “now we need to wait—” She checked the instructions. “—twenty minutes for it to set in. Then rinse until the water runs clear.”
I didn’t get up off the toilet. I sat there, my hands on my knees, waiting for the time to go by. Unfortunately, Charlie didn’t leave, either. She stood near the sink, her back leaning against the counter, though at least she didn’t stare at me.
Honestly, this whole thing still didn’t make sense. Why not go to the police? Why not tell someone else about her stalker? A serial killer happened to fall into her lap and her first thought was:Oh, I can use him like a dog to attack my enemies! Awesome!She wanted me to be her personal Pokémon.
Hmm. Although, now that I thought that, all that enthusiasm didn’t seem like her.
“I still don’t understand why you need me,” I muttered, causing her dark brown eyes to land on me. Prior to that, she’d been staring off into space, something she did often.
“The police don’t do shit half the time, and I don’t think my parents would even believe me. And I told you what I want you to do to him after we find out who he is.”
“Yeah, you want me to kill him. You are aware that normal girls don’t want serial killers to kill anyone for them, right?” Who was I to lecture her about normal? I think I’d proven to everybody that I was the farthest from normal I could possibly be. Being a serial killer tended to skew the data on that.
Charlie’s eyes fell to the tiled floor, and she got quiet. I didn’t know what she was thinking about, but her face wasn’t a happy one. I had the feeling it never was.
“You think you’ll feel better once your stalker’s dead?” I asked, leaning my back against the toilet and holding in a wince. My midsection was still sore. Any wrong moves and pain shot through me like a jolt of searing electricity. The pills dulled it, but it was still there, lingering. It’d be like that for a while. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to go toe-to-toe with her stalker until after I was healed up.
“I don’t know.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected to hear, and I blinked at her. “You don’t know?” I echoed. “If you don’t know, then why are you here? Why enlist my help if, at the least, you won’t feel better when it’s all said and done?”
“It’s not that easy for me. I’m not…” Charlie paused, biting her bottom lip in a nervous gesture. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her do it. “I don’t get happy.”
“You don’t get happy? What’s that mean? You’re depressed or something?” Honestly, I think I picked that much up already. She didn’t exactly hide it. The darkness in her eyes held a sadness that I’d instantly picked up on.
“No,” she said quickly, but then she added, “maybe in the past I was, but I’m not anymore. I’m just… I’m here. I’m alive. I’m still breathing. That’s all I am.”
“Right. And someone who wants to kill someone else—”
“I don’t want to kill someone else. I wantyouto kill someone,” she clarified.
“My point being that there’s still something there. You wouldn’t drag me into your life like this if you weren’t still holding on to something.”
Charlie was silent for a while, and those eyes of hers lifted off the floor. “Or maybe I just want to make sure he doesn’t get the satisfaction of haunting me like this. Maybe I just want the asshole to come up empty handed.”
I smiled. “Spiteful. I like it.”
Her mouth puckered in disgust. “Of course you do.”
She got quiet after that, and I didn’t feel like carrying on the conversation, so I sat there on the toilet, waiting for the time to pass, not saying another word. When it was time to rinse it out, I tried to kneel and lean over the tub so she could help me get the dye out—didn’t want to strip and hop in the shower; getting dye over the still-healing wound on my abdomen probably wasn’t smart.
But it was too much bending. I couldn’t do it. It hurt too fucking much. So, we settled for the sink. It still involved bending over, but I had more room to angle my body and keep it as straight as I could while still lowering my head to the small sink.
I bent over and held in a groan. My hands clasped on the edge of the counter, and Charlie started the water. A steady stream of cold as fuck water pelted the back of my head, brown dye instantly running into the sink and swirling around the drain. If I wasn’t injured, I would’ve hopped up the first second that ice-cold water hit my scalp. It wasn’t the best feeling in the world, like stepping on a Lego or getting a single sock wet. Or, hell, even getting stabbed.
Yeah, it was that bad.
“Fuck!” I hissed. “That’s ice fucking cold, Charlie.”
“Oh, sorry.” She reached over me to fiddle with the dial. It was an older fixture with only one lever, unlike most these days where hot and cold each had their own. “Is that better?”
“Not. Really.” I spoke that through bared teeth, my scalp all tingly for the wrong reasons. Cold water was absolutely miserable. I think I’d just learned about a new way to torture people: pelt their heads with ice cold water for a minute or more, and it’d be sure to break their spirit.
“I’m trying to—”
“Just get the fucking dye out,” I growled. The sooner my hair was washed out, the quicker we could be done with this shit. And trust me when I say: it was shit. Awful shit. Literally the stuff nightmares were made of.
Charlie’s hands touched my scalp, and her fingers worked to help the water rinse it out. She ran her hands back and forth, massaging my head. If the water wasn’t so goddamned cold, it might’ve felt nice—not that I’d ever admit that out loud.
