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Once he had a mug in his hand, he took the tiniest step back and repeated, “I must’ve missed that lecture.” And then he finally gave me my personal space back, moving to the Keurig and using my K-cup for himself.
It took me a while to realize that’s what he was doing, and once I was no longer flushed from the whole way too close thing, I said, “Hey! That was for me!”
He smirked at me. “I thought we were sharing everything now?”
Sharing everything, huh? Yeah, I didn’t think so. There were some things I never wanted to tell Brett. Ironically, those things were the same things I never wanted to share with anyone.
Chapter Eight – Brett
Charlie went to class shortly after that. Honestly, it was probably a good thing she’d be gone for a few hours. I didn’t know what had gotten into me this morning. Getting so close to her… practically flirting. The girl wasn’t my type, and besides that, she was way too young for me. I was here to help her deal with her stalker problem, and that’s it. Nothing else. After her stalker was out of the equation, I’d be gone, and this whole thing would be nothing but a distant memory for us both.
That was the plan, and I was sticking to it.
I charged my phone and watched some TV. It was nice, sitting on a real couch and watching something that wasn’t forty-plus years old. Her parents actually had cable. I didn’t know who the hell paid for cable these days, but I wasn’t going to complain.
What I should do was get myself on a different sleeping schedule; if she wanted me awake at night, watching the house and her room to make sure her stalker didn’t show up again, I’d have to be awake at night and sleep during the day.
Ah, that could be a problem for future me. It’d be easier to stay up all day and tonight and then crash in the morning when the sun came up instead of trying to sleep right now. Deprive myself of sleep so it came easier to me later. That made sense, didn’t it?
I watched TV for an hour, but then I got bored. I decided to get up and wander the house, with nowhere in particular as my destination. Eventually, I found myself in Charlie’s room, taking it all in again.
There really wasn’t much personality to the room. Nothing hanging on the walls, not even a tiny TV. It was a boring room, frankly, and it made it look like there was nothing to Charlie.
I meandered to her closet, yanking the door open and peeking inside. The closet was rather small, a single door with about two feet of space behind it. A few clothes were hung up, mostly shirts, though I did see some fancy dresses that I recognized from pictures on her profile. The dresses she’d worn to her high school dances.
Slowly, I sank to my knees and pulled out a small plastic tub that rested on the floor of the closet. I popped open the lid and lazily searched the contents. As much as I didn’t care to know more about Charlie, at the same time, I was curious. I mean, she’d hit me with her car and was going to leave me there to die—that was cold. It was one thing to run away in fear, but that night, it had looked like Charlie had made the decision herself, no fear involved.
And to do something like that, there had to be more to her. There had to be a part of her that she hid from the world, parts she didn’t want anyone else to see.
Besides being depressed, I mean, because that much was obvious. Anyone who paid attention would be able to see the sadness in her eyes.
The plastic tub was apparently a tub of memories. It was full with old shit from her past, little mementos she’d kept from past days in her life. Movie ticket stubs. Rolls of pictures from a photo booth with her friends when they were much younger. Other things from her younger years, things she apparently didn’t want to throw away but she also didn’t want to display in her room—including her high school diploma.
Once I’d gone through it, I put the lid back on and pushed it inside the closet, right where I’d found it. I shut the door and leaned my back against it, tapping my fingers against the painted wood.
Well, that had beensuperboring. I’d found out nothing at all about her.
My eyes landed on the desk near the window. A small thing, old and scratched up, a desk that had certainly seen better days, but it had small drawers on each side of it. Maybe they’d all be empty, or maybe there’d be nothing interesting in them, much like the plastic tote in her closet.
There was only one way to find out.
I walked to the desk and sat down on the creaky chair—again, a chair that had seen better days. You’d probably be able to find a better, sturdier chair if you went to Goodwill. I did the right side first, top to bottom, though when I had to lean over to reach the bottom, my stomach panged and wordlessly asked what the hell I was doing.
This goddamned tightness in my gut, combined with the lingering pain that refused to go away… I wondered if I’d always feel it, even after it fully healed. If getting stabbed with that fucking bone had been so traumatic for my body that it’d always remain a ghostlike sensation, a reminder that I had unfinished business.
Because I did. I had other people to kill. This thing with Charlie would only be a distractor until it wasn’t, and then I’d finish what I’d started, even if it killed me.
I’d gone to the left side of the desk, searching through the drawers much as I did the right side, and I was about to give up and stop trying to snoop—because it wasn’t yielding any interesting finds—but when I was bent over, rummaging through the bottommost drawer, my eyes spotted the glimmer of something small beneath old notebooks and papers.
I went for it, picking it up before I knew what it was. Smooth and metal, lying flat on the bottom of the drawer, my fingers fumbled a bit before they managed to pick it up, and when they did, a small pinch of pain surfaced on the finger that had touched it wrong.
Bringing it out of the drawer, I saw two things. One: I held onto a small, pristine utility blade, meant for either a scraper or a box cutter, and two: my finger had a drop of blood on it from where the blade had cut me, meaning it was sharp.
I leaned back in the chair and brought my bleeding finger to my mouth, inserting it past my lips and running my tongue over it. They said saliva helped close wounds faster, but that could just be an old wives’ tale or something. I wasn’t too concerned with the blood, but I didn’t want to leave any drops on Charlie’s things; then she’d know I’d snooped.
As I brought my finger out of my mouth and checked to make sure it wasn’t bleeding anymore—and it wasn’t; the cut had been shallow enough—my gaze fell to the blade.
What was Charlie doing with a blade like this? Why would she have it hidden, tucked away where her parents would surely never find it? It was in no box cutter, not inside a scraper, and the metal was pristine, never used. Not rusted in the slightest. With how sharp it was, there was only one reason I could think of.
