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“Listen, I let myself get distracted,” Brett huffed, that smirk morphing into a frown. “And I was delirious with blood loss when you hit me, so that doesn’t count. You have no idea how dangerous I can be.”
I thought back to the articles I’d read online about the bodies he’d left. More specifically, the state of the bodies. He was right, of course. Brett was undoubtedly the most dangerous person I’d ever met, someone with no empathy and no remorse, nothing that made him feel anything for his victims.
But I wasn’t scared of him. He would never haunt my dreams. No, someone else had claimed that right years ago, before Zak had stormed into my life, taken my heart, loved me, and then broke me into a thousand tiny pieces.
What did that say about me?
Chapter Ten – Brett
I watched the house at night. From about midnight to six in the morning, when the sun started to come out, then I went back to the treehouse and caught some sleep. Not enough to replace a full night’s rest, but enough to keep me going.
It was Friday. Today was the day. Charlie was going to a party, and I was going with her. I’d leave the treehouse, walk through the woods to the street, and she’d pick me up a ways from her parents’ house. She’d drop me off on the far side of campus and then, after parking her car, walk to Greek row or whatever that area of her campus was called, and find herself a party. She’d text me when she got there so I knew exactly where to go, and then it was a waiting game.
It was about eleven when I crawled out of the treehouse and wandered to the back door of her house. The first few days, she’d left it unlocked for me, but she’d had a copy of the key made, so there was no need for that anymore.
I went inside and made myself a sandwich for a lunch-slash-breakfast, and after I ate, I hopped in the shower. My stomach still hurt when anything touched it or I moved the wrong way, but the pain wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t crippling. That meant it was healing, slowly but surely.
In a way, I should be grateful to Charlie for hitting me with her car and dragging me into this mess. It gave me something to do while I healed up, something to focus on besides my desperate need for revenge on that stupid Montgomery girl.
After my shower, I slipped on my pants and nothing else. The towel I’d brought from the treehouse hung around my shoulders as I absentmindedly walked across the hall and found myself in Charlie’s bedroom.
I plugged in my phone to the outlet near her bed—I’d started leaving my charger in her nightstand so I wouldn’t have to carry it with me back and forth—and then I gingerly sat on her bed.
She hated when I was on her bed, and I didn’t know if she hated it because it was me or because she had a thing about other people being on her bed.
Slow to pull the towel off my shoulders, I ran it over my head, through my hair. The dye had lightened a bit so far, and you could kind of see my blond roots coming through on my scalp, so I assumed we’d have to re-dye my hair in a week or two.
I set my towel over her pillow, and then I lay back, my hands on my bare chest. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and maybe it was because I was in her bed, or maybe it was for a different reason entirely, but I caught myself wondering something about Charlie.
Was she a virgin?
I doubted it. I’d bet anything that Zak kid had wormed his way between her legs. Hell, I was leaning on that being what happened, the reason for the breakup that Charlie didn’t want to talk about: they slept together, and then the kid saidadios.
It didn’t matter, of course. Why would it? It wasn’t like I cared that Charlie wasn’t a virgin anymore. I wasn’t, like, obsessed with her or anything like that. It was just an innocent thought, something I caught myself wondering while laying on her bed and staring at her ceiling while my thoughts drifted toward her.
She really was annoying. Right when I thought I had her pegged, she proved me wrong. Here I thought she was a depressed girl, but maybe she just had sad eyes. Maybe I’d put too much weight on that tiny little blade she had tucked away in her desk.
She was feisty sometimes, which was kind of fun. I got more of a kick out of her than I should. But, after it was all said and done, she was just a means to an end, a way for me to lay low while the images of my face plastered over local news stations faded away, replaced by some other fear-mongering story.
Turned out, a few hours of sleep wasn’t enough for me, because as I thought of Charlie, drowsiness overtook me, and before I knew it, I fell asleep.
A dark, dreamless sleep greeted me. No dreams. No images. Just a pure, undiluted blackness that, in the end, faded way too fast. I woke up after what felt like five minutes, but when I checked my phone charging on her nightstand, I saw it was almost three.
That meant Charlie was almost home.
I didn’t want to make her mad by seeing me laying on her bed again, so I got up, fixed the sheets, and took my towel off her pillow. I grabbed my shirt from the bathroom and unplugged my phone, stuffing it into my pocket. It was an old phone, but at least it charged quickly.
I was walking down the stairs at the exact same moment Charlie came in, and my feet slowed on the bottom steps when I saw her lock the front door behind her. She must not have noticed me yet, because she stayed against the door, her back to me, and she let out a huge sigh.
Right there. Her eternal sadness was peeking through.
I decided to make extra noise as I came down the last few steps, alerting her to my presence, and as she turned around to face me, I gave her a smile and asked, “Ready for the party tonight? We’re going to catch ourselves a stalker.” My towel had been thrown over my shoulder, and it hung there, still a little damp.
“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that.” Charlie’s feet dragged herself into the kitchen, where she plopped down at the table, dropping her bookbag near her feet. I took the chair across from her. “Say he’s there. Say we find out who he is. He approaches me, tries to get me to go with him somewhere… what then?”
“Well, I’ll be watching, so I think our first goal would be to get him away from the party, away from other prying eyes. Once he’s alone, I can knock him out—”
“And what happens if he’s bigger than you?”
