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Then, eventually, he went away.
Locked up in the prison I looked at every single day.
I figured it was over then.
I had no choice but to move out of his house.
And in a desperate attempt not to have to return home with my tail between my legs to a mother who told me she thought the man looked like bad news, that she was the queen of bad news guys, that she could spot one a mile away, I found a bag of Czar’s cash I once saw him stash in one of the abandoned buildings in town, claimed it as my own, got an apartment, and tried to just… move on.
Forget about it.
Put him in my past.
Then the flowers started to show up.
The notes.
The reminders that I still belonged to him.
I’d just figured it was, you know, a desperate, lonely man trying to hold onto the woman he had on the outside.
But then, after I finally trusted myself to see another man again, the threats started.
Reminding me who I belonged to.
Telling me there would be consequences if I ‘stepped out on’ Czar.
For a while, I’d seen those threats the same way I’d seen the love notes. A man without any control on the inside, desperately trying to hold onto some on the outside.
But then the guy I’d been casually seeing nearly died in a “car accident.”
I’d even, with time, been able to tell myself that was just a coincidence.
Until the next guy was “mugged” walking down the street.
I mean, yeah, sure, we had petty crime in Shady Valley. I was sure people had been mugged or robbed. They probably even got roughed up sometimes.
But it seemed too coincidental.
Too vicious.
I decided one night to test my theory that men were getting hurt for getting involved with me.
So I pretended to take some asshole guy from the bar up on his offer to take me out after work, knowing I wouldn’t feel so bad about him getting hurt since he’d been making “jokes” about roofies all night.
In my experience, decent guys didn’t joke about date rape. So, yeah, if he got his ass kicked, I wasn’t going to shed a tear about it.
I double-checked that I had my stun gun and my knife, then I followed him back to his place.
I told the guy that I wanted to feed him before I fucked him, buying some time as I threw together a makeshift meal that I choked down before waiting until he hit the can, and rushing out of there.
Sure enough, I caught it on the police blotter.
He’d had a ‘home invasion.’
Someone had broken his jaw.
One guy who you were seen with who met with tragedy could be random. Two, a coincidence. But three? That was a pattern.
