I finally start the car, throw it in reverse, and whip out of the driveway. I stop at a redlight as I leave the neighborhood and take the opportunity to put on whatever clothing I grabbed off the bedroom floor. I hold it up through tears, trying to figure out how to put it on.
It’s Colson’s t-shirt.
I break down into even more of screaming mess as I pull it over my head. It still smells like him.
Later, I’ll be impressed that I drove home having a full-blown panic attack. My mind is racing, but no coherent thoughts materialize, as I’m still focused on surviving the night. After I park my car in front of the apartment, I grip the top of the steering wheel, every emotion bubbling over. I let out a primal scream and press my forehead against the wheel, sobbing uncontrollably.
After a few minutes, I take a deep breath and try to compose myself enough to make it inside. Glancing around nervously, I scurry out of the car and hurry down the sidewalk toward the stairwell. Except I don’t make it five steps before I double over, throwing up the entire contents of my stomach into the grass.
Even as I puke my guts out, I hope no one who works third shift walks by and sees a barefoot woman with crazy hair, dressed in nothing but a man’s t-shirt, hauling a tote bag and vomiting off the edge of the sidewalk in front of some unsuspecting person’s apartment. If they do, maybe they’ll decide they can’t deal with this kind of drama and just keep walking. It would benefit us both.
After a couple of dry heaves, I make a run for it and take the steps two at a time to my front door. I unlock it as quietly as possible and slowly go inside. Katie and Emma are asleep on either side of the sectional, so I take a deep breath and creep across the carpet in my bare feet as quickly as I can, just another shadow in the room.
I breathe again only when my bedroom door clicks shut and I twist the lock on the handle. I trudge into my bathroom and turn on the light, only to be met by a disheveled woman in the mirror wearing a man’s t-shirt and nothing else. My hair is a mess. Some curls stick out at maximum volume and others hang almost straight from laying on them. I turn away in despair, reaching into the shower to twist the lever. I sit down on the floor of the shower, letting the scalding water run all over me. My body aches, inside and out.
It hurts. It hurts so bad.
Afterward, I pull on a fresh pair of pajamas and bury myself in my sheets and comforter, wishing for a coma. I try to block out each buzz of my phone until I can’t take it anymore and I delete the entire barrage of texts from Colson without looking at a single one. Then I block his number.
More than anything, I want to sleep and wake up in a world where the last hour never happened.
What the hell just happened?
I cry in silence for the Colson I knew at the beginning of the night—the one I’m still enamored with, even now. And I cry in horror, never again wanting to see the Colson who wanted me dead hours later. I just hope I can fall into a deep sleep and not wake up again until the apartment is empty and I don’t have to answer any questions about the night before.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Brett
One Year Ago
“Where’s this asshole now?” Bowen spits with disgust.
Probably a congressman or supreme court justice. Isn’t that where they always end up?
But probably not Colson. He would never. Maybe he ended up living in a creepy cabin out in the mountains like he wanted, except now he also has a cellar full of missing women.
“Did you ever speak to him again?”
“No…” It dawns on me that I haven’t uttered Colson’s name once during this conversation, and I’m not about to start now. I can’t bring myself to refer to him as anything else than, he—an innocuous pronoun. “He texted me right after it happened, but I blocked him and never read them. All I could see was that night, playing over and over again,” I sigh, “and after all that, I still had to see him in class the following week.”
“Shit,” Bowen screws up his face and rolled his eyes, “how’d that go?”
“Awful,” I mutter, remembering the constant, low-key stress that took over my life until the semester was over. “He came into class every day and sat down next to me like nothing happened. He didn’t even say anything, he was just…there. It really messed with me. Like, I even started wondering if I imagined the whole thing. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and skipped out on the last two weeks of class.”
Bowen cocks his head, “Is that why you got all squirrelly on the hike?”
“Kind of,” I mumble. Even now, I don’t want to come right out and say it.
“I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
I shake my head, “It’s not your fault. It could’ve been worse.”
Bowen arches his brow with a smile, “You’re way more pragmatic than I am.”
“I’m good at compartmentalizing,” I say with a shrug.
Colson before he tried to murder me fit nicely in a box, Colson after he tried to murder me fit nicely in a different box, and so on and so forth. Brett after meeting Bowen will get its own box as well.
“And then,” I shoot Bowen a look, “I kept seeing him everywhere. It’s like he always showed up where I was. Every time, I managed to hold it together, but afterward, I just—” I hesitate, just wanting to forget it, “cried and cried. It got to where I barely went out anymore.”
“So, he was stalking you,” Bowen concludes.
I give a half shrug, content to pretend everything was a string of inconvenient coincidences. Just like I pretend I never heard any of the things Colson said to me that night, even though they remain seared into my brain.
“You said it was weird he even ended up in that class,” Bowen points out. “He sits next to you, moves whenever you move, you never saw him around campus before then, but after all that, he just shows up everywhere you go?” Bowen tips his head onto the back of his chair, “I think you’ll hear from him again.”
This is not what I want to hear.
I try to brush him off, “It was three years ago.”
“Three years to think about you,” he points out. “I can’t blame him, I guess. I’d be freaking out, too, if I screwed up that bad and you told me to fuck the hell off.”
I shoot him a grin and seize the opportunity to deflect, “Has a woman ever told you to fuck the hell off?”
Bowen pauses, staring into the fire for a few moments before turning back to me, “Not successfully,” he says with a wink, sending a wave of butterflies through my stomach. “So, what did your friends say about what happened?”
“Nothing,” I confess, “you’re the first person I’ve told.”
