Page 2 of Creep

Every single inch that I would covet as mine and no one else’s.

I could make sure of it—I would make sure of it.

I never had another person belong to me so fucking wholly. She would be the first. Theonly.

I would make her want me. Love me.Needme.

How unfortunate for Lia Whitlock to have visited her childhood home tonight, of all nights.

How unfortunate for her to have crossed my path.

She will be mine.

1

LIA

I felt the air change.One moment, everything was normal.Fine. The next, the hair on the back of my neck stood up on end, and I shivered.

Someone was watching me.

I paused in my steps and turned around.

There was no one and nothing there but the trees and dirt. The woods seemed to mock me. Ironic, considering it was one of the reasons I decided to apply for a job here atthisspecific coffee shop.

I thought it had its charm. During the summer, it attracted enough patrons to purchase a cup of coffee and sit out back, enjoying the scenery.

But that was in the summer. We were just heading into fall in New York, and everything was dead silent outside. Dad hadn’t wanted me to work here in the first place. He didn’t think it was safe, but I had enough of my inheritance from my grandpa that I didn't need Dad’s approval on anything. I’d also graduated with a degree in accounting like he wanted me to, but I couldn’t bring myself to work in that field. In Dad’s field. I have been aimlessly hopping from one job to the next. This coffee shop was the longest place I’d lasted. And it was probably one of the biggest fights we’d ever gotten into. Not that we fought a lot. My dad was a mild-mannered man who spoke only when he felt there was something he needed to say. He had his own accounting firm and had wanted me to join the family business, but the last thing I wanted to do was crunch numbers for someone else for the rest of my life.

Caden would have been great at it—had he been given the chance to grow up. He was the more analytical sibling. He took after our father… but despite their similarities and thedissimilaritiesbetween Caden and me, we were close. He had been my best friend before he was cruelly taken away from me.

And now, I felt like all I was doing was trying to live in his shadow and failing.

Settling down in my job was supposed to be a step in a different direction. Something to make me feel passionate about. Something to make me feel… alive.

That wasn’t the case.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I thought working at a coffee shop would give me a sense of purpose. But all it accomplished was give me mere hours of reprieve from my own twisted, dark thoughts threatening to pull me under and cause me to feel so exhausted by the end of each day that all I wanted to do was curl into a ball on my apartment floor and just… let go.

How could I be this directionless?

A gush of cold wind picked up, and I hurried back inside the deserted coffee shop. It was after hours. I should be home, or hell, on my way home. Instead, I was coming back here because my mind seemed to have been elsewhere these past days, making me unable to sleep, and, in effect, it made me forget my phone. So now here I was, and feeling like I wasn’t actually alone.

But this was just my thoughts on a ramble. And perhaps the sleep deprivation was making me paranoid.

Who would be watching me?

My heart rate picked up from the thought, and I hurried inside, turning on the lights and taking in the empty shop.

Everything was as I left it. And it was so quiet that I could almost hear my own heart beating.

My phone was behind the register. I let out a small sigh and could feel all the stress coming back to me.

Why was I holding onto this job at the coffee shop?

Oh yeah. Because if I didn’t have this, what did I have? What was I supposed to do then?

I blinked. Not having an answer was almost more dreadful than the fact that I planned to keep working here for one more year. Of course, this was what I told myself every year.

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