Page 19 of Haven't Killed in Years
“You seem…excited,” I said. “Are you getting off on this or something?”
“I am. Kind of,” he admitted. “Not in a sexual way or anything, but I’ve never had a stalker before.”
“I’m not stalking you. You can relax.”
“Are you dangerous?” he asked.
“Oh my God, stop. Seriously. I get this looks bad, but you aren’t going to be able to tick off any of your weird fetish boxes with me.”
“Any ofmyweird fetish boxes?! You broke into my apartment, probably trying to steal my underwear.”
“No one wants your nasty baggy boxers. You look like you’re twelve years old,” I spat back.
He glanced down, seemingly affected by my observation, but shook it off, remembering he had the upper hand in the situation. He sighed and tugged his hair again,1-2-3. “Tell me why you broke in, then.”
“I wanted to see how obsessed you are with Abel Haggerty. I wanted to see if you were hiding anything.” I was probably acting too casual for break-in behavior, especially if this guy was not playing thegame I was. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was in a bad relationship once. It’s made me paranoid, and probably a little impulsive.”
He processed that before asking, “Are you afraid of me?”
I think he wanted the answer to be yes, but it was most certainly a no. I shook my head. “Are you afraid ofme?”
“Should I be?” He tilted his head and gave me a little smile.
A silence took over that wasn’t necessarily awkward, but it wasn’t comfortable. My wheels were turning and so were his. He bit his lip and squinted at me, tentative to say something, but he got over it. “Have you ever seen a dead body?”
“No,” I lied. Holy shit, was he about to pull out the rest of Oswald Shields’s body from under the bed or something?
“Sometimes I go to the morgue,” he explained.
“Why?” I asked, a bit disgusted—not because I thought it was disgusting that he went to the morgue but because that was his big bad-boy admission after I had already hyped him up in my head to be a murderer with the dead body of a man I knew under his bed.
“I do it to remind myself what it really is that Abel’s talking about. It’s different from hearing words or seeing pictures. When there’s a dead body in front of you, it’s real.”
I could see how this would sound deep to someone else, but I had seen a lot of dead bodies and knew you didn’t have to be so emo about it. “Do you want to be like him?” I asked. “Is that what this is about?”
“A killer? No.” He shook his head, not offended. “I just…It feels like there’s a key to life and death, and if I can figure it out, I can transcend it.”
Oh God, his book was going to be awful.Just write the facts with digestible prose, Dostoevskywas what I wanted to say. “I think you’re romanticizing” was what I said instead. “I don’t think it’s about transcending. I think it’s about accepting. A person is only a thing andthere are lots of things. In your own head, you think you are the shiniest, most unique thing out there, but you’re not. Once you can understand that you’re just another thing on this planet, you can accept it and it frees you.”
He exhaled a little noise that saidwowwithout actually having to saywow. “That’s sad. Even if you’re right, that’s depressing. Do you really think like that? Do you think you’refree?”
“I hope so,” I said, knowing I wasn’t free. I’d been in hiding since I was nine years old. I existed in a cage with a long list of rules. When I thought about it, it bummed me out. Stupid Dominic, making me think about these things. This was why I only dated Brians.
He was staring at me.
“What?” I asked.
He leaned across the couch and touched my cheek. He waited to see if I would hiss at him again, and when I didn’t, he kissed me. I wasn’t expecting the transition, but I went with it. So much for it not being sexual. It felt nice to be kissed by someone who was kind of a freak and who was attracted to the fact that I was probably one too. He had no idea though, really. He was hoping for the crazy ex-girlfriend type, but my crazy was way too severe to ever revolve around him. I couldn’t let myself pretend it was anything else. I couldn’t let anything cloud the serious mess I was in and how I was going to get out of it. I pushed him back enough to part our lips.
He sighed, biting his lip as he retreated, coming across more apologetic than disappointed. “Can I show you something?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, knowing better this time than to hope it was going to be a dead body.
- - - - -
“Have you heard aboutthose arms they found?” Dominic asked as he brought his laptop back to the couch.
“No.”
