“I don’t know. Hunter will kill me if anything happens to you.”
“Hunter clearly doesn’t care!” I snap. “Anyway, the letters were just some weirdo and the car and backfiring and stuff was a coincidence. Have you honestly seen anything suspicious these past few days?”
“No,” he grumbles.
“See I’ll be fine. Hunter was being paranoid.”
“He has been pretty unhinged,” he admits.
“Go home, Mitch. You don’t need to look after me.”
He stares me down and I lift my chin. I’m fed up with men telling me what to do. I’ve put myself on the line one too many times recently and where has that led me? To heartache and confusion.
“Go home or I’ll call the police and tell them you’re harassing me.”
His brows rise. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
I see his chest heave with a deep breath and he backs away. “Fine. But call me if you need anything. I’m serious.”
“I won’t need anything,” I tell him confidently. I don’t need anything or anyone.
***
I lie in bed and lift my phone. No calls. Nothing. That familiar ache eats away inside of me. I glance at the time. I need to get ready for work but after a week and a bit of nothing—no word from Hunter—it’s getting harder to drag myself out of bed.
I snatch the phone again and find the last message he sent me. It’s easy enough to find seeing as hardly anyone has my number apart from him. My heart throbs painfully as I skim the words, searching for some kind of hidden message, for some reason why he would have disappeared. What did I do? Am I a terrible kisser? Awful company? Did I seem as desperate as I felt for him? Was it the whole house situation?
Be safe, princess.
Princess. Weird how that drove me mad and now I crave it. I need to hear him say it in that deep tone that rolls through me. I scrape a hand through my hair, push myself up and fling the phone onto the bed. Nausea rolls in my stomach. Or maybe hunger? I haven’t exactly been eating well. I can’t seem to bring myself to. I need to get a grip. Where has my determination to carve a better life for myself gone? It’s late afternoon on Saturday and I’m still in bed.
It went with Hunter it seems—a man I really didn’t know all that well.
I’m an idiot.
Thrusting one heavy leg out of bed, then the other, I stagger to the bathroom and get ready for work. I throw myself under a scalding shower and lean against the cold tiles, and pray the contrast pulls me out of my lethargy. This isn’t me—this moping, lovesick shell of a person. I wrap my arms around myself and dig my nails into my sides until it hurts. I need to feel something. This empty pain inside is driving me insane. Why did I not listen to my instincts and keep Hunter out of my life? Everything was going fine until he turned up. I might not have had the most exciting life, I might even have been lonely, but I was fine. Anything is better than what I feel now—this hollowness in my stomach that tells me he realized I wasn’t worth his time.
I flick off the shower, wrap a towel around me and one around my hair too. I try not to picture how he looked at me. And how he touched me. Am I just really stupid? I don’t get it. Everything he did had me convinced he wanted me. Everything he said did too. And me being an idiot, wanted to believe him.
I do my make-up mechanically, perfecting my mask. It doesn’t feel so important now. Who cares if someone recognizes me? I don’t think it will hurt as badly as this does. I give myself a mental slap and slick on some dark lip gloss. It matters because you wanted a fresh start, I remind myself. A good job, a home of your own. A steady, predictable life. Hunter had to burst his way in and ruin that, didn’t he?
Heading back to my bedroom, I drop the towel and dress. Almost all the clothes I own remind me of Hunter. I can hardly afford to replace everything so I’m stuck. I pull on my leather trousers and a tank top, and mentally chastise myself for being such an idiot.
A shiver trails down my spine when unwrap the towel from around my hair and run a brush through it. I walk over to the window and peer through the slight gap in the curtains. A car drives off from the front of the building—a red sports car. Nothing weird about that, so why do I have this strange feeling in my stomach? Was I hoping it might be Hunter having changed his mind about us?
Dropping the hair brush on my side table, I twist it into a bun and secure it with an elastic. I pause and eye the drawer with the painkillers in. It would be so easy to do that again. Just to numb the pain for a while and block out the bad memories. First my stepfather, then the porn producers and now Hunter.