Prey (Primal #1)

18

I t was late afternoon when I returned to my room; I knew he had been there before I unlocked and opened the door. It was a hunch, sharp instincts, then warily. When I opened the door, I was greeted by his scent of cigarettes, cologne, and burnt wood. Half of me expected him to be sitting there on my bed wearing a mask, eating popcorn. Eating popcorn? I don’t know why I thought he’d eat popcorn, but the pop of purple on my pillow caught my eye first, then…damn…the envelope. My money.

In a panic, I snatched the envelope to find that he’d opened it but breathed a sigh of relief when he hadn’t taken any money. So, what was his purpose in breaking in here if he didn’t take anything? To scare me. The more he did this, the more I became less fearful and more angry.

I opened my drawers and noticed he’d been through my clothes, and a shudder traveled down my spine. Suddenly, all my clothes seemed unclean, and I started piling them on my bed to take to the laundry room. He must be one of those voyagers who got a kick from sniffing through women’s underwear. Creep. I should’ve asked Judith for a gun.

Should I report the stalker to Carly, the hall director? No. She seemed doubtful when I reported someone breaking into my room and writing TRAITOR on my door. I knew security cameras were erected in several places, but I still had to ask Carly to view them. He seemed to have gone through my textbooks, and I freaked out at the thought of him accessing information on my laptop. He’d have to know the password, but it didn’t stop me from checking a search history to see if I managed to get past the blockade.

The laptop mainly contained my assignments from my freshman year at another college before I transferred here to study marine biology. There were also emails to Judith and my carefamily, who took me in under the Witness Protection Program. But the stalker wouldn’t view them as interesting unless he searched for something specific.

Snatching my phone, my fingers trembled across the screen so much that I kept having to delete three messages because they were unreadable before finally sending the last one.

Me: You broke into my room again!!!

I tossed my phone down angrily on my bed, then paused over the small yet intricately beautiful purple flower resting on my pillow. It was a flower he had picked from the bush outside the hall's front door, so there was little effort, but still, stupidly, that single flower, that small gift, created an explosion in my heart.

A single hot tear trickled down my cheek, and I wiped it away with the back of my hand and sniffed back my never-ending loneliness. I was unnoticeable, like a cobweb in the corner of a room or an ant running across a leaf. You had to look hard to see me. And he did. He saw me.

Okay, he was weird and creepy, but he noticed me. He picked a flower and placed it on my pillow as a romantic gesture because he saw me. He also went through all of my clothes, but I couldn’t find anything missing, so…oh god, my stalker was a perpetual panty-sniffing creep, and I was falling for him.

I hadn’t even met him properly, but I was falling for him because he showed me attention. I was such a lonely loser. I took the crumbs offered, and he crept into my heart after Shaun fractured it.

Scream Mask Freak: I’ve broken into your room only once.

Huh? Oh yeah, that’s right. He was denying the TRAITOR on the door crap. Should I believe him? No.

Me: U left the flower on my pillow?

Scream Mask Freak: Yes.

I swallowed back the rising emotion. He admitted it. He admitted he had left the flower there.

Me: Did u go through my stuff?

Scream Mask Freak: What r u doing tomorrow?

Me: Why?

Scream Mask Freak: Coffee?

A one-word answer wasn’t enough for me to know what he was suggesting. My optimism, laced with loneliness, might be reading into this, so I needed clarification before I made a dick out of myself by jumping to conclusions.

Me: Elaborate. What do u mean by ‘coffee’?

I waited five minutes for a reply, and when I was met with silence, I took a large bundle of clothes and went down to the laundromat room on the ground floor, assuming that by the time I returned, a message would be waiting.

Once, in the laundromat, with my bag of clean clothes touched by my stalker's hand, I stumbled across a familiar face sitting on a bench, head down, reading a Kindle.

“Cheetos? I mean…” she looked up under those glasses, and my hand twitched to the glasses on my face to adjust them. Sometimes, I forget they’re there; other times, I forget to put them on because I didn’t need glasses to see; it was just part of my disguise. I’d become better at it by ticking boxes every day.

Glasses – check.

Hair color – check.

Name and ID – check.

And so on…

“I’m not a sociable person,” she announced strangely, insinuating that she had no interest in conversing with me.

“Me too,” I stated as I opened the door of the nearest washing machine and piled my clothes inside. “So…do you live here in Hallen Hall?”

She dropped her head down to continue reading, and I was unsure if she hadn’t heard me or ignored me. “Okay,” I muttered to myself. “I can talk to myself.”

I poured laundry powder into the filter, switched the machine on, and sat on a second bench, so I didn’t cramp her style. “Thanks for the ID, by the way. I got a job, so…”

No response.

Weirdly, even though her behavior seemed rude to most people, she was just introverted, and I understood that. Riley Laws understood being shy and socially awkward, and even Annika knew the importance of retreating to the back of the room to avoid attracting attention. When you come from an abusive situation, you learn to read body language and gauge a response from people around you. This was what it was like for me in foster care, bounced from one family to the next until the Kaisers kindly took me in and adopted me.

“Where?” Cheetos asked without looking up from her Kindle.

“Pardon?” Several minutes flew by after I said something, so I wasn’t sure what she was responding to.

“Where did you get a job?” she asked again without looking up from her Kindle, and I wondered if I looked that endearing when I was reading with my glasses on. I hoped so.

“Oh…just a club downtown,” I replied, giving little away because I didn’t want Cheetos and the nice lady at the club to get in trouble since they knew I used a fake ID to get the job.

“An eighteen-plus club?” It felt good to have a reasonably normal conversation with a reasonably normal girl in my age group.

“Um…yes. A kitchenhand. It’s not much, but at least it’s a start,” I smiled, thinking about returning to Savile.

I couldn’t wait to be in that glamorous atmosphere, even if it were on the peripheral. The sound of a band playing, shoes tapping on wood, and the scent of expensive cigars remind me of the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Kaiser. Gunner stole glace cherries and salted pistachios from plates and sneaked them into my hand.

I chuckled aloud, reliving the antics Gunner and I got up to when no one was looking. Cheetos glanced at me over her Kindle but said nothing. Silence fell. The conversation was over, and that was fine by me.

After several minutes, I wondered if my stalker had given me an appropriate explanation of what ‘coffee?’ meant. “I’m just going to head back to my room for twenty minutes,” I told her, and she shrugged indifferently, possibly baffled as to why I felt the need to tell her that.

Walking back, I noted where the cameras were down the halls and the fire exit, the only alternative access to this part of the hall. The cameras must’ve caught him coming and going, let alone students returning to their rooms. There was no way he could’ve entered the hall without being seen, but if he had a keycard into my room, then perhaps they assumed I gave it to him.

I ran to my room and unlocked the door, annoyed at my intense yearning for his reply. I paused before picking up the phone because I knew, without even looking at it, I knew he hadn’t replied. Immediately, my brain fell into a calamity of excuses – he’s busy driving, and you know how dangerous it is to text while driving, maybe he dropped his phone and broke it, perhaps he’s in an important meeting with important people…

Or maybe, just maybe, he changed his mind. As soon as he sent the ‘coffee?’ message, he wanted to take it back because perhaps he had sent it to the wrong person, and it wasn’t meant for me in the first place. But wait, that didn’t make sense either. He broke into my room and left a flower on my pillow.

Oh no. Maybe it was a mistaken identity. Perhaps he thought I was someone else and just realized the terrible mistake he made. No. Wait. That didn’t make sense either because he knew about Shaun.

My fingers hovered over the screen of my phone, but I held back, clenched my hands into tight fists, and decided to separate myself from my phone again. Even short spurts without my phone glued to my hand or in my bag were healthy, breaking the cord of addiction and longing for someone to remember that I existed.

I left the room without my phone again and fled downstairs to the laundromat, hoping Cheetos might still be there. Even silent company was good company, and that gap in my stomach felt emptier by the second.

She glanced up from her Kindle and caught a warmth in her eyes that she was pleased I returned so soon. “It hasn’t finished,” she pointed out.

It took me a few seconds to figure out she was discussing my washing. “Yeah,” I sighed, slumping down on the bench and fixing my eyes on the washing going around and around mesmerizingly.

We didn’t talk for ten minutes, which was fine with me. I wanted to ask her many questions, but she made it clear that she wasn’t eager to share her personal life with me.

A dryer beeped, indicating that it was finished, and without a word, she jumped up, took her warm, dry clothes out, shoved them into a cotton bag, and left. I called out, “See you later... Cheetos.”

“Bye,” she was so quiet and paused a second at the threshold as if she was close to saying more. Even if she told me her name, that would be great, or I’d have to keep calling Cheetos.

Instead, she walked on, disappearing from view, and I suppressed an urge to follow her to see if she resided there. But a girl entrenched in anxiety and doubts would look behind her at the slightest sound to see if someone was following.

Because that’s what I’d do.

An hour later, when my washing was done and I was put through the dryer, I arrived back at my room disappointed that Stalker Freak still hadn’t replied to my message. The pop of purple on my pillow seemed to infiltrate the entire room, and I took the stem between my fingers and allowed my nose to nestle in the petals, only to find that it had no scent.

Once I started classes and my job, I’d be too busy to care about some stupid loser who had a habit of breaking into my room.