Chapter 6 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I can see that you wanted me cold / You’re so bold while you’re watching me moan”
— “Drowning” by BANKS
I spin around to face him, my back flat against the door. The Fear isn’t gone, not exactly, but a more familiar and welcome emotion is joining it in the spotlight: black-eyed rage at the impudence of men.
That feeling is a good ol’ friend of mine, and she gets plenty of exercise in the Year of Our Lord 2025, because men just keep insisting on being the fucking worst.
Even stalker men with violent psycho tendencies assume they get to dictate what women do.
I’m very sick of that bullshit.
“Uh, excuse me? You don’t get to decide who I have dinner with. You don’t get to decide anything about my life. You broke into my apartment, you threatened to kill me, and now, you’re—what? Jealous? Of Elliot?”
“You think this is jealousy?” he asks in a baritone drawl. His breathing is slow, even, and controlled. Everything I’m not right now.
“I think a man who tells a woman she’s ‘not going’ on a date she didn’t even say yes to has some pretty serious control issues, yeah. If the shoe fits, et cetera.”
When he doesn’t immediately reply, I start to wonder if I might’ve overstepped a little bit.
I feel him move. A shadow against shadows. He pushes closer, and closer, and I retreat and retreat, but there’s only a foot or two to go until I’m smeared against the door and he’s flush against me.
His hand drags up my torso and past the curve of my throat, until his fingers push into my hair, gripping at the roots.
He tilts my head to the side and lowers his face to my neck.
I feel the mask’s fabric brush my skin, then the warmth of his breath as he inhales, long and deep, smelling me and sighing happily.
“You’re right,” he murmurs against my bare throat. “I am jealous. I’m the most jealous man in the world.”
His fingers tighten until prickles of pain dance across my scalp.
“And that’s why I wouldn’t hesitate to gut that frightened little boy like a fucking fish if I thought there was even a fraction of a chance you’d say yes to him.
” His lips graze my ear through the mask.
“Even a micro-fraction. Even a thought of a fraction. I’d open up his veins right there in his doorway and he’d never even see it coming.
You’d look pretty all splashed in his blood, wouldn’t you? Red freckles to match the brown ones.”
My rage sputters out. Just like that, poof, gone.
“Are you here to kill me or kill him?” I ask in a thin, terrified voice.
“I don’t care about him one way or the other. But I suggest you don’t make me start caring.” I hear the sole of his boot creak against my hardwood. “People I care about tend to have very bad nights.”
“Yeah,” I squeak. “I can attest to that.”
“Has it been so bad?” he taunts. “You looked perfectly content to be kneeling at my feet, little fox.”
“I think the mask might be cutting off your air supply,” I retort.
He chuckles ominously. “They didn’t tell me you were funny.”
“Who, me?” I say, pretending I’m breezy and unaffected. “Well, they should have. I’m a riot. You ought to see my tight five. Kills at open mics.” I glance down at the gun still wedged between us. “No pun intended.”
The Masked Man laughs again, but it’s a nails-on-the-chalkboard laugh that sets my teeth on edge. “You shouldn’t be worried about the gun. Much too loud and messy for what I came to do. I only brought it as a precaution.”
It’s my turn to laugh. “Do you know what normal people use as precautions? Umbrellas. Bicycle helmets. Fucking condoms.”
“I’ll ask again: What makes you think anything about me is normal?”
As if to prove his point, he dips his head and licks his tongue up the side of my neck in one long, slow stripe.
I suck in a breath. My hands fly to his chest to push him off, but instead of doing that, they just stay there, flat against the solid wall of him, doing absolutely nothing useful.
Then his teeth close on my earlobe and nip down hard. A sharp, involuntary squeal rips out of me before I can stop it.
“Oh, you liked that,” he breathes heavily against my ear. “Guess what? So did I.”
He presses forward and I feel exactly what he means. He’s hard. Unmistakably, unapologetically hard, the length of him pushing against my hip through his pants. Even worse is that my hips tilt toward it instead of away.
It’s a tiny movement. Millimeters. Practically invisible.
But he catches it.
“There she is,” he murmurs. “She’s a very good girl after all.”
I shove him as hard as I can. That achieves a grand total of maybe three inches between us, but I’ll take every single one of them. I want this lunatic away from me immediately. My skin is prickly and hot and everywhere he touched me burns like I’ve been doused in chemicals.
“Get off me.”
I flatten myself against the door and cross my arms over my chest, trying to hold myself together. My earlobe is still throbbing where he bit it. I can still feel the wet trail his tongue left on my neck, cooling in the air.
He doesn’t come back for those three inches. He stands where I pushed him in the dark, breathing, radiating heat and cinnamon.
“Do you fuck a lot of men, little fox?”
My breath snags in my throat. “Do I what?!”
He shrugs. The mask hides his facial expression, but his body speaks for him. It’s long and languid, lithe, capable, somehow sexual even while he’s just standing there.
“I asked you a question,” he says. “Do you fuck a lot of men?”
“That is none of your goddamn business.”
“Everything about you is my business from now on.” His tongue darts out to wet his lips as his pale eyes regard me. “Don’t duck the question. I want to know what you let them do to you.”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“All the difference in the world” He takes a half-step closer. Just one. Enough to close the gap I fought for. “I need to know how many of them have touched you.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“How many, Jillian?”
“You’re out of your mind. You know that, right? You broke into my home with a gun, and now, you’re asking me about my sex life like some crazy ex-boyfriend, except we’ve never even met.”
“How. Many?”
“A hundred!” I cry out sarcastically, throwing up my hands. “A thousand! Every man in Manhattan! The whole borough! I’m working my way through Brooklyn next. Happy?”
His breathing changes. It gets heavier, rougher, and I realize I’ve poked something I probably shouldn’t have poked. The air between us goes thick and dangerous.
“You think that’s funny?” he growls. “Every man who’s ever put his hands on you is a man I’ll eventually find.”
“Is that supposed to be romantic?!”
He shrugs again, one shoulder rising and falling nonchalantly.
“You’ll soon learn that romance in my world isn’t flower arrangements and chocolate boxes.
It’s the bleeding, severed cock of every man who thought he was allowed to defile you, all arranged in a neat little row while their former owners find permanent beds in the muddy marshes of Red Hook. Would you like that, little fox?”
I shake my head so hard that my hair flies out of its messy bun. “You’re sick. You’re very, very sick and you need help.”
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But I’m not the one pressing her thighs together every time I open my mouth.”
“You’re doing a lot of talking for someone who supposedly came here to kill me.” I tilt my head to the side and give him a pitying look. “That’s because you don’t have the balls to do it, do you?”
The Masked Man laughs once again. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” he says. “For tonight, you’re safe. I’m going to keep an eye on you while I decide what to do. This will be a fun little game, I think.”
“While you decide—?” I sputter. “No. No. We’re done here.” I push off the wall, throw the crumpled mail down on the kitchen counter, and turn around so I can shove him toward the door. “Get the hell out of my apartment.”
For a second, I think he’s going to let me get away with it, that he’ll disappear from my lightless apartment like the wisp of smoke he is and this will all turn out to have been nothing but a bad dream.
But it doesn’t go quite like that.
Instead, he catches my wrist mid-shove, spins me around, and pulls my back against his chest in one fluid motion. When he laughs again, I feel it shudder through every inch of me.
“You’re adorable when you’re brave,” he remarks.
His free hand arrows down, past my stomach and the drawstring of my pajama pants, until his palm cups me between my legs over the thin fabric.
I gasp.
He doesn’t go any farther, though. He just holds it there, hot and warm and solid, pressing where I’m suddenly achy. My knees nearly buckle.
“I’ll be seeing you very soon, little fox,” he whispers in my ear.
Then his hand is gone. And so is his heat.
His smell, however, lingers.
I don’t move for a long time. I stand in the dark with my back against his ghost and listen to my apartment settle around me.
When I’m sure he’s gone, I lunge forward and throw the deadbolt, then the chain. Then I press my spine to the wall beside the door and let my legs give out. I drop to the ground, knees up, pajama pants riding up my shins, and I breathe.
I just breathe.
In through the nose.
Out through the mouth.
Over and over until my hands stop shaking, which takes a while.
The lights flicker once, twice, and then snap on. The apartment floods with the warm, ordinary glow of the overhead kitchen fixture and the little lamp I leave on by the couch. Everything looks exactly how it always looks. Clean counters. Stacked books. My half-finished whiskey on the table.
It’s over. It’s truly, actually over.
Something is still bothering me, though. It takes me a second to figure out that something is missing from the tableaux: The space on the counter where I tossed the mail Elliot brought me is empty.
I look on the floor, under the TV, but it’s nowhere to be seen. The only answer is the obvious one: He took it.
I almost laugh. Fuck it. He can have my ConEd bill and whatever credit card offer Citibank is pushing this week.
I’ve got way bigger problems in my future.