Chapter Six
Brynn
I fidget with my costume as my savior—captor?—cuts the wheel and pulls into a dark parking garage.
I put my heels back on when it was time to get out of his buddy’s car and into his, but we haven’t said a word to each other since.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into his car, but I didn’t have my phone and my car is parked back by the frat house. My options seemed to be getting into his car or walking back to my car in heels and risking one of the pervy frat guys picking me up along the way.
And it started raining.
None of my options were great, but this seemed like the best one.
He cuts the wheel and pulls into a spot marked ‘reserved’ more aggressively than I think he needs to.
He kills the engine, then opens his car door and climbs out.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I get out, too. I stand on the passenger side of the car uncertainly and watch as he walks around the back and heads toward an elevator without a word.
Chewing on my bottom lip, I look around. I don’t know where I am, exactly. I recognized some of the stuff on the way over, but I haven’t been on this street. I think we’re near campus, so my apartment probably isn’t too far away.
“You coming?” he asks.
My gaze snaps back to him, and I hustle to catch up since he has already pressed the elevator button.
The elevator doors open and he’s inside by the time I catch up to him. My heart pounds, and I don’t think it’s because I had to jog over here in heels, but I’m having serious concerns about my cardiovascular health tonight.
The elevator has bad fluorescent lighting, and it’s eerily quiet. It feels like we’re in a low-budget horror flick, and I wonder if I’m the idiot who did the thing the audience was screaming at them not to do. I can hear myself being nervous, and he seems so unbothered, I feel self-conscious about it.
Maybe I should feel more self-conscious about following some guy I don’t know, whose face I can’t even see, up to an undisclosed location, but I keep telling myself he saved me from imminent peril, so he must be some kind of good guy.
As if in response, my brain summons the memory of him tackling me to the ground and holding me there, his body planted between my spread legs, his rough hands all over me.
He sure didn’t feel like a good guy then.
His friend also laughed when I said that in the car, and if even your friends don’t think you’re any good… well, there’s probably something to that.
The elevator dings and the doors slide open.
We’re on the 18th floor.
I file the information away, even though I don’t know what I need it for. In case something else bad happens, I guess.
The police department is going to have to hire a whole new employee for the marathon of crimes I’ll have to report tonight.
Assuming I make it to the police station after this detour.
He didn’t save you just to kill you.
That’s probably true.
I don’t know, I don’t trust anything right now. If Santa Claus showed up, I’d probably throw a shoe at him and run away.
The building we’ve entered looks nice, at least.
Sure would be a shame to be murdered in a crappy location.
I smile faintly at my own dark humor, but my amusement fades when the guy stops outside a door—1802—and draws a key card out of his pocket.
Are we at a hotel?
I’m immediately alarmed. The digital lock on the door flashes green and then he opens it.
It’s dark inside, but he flips on a light as soon as he’s through the door. He seems at ease and not like he feels the need to keep an eye on me, so I guess it’s okay, and I slowly follow him inside.
It’s not a hotel, it’s an apartment.
A really nice apartment.
I look around, surprised at how spacious it is. The ceilings are high, the walls are painted a dark blue, and the curtains are open. I drift over to look at the impressive view of the city out the window behind the expensive-looking couch, but as soon as I approach, the curtains start closing.
I jump since no one is standing near me, then I look back and see him with a remote control in his hand.
“Remote control curtains. Fancy.”
“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs, bending to place the remote back down on his coffee table.
I assume it’s his coffee table, but I also can’t believe he lives here. I know a lot of rich kids go to my university and plenty of them probably have great places, but you’re supposed to struggle in college, aren’t you? He’s already living like he’s running a Fortune 500 company.
“Do you have a roommate?” I ask him.
“No.” He answers as he rips his mask off, and when he does, my jaw hinges open before I can stop it.
I don’t know what I expected him to look like. Maybe it was all my thoughts earlier about Erik and Christine, a deformed genius hidden behind a mask right before I met an actual man in a mask who… now that I’m thinking about it, actually sort of kidnapped me and brought me back to his lair.
Maybe I was expecting a deformed but brilliant maniac who lovingly stalks the woman he likes from the shadows before finally bursting into her life.
I was not prepared for him to be so handsome.
I thought Kyle was cute, but this guy…
He’s the opposite of Kyle in every way. Kyle is blonde and has a playful sparkle in his eye, while this guy looks intense and kind of… cruel.
I’m not sure what it is exactly that makes me feel like he’s cruel, but I find myself suddenly understanding why his friend laughed when I described him as a good guy.
As handsome as he is, I would have been far less inclined to follow this guy somewhere to be alone with him than I would have a brilliant, deformed genius who stalked me. That, maybe I could twist in my imagination with defenses about his good intentions. Mix in sympathy and ignite a desire to comfort him, to make up for the cruelty he had surely experienced at the hands of others.
But the unmasked man standing before me looks like the tormentor, not the tormented.
I can imagine all the kids he went to high school with whose lives he probably made absolute hell.
He scowls like it’s his face’s natural setting, swiping his fingers through his mass of dark hair to muss it since he’s been wearing the mask for so long, then he looks my way and pins me with his piercing blue eyes.
I don’t remember what we were talking about.
I’m lucky I remember my name.
Before, I felt awkward, but now I feel really awkward.
And I want to leave.
If Kyle triggered the chorus of Begin Again in the coffee shop before I knew what an asshole he was,this guy is definitely giving I Knew You Were Trouble When You Walked In.
“Um, so…” My mind races my heart, and I try to find a clean way out of the hole I feel sunk in. “Your phone,” I say, finally grasping at something. “Mine is back at the frat house, so I… I followed you in here because I was hoping to use your phone.”
The corners of his mouth tip up in a dark smile. He drops the mask and saunters closer. “My phone?”
I nod, unconsciously taking a step back.
My retreat amuses him. I can see it in his eyes. He keeps moving toward me though, so I guess he’s comfortable with making me uncomfortable.
“The phone that I had on me the whole time we were together? You had to come back to my apartment to use that?”
“Well, to be fair, I didn’t know we were at your apartment.”
“You seem nervous.”
“I—No.”
“Now you seem like a liar.” There’s a slightly playful lilt to his voice when he says that, and I don’t know why it makes my stomach flip over.
“I just… I need to get home.”
He shakes his head as if he’s the decider. “Nope. Can’t go back to your place.”
I scowl up at him. I’m still backing away. I want to stop because I don’t know where I’m going, but it’s hard to stop retreating when he’s still stalking toward me. “Would you stop?”
He cocks a dark eyebrow as if he’s not doing anything wrong. “Stop what?”
“Crowding me.” My butt knocks against a wall before I finish saying the last word, and I startle easily, so it comes out as sort of a squeak. I swallow, then shoot him my dirtiest look as I’m forced to look up at him.
He smirks. “I wasn’t crowding you.” He leans in, bracing his arm on the wall next to my head, casually trapping me. “Now I am.”
Wow, he smells good. Really, really good. How does he smell so good when we just ran for our lives through the woods?
That’s not what I should be thinking about right now.
My heart pounds and my mouth feels dry so I lick my lips.
I wish he would’ve left that damn mask on. I can’t seem to think straight at all since he took it off.
Since I’ve lost the thread of the conversation again, I grasp at the last thing I can remember saying that felt like we were on safer ground. “Why can’t I go home?”
He watches me for a moment, his blue eyes not missing a thing—the way I swallow nervously, the way I shift uncomfortably, the way that, despite those things, I don’t shove him or cuss him out or do anything to potentially escalate the situation.
I drop my gaze self-consciously, but it’s a split-second thing.
Finally, he answers my question. “You can’t go back to your place because I assume Kyle knows where you live. I didn’t go to all that trouble to save your little ass just to have him scoop you up outside your apartment.”
I swallow uneasily, shifting my gaze to look up at him again. “I have to go home. I have a cat, and my roommate won’t think to feed her. I can’t call my roommate because I don’t know her number. Besides, Kyle doesn’t know where I live.”
“I’m sure it’s not too hard to figure out,” he states, gazing down at me.
God, his lips are… distracting.
“I also don’t know you,” I add. “While I appreciate your help, I don’t have to listen to you.”
This amuses him. “No?”
It’s a bit obnoxious the way he asks. As if I’m just so fucking wrong, he finds it adorable. “No,” I say primly.
“Who knows where you are right now?”
My chin rises, but only because he knows the answer to that as well as I do.
No one knows where I am right now.
Not a single soul.
Even my digital footprints would never lead here because my cell phone is back at Kyle’s, and the only person who saw me get into this stranger’s car was his friend.
I know without needing to be told that he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Yet again, he doesn’t seem to need me to acknowledge his upper hand. Rather than acknowledge it at all, he asks, “What’s her name?”
“What? Who?”
“Your cat. I want to know what you named your cat.”
The way he says it feels… odd. Intimate.
Not I want to know your cat’s name.
I want to know what you named your cat.
My breath feels sticky inside my lungs. It won’t come out properly.
I almost lose the thread again, but I force myself to focus. “Toast.”
He blinks, then smiles. “You named your cat Toast.”
“Well, technically, it was already her name, I just let her keep it. She was one of a litter of kittens that got dropped off at a shelter. They all had breakfast names. Bacon, Pancake, Blueberry Muffin. Her name was Toast, and she was there the longest. All the other kittens in her litter got homes, but she didn’t, and… you know how shelters make posts on social media telling people things like that so some soft-hearted sucker will immediately make an appointment and hopefully adopt them?”
Smiling faintly, he nods.
I shrug. “That’s what happened.”
Still amused, he says, “So you’re a soft-hearted sucker?”
“Sometimes.”
“Most people wouldn’t admit a thing like that.”
“I’m not embarrassed about it.”
“Why not?”
“I think the alternative’s a lot worse.”
“The alternative being…?”
I think for a second, then shrug. “Being the kind of person who just… wouldn’t care.”
He cocks his head slightly, as if relating more to the other side. “Not caring’s a lot easier.”
“Well, I’m not lazy,” I quip.
He cracks a smile. “I’m glad to hear it.”
That’s an odd thing to say.
I frown. “Why?”
“Because that brings me to the second reason you’re not allowed to go home yet.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m gonna need you to dig the glass out of my back before I can go to bed.”