Chapter 23
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Berlyn
I pace outside Summer’s apartment door, waiting for her to answer.
With her old roommate, I would always just walk in, but her new roommate makes me feel awkward about it. It’s why we spend most of the time at my place.
Summer opens the door with a manic grin. “You’ll never guess what I bought?”
Pushing past her, I look around the living room but don’t see anything that immediately catches my eye. “Do I want to know?”
She’s already nodding her head. “It’s going to help us with our situation,” she promises and that can mean quite literally anything from a sex toy to a gun.
I really hope it’s neither one of those options though and somewhere in between.
I’m not totally sure what’s between those two things but anything would be better.
I’d be more likely to shoot myself with a gun than protect myself with it, and I’ve been gifted enough sex toys recently.
Grabbing my hand, she pulls me into her room. Far too excited for all of the nonsense that’s been unfolding in my life like the plots of one of our favorite books.
“Ta da,” she exclaims, complete with jazz fingers as she shows off her surprise waiting in her room for us.
It’s…not what I was expecting. “A whiteboard?”
“And magnets!” Summer is way more excited than I can even begin to fathom. Didn’t she say this was going to help with my situation?
I fail to see where magnets fit into being stalked by masked men with murderous urges.
She smacks my arm when she sees my bewilderment and groans. “It’s to help us put all the pieces together, duh.” Her excitement is still being lost on me. “Never mind, you’ll see,” she promises. “Did you bring the notes?”
I nod, grabbing the notes I haven’t handed over to the police from my bag and give them to her. Using the magnets, she adds each one to the whiteboard, stopping to write dates on the board next to them in black marker.
Not that any part of my life has seemed reasonable lately, but something about this seems especially unhinged. Then again, maybe that ship sailed as soon as I started lying to the police to cover up for the men stalking me who are also most likely murderers.
And sent me a fucking liver.
I shiver and Summer gives me an empathetic look. “Thinking about the liver again?”
My lip curls in disgust. “What the fuck am I doing, Sum?”
“Living out your very own dark romance,” she says sagely.
This truly is insane. Maybe I should call the cops and hand them over everything I have.
I can lie. Say I hadn’t noticed until I was going through the doorbell footage.
I don’t have to tell them everything. Like how they definitely made me come in my sleep and left behind evidence to prove it.
How I liked it. How I wanted more of it.
She finishes putting the notes up on the board, adding other events and dates in between, creating a timeline of sorts. Each gift, note, sighting, and video we have is now notated in chronological order. “Why did you want to meet here, by the way?”
I sigh, throwing myself down on the bed. “I’m almost positive there actually are cameras in my house.”
Her mouth drops open in surprise. “No fucking way.”
“How else would they know my security passcode? My fantasies? When those gifts seemed way too perfectly timed to have been a coincidence. Everything. It all points back to me being watched.”
She tilts her head at the board, looking at it from different angles, not that there’s much to look at currently. “I really need to stop speaking things into existence,” she ponders and I snort. She has been hitting the nail on the head a little too closely lately.
Summer eyes me with a predatory gleam in her eyes and I’m already shaking my head. I don’t think I want to know whatever is running through her head. She grabs a different color marker and begins to write under her current timeline a different set of events.
Each and every time I’ve interacted with the guys.
I groan, “Not this again.” I grab a pillow and bury my face in it, seriously contemplating suffocating myself. Put us all out of our misery. “There were only two of them.”
“That you know of,” she points out. “I’m manifesting it for you. If I can speak things into existence, this is my first pick.”
Pulling the pillow away from my face, I throw it at her.
“It’s not them. They were with me at the party when I saw him.
” And I have been avoiding them since the whole liver fiasco.
They weren’t thrilled to know I had a stalker, less thrilled to hear about Richards, and most upset that I didn’t ask them for help.
She turns around, one hand on her hip as she points at me with her uncapped red expo marker. “Were they though?”
“What do you mean?” We were definitely together. My blue dress had the white and black paint on it the next day to prove it. Maybe another reason I’ve been avoiding them. We haven’t really talked about the whole I’ve kissed all three of them plus some yet either.
“I mean,” she drawls, “did you see the masked man when all three men were with you?”
I click my tongue, running through my memories. They’re still as hazy and fragmented as they were when I woke up in the morning, even if the fog has cleared from my mind now. “I don’t know.”
I can’t be sure of anything. There was a good portion of the night I was only with two of them, though it switched between Jude and Ezra.
Did I see the masked man again after Ezra joined us again?
I’m not so sure I did. There was even a moment I thought I was dancing with the masked man, but when I looked again it was only West. As it had been all night.
West was the only one who never left my side. It had to have been some kind of hallucination. My fear playing tricks on my brain. Then Jude was there, but Ezra was gone. And the stranger was in the trees. Did I see him again after that?
“What do you think?” she pushes. “I know your memory is fucked, but you’re thinking something.”
Having a best friend who knows you so well can truly be so infuriating. “I don’t have any memory of seeing him when all three guys were with me,” I admit reluctantly. “But that means nothing. I also never saw two masked men together at the party.”
She shrugs but keeps grinning, pointing back at the whiteboard. “There is a lot of overlap,” she notes. “Food for thought.”
I roll my eyes. “Can we be serious? What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to figure out who your stalkers are,” she promises. “And then we can decide if you want to keep them or not.”
The fact we’re talking about murderers seems to be lost on her. “The men who murdered our professor?”
“Allegedly,” she drags out the word. “And plus, he deserved it. He was scum. Wasn’t really an alleged murder as much as allegedly taking out the trash. Practically community service if you think about it. Allegedly.”
I can only stare at my best friend in disbelief. Maybe she needs therapy more than I thought.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she scolds. “It’s not my first rodeo,” she reminds me and I have to concede that point. She’s right. Richards was a predator and if there’s anyone who believes that the world is better off without him, it’s Summer.
I guess it’s not all that surprising that she would feel this way about the situation. It’s almost too reminiscent of what she went through.
“How are you holding up through this?” I press and now it’s her turn to roll her eyes at me. She constantly worries about me, but the second the tables are turned…
“I have no regrets about the choice I made, B. You know that.” Her tone is hard, but not with anger.
She looks me dead in the eye, no joking or teasing.
Not even a hint of her usual smile. “I would kill him again even if I could go back and do things differently.” There’s so much confidence in her words there’s no way I could doubt her.
I’ve always been jealous of Summer’s ability to stand up for herself. To know she was worth saving even at the cost of someone else’s life. She may have been holding the weapon, but she wasn’t the monster in the room that night.
If I can look at her and believe that fact with my whole chest, why is it different with Richards? Because he hadn’t been preying on me my entire life the way Summer’s step-father had with her? Or because I just don’t value myself the same way I do her?
We already know I wasn’t his only victim. And what about next semester? Would he choose a new victim until the end of time? Would he have grown more bold? More violent?
There’s no way to know, but is that really such a bad thing?
“Are we just trying to rationalize something we have no business trying to justify because we think the masked men thing is kind of hot?”
Summer gives me a deadpan look. “I think you care too much.”
“Somebody died,” I groan.
“A man who was willing to hurt you is now no longer capable of doing so. That’s the only thing I care about,” she argues.
“Hell, I’ll write your stalkers a thank you card right now.
” I may not have known Summer before she went through everything she did, but I know it changed her.
Hardened her, made her edges sharp and jagged.
A defense mechanism to keep people out and to keep herself from letting the wrong person in all over again.
A man she trusted abused that trust in the most evil way possible and paid the greatest price for it. I feel relieved she feels no guilt over that and yet worry about my friend all the same. I have no idea how I got past her layers and layers of barbed wire, but I’m grateful I did.
“You’re ridiculous,” I chastise, but my lips twitch despite myself. I’m not nearly as torn up as it seems about the whole thing. But it’s that little fact that is beating at me.
This isn’t how I should be feeling. This isn’t something I should be able to accept. Let alone be something that does feel kind of sweet.