Chapter 12
CHAPTER 12
KIARA
Two weeks later
“Have you told your grandma what happened yet?” Yolanda asks me over the phone. It’s ten 0’clock at night, and I’m sitting on my window seat, looking out through my bay windows to the field behind my house. The moonlight glints off the blades of grass from the drizzling that’s started.
I chew on a fingernail and scan the large open field to the abandoned neighborhood beyond it. For some reason, the masked man hasn’t been back in a few weeks. Not physically, anyway. He texts me several times every day, and I ignore them.
Well, I don’t respond to them. He gets left on read every single time, and I feel like that will come back to bite me in the ass one of these days.
“No,” I say with a sigh, toying with my locket. “I just can’t right now, Yo. I don’t think I ever will.”
Yolanda says something to someone, and I feel bad for calling her when she’s at work.
“Do you want me to call you back tomorrow?” I suggest.
“No, it’s fine. I just need these people to leave me the hell alone when I’m on break,” she says irritably. “Anyway, has the man come back to finish what he started?”
And by that, she means take the things he didn’t the first time, because, again, I can’t tell her what actually happened between us. I haven’t even told her there was another man in the house, because she really would call the police herself.
“No,” I say again.
She sighs. “Well, at this point, I guess it’s better to just try to pretend that night didn’t happen.”
If only you knew…
I chuckle to lighten the mood, twirling a strand of hair around my finger nervously. For some reason, I’m feeling really jittery tonight. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Hey, did you ever figure out what happened to that old man?” I ask quickly to change the subject.
Yolanda is a nurse at the local hospital, so she has no shortage of crazy stories. I use that to my advantage tonight, because I really want to take my mind off everything.
We talk for her entire thirty-minute break, then I let her go so she can go back to work. Lifting my arms over my head, I stretch out the muscles in my back and shoulders that have been so tight and tense lately.
“Kiara?” Grandma says from the other side of my door. I go to open it and see her standing there with a glass of milk and a small plate of chocolate chip cookies. I smile and take the snack from her. “This used to always help you sleep when you were little.”
I set the milk on my nightstand and bite into one of the cookies. “I remember. Thank you, Grandma.”
She kisses me goodnight and goes to her room. I close my door again and sit on the bed with my milk and cookies, watching TV until I get tired.
***
The moonlight casts shadows along the walls of my darkened bedroom. I’m not sleeping with the TV on tonight. I refuse to let him make me scared in my own home.
But it doesn’t change the fact that I am, in fact, scared as I lie here with the knife he gave me clutched to my chest, waiting for him to slip in and do God knows what to me. For some reason, I just know he’s coming back tonight.
I can feel it.
I hate how confused I’ve been, the constant push-and-pull of my emotions. It makes no sense that I’m as scared as I am, but also as turned on as I have been. Of course, fear is a natural human reaction, but being aroused at the thought of my intruder coming back to steal from me certainly isn’t.
I wish Mom were here. She was my best friend; no part of my life was a secret from her—except this . These urges that I feel in an otherwise fucked up situation.
What’s that saying? How can something so wrong feel so right?
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my entire life right now.
Letting out a defeated sigh, I lie on my stomach with the knife resting next to my pillow and close my eyes to try to get some sleep.