Chapter 36 Kai
Kai
Something wet patters against my cheek, forcing my eyelids open.
My neck screams in protest as I lift my head from its awkward angle against the windowsill.
It’s dark outside.
Jesus, how long have I been out? Minutes? Hours?
The joint jammed between my fingers burned itself out, leaving a trail of ash across my jeans. Empty beer bottles form a semi-circle on the floor by the window, like some half-assed séance where the ghost refused to show.
“Fuck,” I mumble, squinting out the window as another breeze blows drizzle against my face.
When did it start raining? Judging from my damp hoodie, quite a while ago.
My mouth tastes like an ashtray from all the weed I’ve smoked. My head filled with pencil shavings instead of brains. The bottle of J?ger I’d been nursing sloshes in my lap as I shift position, and I groan when I realize I’m going to be hungover as fuck tomorrow morning.
Where the fuck is my phone?
Actually, fuck that. I hope it fell into a black hole.
I blink, trying to bring the world into focus. The sorority houses across the road are all lit up, but my eyes flicker instinctively to Gamma Alpha Zeta.
I’ve been staring at it all day, one window in particular. Waiting. Watching.
Like a fucking stalker.
A pathetic, obsessed—
The sound of a car door slamming cuts through my thoughts.
I fumble for the binoculars on the other side of the windowsill, nearly dropping them out the window. Dahmer lent them to me earlier today, not even bothering to ask what I needed them for.
All the better to stalk Haven with, my dear.
The world swims as I press them to my eyes, struggling to adjust the focus with trembling hands.
Speak of the fucking angel.
Haven materializes in my viewfinder like the very ghost I’d apparently been trying to summon with my beer bottles, wrapped in a ridiculous pastel blue poncho that makes her look like a lost child. She’s just gotten out of the Land Rover.
Where the fuck did she come from?
Where did she go?
Motherfucking Cotton Eyed Joe.
Jesus, I think I’m still drunk.
I keep the binoculars focused on Haven’s blue poncho as she moves over the road. Not heading inside, where it’s warm, and dry—
and men are waiting to creep into her room
—but across the road.
My heart thumps at the thought that she might be heading this way.
Because she knows I was there this morning.
She’s on her way over to confront me.
But the angle’s wrong. She’s crossing straight over, seconds away from disappearing out of sight behind a frat house four doors down. Just before she vanishes, she raises an arm, taking a swig from the bottle in her hands.
Her movements are jerky, uncoordinated.
She’s drunk.
Just like me.
“Look what he did to you,” I grate out.
Even from this distance, I can see the change in her. The way her shoulders hunch forward. The careful way she walks, like something inside her is broken.
My beautiful Haven, defiled by a beast, while I watched from a fucking closet not five feet away.
Haven vanishes from sight, leaving me staring at the empty, rain-soaked street.
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see stars, trying to erase the images burned into my retinas.
Haven’s limp body.
Bastian’s hands spreading her thighs.
The blood on his mouth.
My own pathetic erection straining against my jeans as I filmed him eating her out. Spitting inside her. Fucking her. Kissing her.
A wave of nausea swells so violently I slide off the windowsill into a clatter of beer bottles. There’s a thump against my hip as gravity claims the phone in my pocket.
I’ve pulled it out at least twenty times today, thumb hovering over the delete button before I chickened out. It’s insurance, I told myself. Leverage against Bastian. That’s the only reason I’m keeping it.
Not because I’ve watched it countless times.
Not because I hate myself more with each viewing.
Not because some sick part of me gets hard every time I hear the sound she makes when he pushes into her limp body.
I fight back the urge to puke with a hard swallow.
Don’t need another written warning for puking inside the house. I’m on two strikes already.
The world tilts dangerously as I stumble for my bedroom door, but muscle memory takes over—grabbing jacket, shoving feet into boots. My body knows what to do, regardless how fucked up my mind is.
I’ve followed Haven since we met in the woods.
At first it was just walking her home to make sure she got back to her trailer okay. She would never let me inside, and always told me to hide so her dad wouldn’t see me, but I’d do it anyway.
When I realized she went to the same school as me, I began following her in the mornings, too. Our elementary school was only a few blocks down the road, but the shortest route went past some abandoned factories, and those were dodgy as shit.
I just wanted to make sure she was safe.
No one else was gonna.
She finished school before I did, but I’d cut class when the thought of her walking home alone left me unable to concentrate anyway.
That’s when I realized that she often went straight to the woods after school. That she’d been waiting for me to get home, sometimes two to three hours.
Alone.
In the woods.
I know she’s not a fucking pussy. She can handle herself.
If she’s conscious. Not fucked up on molly. Or drugged with sleeping pills—or whatever the fuck she was on today.
The rain is a fine mist that coats to my skin and hair as I track her across campus. She doesn’t care about being seen—stumbling across open spaces, taking the most direct route rather than sticking to shadows. I hang back, clinging to the shadows, using the cars in the lot for cover.
All while glimpses of that fucking video keep peek-a-booing my subconscious mind, forcing me to swallow down the nausea that threatens to bring up all the booze I’ve consumed.
Just before she reaches the woods beside the library gardens, Haven stops dead in her tracks.
I freeze behind a low hedge, popping down in case she looks my way.
Haven spins around, scouring the walkway. My pulse skips when she looks straight at me, but her eyes move on a second later.
She’s too drunk, or I’m too well hidden, for her to spot me.
But she knows.
She can feel me.
Even when she was a kid, she had a sixth sense about these things.
About me. At first I thought I was scaring her, the way she’d constantly check behind her, hands tightening on her scuffed yellow backpack, shoulders hunching.
But weeks after I started following her, she began wearing a faint smile, chin lifted, almost strutting to and from school.
I like to think my invisible presence gave her that confidence.
Or maybe our games did.
Would she feel the same if she knew I’d been follower her on-and-off since she came back to Agony Hollow? Taking photos. Videos.
Stalking her?
“You want a piece of me?” Haven yells, waving the bottle at no one. “Then come get me, motherfucker!”
Her manic laugh sends a shudder through me, and I have to force myself not to sprint after her when she plunges into the darkness between the trees.
Instead, I give her a thirty-second head start, counting under my breath to ground myself.
I make it to twenty-three.
The scent of wet soil and pine needles hits me as I slip quietly between the trees.
These aren’t our woods.
They’re just a small copse of trees separating the campus grounds from the farmland beyond. Nothing like the vast forest that stretched behind our trailer park.
But in the dark, rain misting around me as I follow her deeper inside, it’s familiar enough to conjure fucking ghosts.
Suddenly I’m fifteen again, leading Haven through the trees for another round of ‘Hide and Hunt.’
Hide and seek was for babies. ‘Hide and Hunt’ was our game, where I’d give her a head start, then track her through the woods like prey.
She’d try every trick—doubling back on her tracks, crossing the creek, climbing trees—but I always found her.
The hunt always ended in a sprint. Always ended with me tackling her to the forest floor.
Usually one—or both—of us with a skinned knee.
“Hunters always catch their prey,” I’d tell her, triumphant and breathless, as I pinned her beneath me.
In the beginning, catching her just meant tickling her until she screamed for mercy. As we became older, the game changed. Tickling became pinching. Then slapping. The older I got, the more my hands would linger, especially on those forbidden places.
The older she got, the less she struggled.
I shake away the memories, focusing on Haven’s uneven footsteps ahead of me.
She’s making no effort to be quiet, snapping twigs and splashing through puddles, letting out little hiccuping laughs that sound almost like sobs.
She staggers forward, bouncing between the trees like a pinball, her blue poncho snapping around her legs.
I move the way I taught myself to move when sneaking out of the single-wide past Dad when he was asleep on the recliner. Each step careful, deliberate, and most importantly, silent.
Piss easy in the middle of the day. Near impossible at night.
A twig snaps under my boot.
Haven stops.
I freeze, pressing my back against the damp bark of a nearby tree, holding my breath.
Silence, but for the plip-plop of rain.
Then her careful footsteps as she moves away from me.
No longer running, but searching. I risk a peek from behind my tree, spotting her easily.
She kept near the perimeter of the woods, I’m guessing so she wouldn’t twist an ankle in the dark.
There’s just enough light filtering through the trees from the campus’s flood lights to make her out.
She scowls as she whips her head around to search the trees.
Frustrated, angry, desperate.
God, she’s beautiful, even now. Especially now.
Broken and vulnerable and hurt.
The alcohol and weed in my system amplify everything—my desire, my self-loathing, my fury at myself for wanting her even more after what happened.