Chapter 2
RETH
Flashback
Iwait across the street. Her window is a square of warmth in the dark—cheap fairy lights threading soft over books. She stands at the glass in those ridiculous wreath pajamas, hair scraped into a knot that keeps slipping, lips moving with a song I can’t hear.
She lights a candle. Match. Strike. I imagine hearing the small sound even from out here. She cups the flame like a secret and sets it in the sill beside the paper stars.
I catalog the details no one else bothers with—how she chews the inside of her cheek when she’s thinking, how she straightens the same crooked star twice but leaves it crooked anyway, smiling at her own imperfection.
Study the way she leans her forearms on the frame; the way the fabric at her hips pulls when she shifts her weight; the way her breath fogs the pane and clears, fogs and clears—a rhythm I could live inside.
She leaves the window and pads across the room. The fairy lights catch on her cheeks and turn her hair gold as she sits on the stool by her kitchen counter and pulls out a braid of red ribbon, measuring it against her forearm, then snips it clean.
She fumbles with the paper, creasing each corner with her thumb, then ties the bow tight. Her tongue slips out at the corner of her mouth when she finishes the knot. When she’s done, she tosses the leftover scrap into the trash without looking.
A neighbor leaves the lobby, and I catch the door with two fingers, slipping inside and taking the stairs two at a time past the flaking green paint I already made a mental note to fix. The building was never an investment. It was proximity. Access. A way to breathe the same air she breathes.
I lean against the paper-thin walls. Life leaks through them if you know where to listen.
She hums while she works—a carol, soft and off-key, barely louder than the old pipes. I tilt my head, greedy for every note. To anyone else, it’s nothing, just a girl humming in her apartment. To me it’s a hook in the chest, sweetness I have no right to want and softness I don’t deserve.
Her phone rings, and I lean in, catching the cadence of her voice.
“Hey… yeah, I got home okay. Laundry night.” A small laugh, the one she uses when she’s trying to sound lighter than she feels. “No, I didn’t forget about you.”
She shifts, and the floor creaks under her steps.
“Coffee tomorrow morning?” Her voice lifts, hopeful in that quiet way that makes my jaw tighten. “Eight-thirty works. There’s that little place on Pine? Yeah, perfect.”
Another laugh, softer this time. “Okay. See you then.”
A pause. Then, almost under her breath, “‘Night, Dean.”
The name lands like a blade between my ribs. Jealousy slides up my spine, hot and smooth and familiar. I close my eyes, forehead against the wall, and picture his hand in her hair—casual, certain, like he has any right to touch what he doesn’t understand.
He doesn’t. I do.
I see the angle, thumb at her nape, fingers curling, forcing her shoulder back until she gives that small embarrassed laugh she uses when she’s trying not to take up space. I imagine taking that hand and crushing every fucking bone until the sound matches the snap of a twig in snow.
I slow my breathing and force the image down. I don’t act on impulse. If I did, I’d already be watching her stand over his grave.
They haven’t known each other long. Two weeks, three days, four hours, and twenty-two minutes. They’ve gone on three dates, of which I am intimately aware.
The first date—a casual drink at a local pub that rolled into three hours of talking under dim yellow lights.
The second—an impromptu lunch he invited her to, a half-eaten sandwich in a crowded café, abruptly cut short when his phone rang.
The third—a night of too-loud music in a club she’d never have chosen herself.
But she laughed anyway. Too quick. Too polite.
The laugh she uses when she’s trying. Her discomfort was palpable even from the corner where I watched.
Dean must’ve noticed too. Because the next morning, he waited outside her apartment building with an apologetic smile and a Starbucks cup with her favorite coffee. A cinnamon dolce latte. Extra cinnamon.
He’s learning her.
But tomorrow? Tomorrow will be the fourth. Dangerously close to a pattern. To habit. To expectation.
I don’t fucking like it.
I hear the latch, the creak of wood, then the slam of her front door.
Her footsteps float down the stairs, light and airy.
She passes beneath the flickering landing light, and I see her the way I always do—in fragments.
The shape of her calf under those wreath-print pajama pants, the bare strip of ankle above her socks, her sweater riding up when she steadies the laundry basket against her hip so that for one breath her waist shows—pale, warm, real. A glimpse she doesn’t know she gives.
A glimpse I take anyway.
She heads down to the basement laundry room, still humming. Always humming.
The woman lives in a crummy apartment, spending her days wading through other people’s pain, doing supervised hours at a child advocacy center for next to nothing while putting herself through her master’s on whatever’s left of her inheritance.
What the fuck is there to hum about?
The door groans as she shoulders it open, and I wait, letting the seconds stretch while I count the rhythm of her movements.
The sound of her rifling through the basket, a pause, a frustrated sigh, then her quick steps back up the stairs because she forgot detergent. I smile at the predictability of it.
The hall goes quiet again, and I slip inside.
The laundry room breathes damp and warm as the machines shudder and click. Her basket sits open on the table, full. Folded jeans, the cream sweater she wore yesterday, a tangle of flannel.
Lace catches on my fingers when I shift the pile—soft, almost weightless, but it drags heat up my arm like a spark finding gasoline.
The straps are so thin they look breakable.
Like they were made to be snapped. Made to be pulled between teeth.
My grip tightens before I can stop it, and the lace bites back, delicate and sharp all at once.
I picture her stepping into it. One leg, then the other—hips swaying slightly as she drags it up her thighs. I see the way it would cling to her skin, the way it would sit against her, a whisper of white stretched over the softest part of her.
My mouth goes dry, my body reacting like it recognizes her even though I’ve never touched her. Like it already knows exactly how she would feel under my hands.
Heat settles low in my gut, and my mind immediately tries to kill the thought before it becomes an impulse. Because if I let myself think about her like that for too long, I’ll do something I can’t undo.
Something permanent. Something Dean Murdoch would bleed for.
I swallow hard, forcing the image down, but it clings anyway—lace and skin, her thighs parting, the faint stretch of fabric over—
Fuck.
I can’t lose control.
I drag in a slow breath through my nose, forcing control into my lungs like a drug, then shove the lace back into the pile. I lift a pair of socks to cover the fact that my hand hovers.
A piece of ribbon lies lost in the heap—bright red against pale cotton, coiled loose from the gift she wrapped. She must’ve dropped it without noticing. A careless toss when she bundled the basket.
Careless. That’s the thing about her. She scatters pieces of herself without knowing, and I gather them because I’m the only one who sees their worth.
I hook it around my finger once, twice. The satin is cheap, rough if you rub it the wrong way. It bites, and I like that it does. I like that even something soft about her has an edge.
I pocket it.
When she comes back down with her detergent, she’ll never know something is missing. But I’ll know. I always know.
My heart starts to beat wrong—too loud, too fast, like my body is forgetting the rules I taught it. This is what she does when I’m near her too long. She makes me feel the shape of what I don’t get to have. What I don’t get to touch. What my life will never allow.
The resentment simmers, then burns, but not at her. At the fact that she exists in a world I can’t step into without breaking it.
I leave. I have to. There’s a fracture in me when I’m around her, a hairline crack in the discipline I’ve built my entire life around.
I feel it in the way my hands flex like they’re reaching for her without permission, in the way my jaw locks until my teeth ache, in the way my thoughts stop being fantasies and start becoming impulses—hot, stupid, ruinous.
Outside, the wind snaps at my face, cold enough to sting, sharp enough to drag me back into my body. Snow dusts the tops of cars and gathers on the lampposts in white clumps.
I walk without hurry, because if I run, I’ll come back, and I can’t afford that. Not tonight.
I think of Dean Murdoch and his neat cuffs and the way he moves like a man who’s never had to measure himself against consequences.
I think of how easily men like him take ownership of something tender simply because they can.
Men like him take freedom for granted, think with their dicks and fuck their way through life without appreciating what it is they’re using. Who it is they’re breaking.
My path through the neighborhood is muscle memory now—the deli that closes at ten, the florist that never throws broken stems away, the church whose side gate sticks in the cold. I’ve mapped this grid by her habits. A predator’s map isn’t lines on paper. It’s instinct and repetition.
There’s no telling how long I’ve been walking before I loop back to her building, ending where I started. Watching. Always watching. I’m calmer now. More controlled.
Her window is still bright. She sits with her knees tucked under a blanket in the chair by the plant she’s half-killed by overwatering.
She reads, then doesn’t. She stares into the candle.
When the wax gutters, she cups her hand around the flame and blows.
The room darkens a degree. She stands and stretches, arms overhead, belly exposed for a breath under cotton—soft and vulnerable in a way that makes my hands ache.
When she turns off the lamp and the window goes black, I let the dark hold her shape for one more second while the ribbon in my pocket is a coiled promise.
Tomorrow I’ll be standing here in this exact spot…again.