Love in the Time of Serial Killers(55)

After Conner left, I paced around the house, restless. I tried to sit down at my desk to work on my dissertation, but the only thing I ended up drafting was an apology email to Dr. Nilsson, telling her I hadn’t been feeling well but would get her the Capote chapter soon. I opened up her notes on the Helter Skelter chapter but the sheer amount of tracked changes overwhelmed me and so I closed them up again. I could tackle those later.

I wasn’t going to feel right until I talked with Sam, however scary that might seem. I needed to know where we stood.

Of course, right as I opened the front door to leave, that damn cat darted in again, making another beeline right for my room. After days of hoping she’d show up and being disappointed when she hadn’t, now here she was, no doubt looking to camp out under my bed again while I plied her with delicious food. Well, not this time.

I did go back and fill a shallow bowl with water, setting it in the middle of my bedroom floor for her to drink from. I wasn’t a monster.

“That’s all you’re getting for now, Lenore,” I said aloud to the room. “If you want food you’re going to have to be sociable.” Then, after thinking for a moment: “Actually, I would hate for my sustenance to be tied to my ability to relate to other people, so fuck it, stay under there if you want. Just don’t use the bathroom. Got it?”

Something told me she didn’t have it. But I left anyway, sending a brief prayer to the feline gods that she wouldn’t claw and spray everything in sight or whatever cats did when humans left them alone for ten minutes.

I knocked on Sam’s door, my heart in my throat as I waited on the step to see if he’d open it. I guessed I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t, after the abrupt way I’d left earlier. I was fifty-fifty on whether I would’ve.

But I was banking on Sam being more emotionally well-adjusted than me, and I was right, because he finally came to the door. He still hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt, which was totally fine—it was his house—but which would make trying to talk to him that much more distracting. I could make out a small circular mark above his left nipple from where I must’ve given him a hickey. My gaze shot up to his face, which was unreadable.

“Hey,” I said. “Can I come in?”

He stepped aside, letting me follow him through the door until we were both standing in his living room. I crossed over to the pictures above the piano, pointing to each face in turn. “Let me guess,” I said, pointing first to a woman who looked about a decade older than Sam. “That’s Tara, that’s Jack in the Cubs hat, Megan is in between, Erin’s got the pink shirt on, and that’s Dylan with his arm around you.” I squinted closer at the picture. “Are you wearing a shell necklace? What year is this from?”

It was a cheap parlor trick, but I thought maybe he’d be impressed by my memory. I’d always had a knack for those first-day-of-school games where we had to go around the room and name every student who’d come before us and the one fact they’d told about themselves. Plus, I wanted to show him that I’d been listening. That I cared.

“You switched Megan and Erin,” he said, not seeming as impressed as I’d hoped. Not seeming much of anything. He was more of a stranger than when I’d stood on his doorstep to drop off a package. “But otherwise, yeah. Did Conner leave?”

“A few minutes ago,” I said. “And the cat came back. Just like you said she would.”

“Great.”

The problem was that my first instinct was to try to kiss him, to see if I could get him to melt into me the way he had last night. But I knew that would be a mistake. The physical stuff wasn’t the issue here.

“Sam . . .” I swallowed, wishing I knew what to say, wishing there was some magic formula where I could give him as much of me as he wanted, but hold enough back to avoid being vulnerable. I had a sneaking suspicion that the formula didn’t exist; that it was an unsolvable equation.

He glanced toward the table, where I saw there was a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. I’d interrupted his lunch, too. God, I was the worst.

“It’s my fault,” he said finally. “I guess after last night I thought . . .” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, even though it clearly did. “If you don’t want to tell your brother yet, I get it. It’s more that I can’t figure out what you would tell him.”

“Not any of the details, that’s for sure,” I said. “My mother once told me about an incident with my stepdad involving a sex swing, and I’ll never be able to bleach that image from my brain. It’s made Christmases with them unbearable.”

Sam smiled a little, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “I mean, what are we doing? Am I your boyfriend now, are we friends with benefits, was that a one-night stand . . . ?”

The way he said boyfriend sent a thrill up my spine. Which was ridiculous, because that was the last thing I wanted or needed right now—especially when I wasn’t even planning to be in town for that long. But suddenly he said that word and I was back in tenth grade again, doodling my crush’s name in the margins of my math homework.

“I definitely want more than one night,” I said.

His eye contact was all-consuming. “So do I.”

“After that . . .” I shrugged helplessly. “Can’t we just be two people? Two people who live next door to each other and hang out and hook up sometimes—preferably a lot of times—but who don’t have any expectations beyond that for now?”