Love in the Time of Serial Killers(64)

“I can hear your brain working,” Sam said.

I rolled over, propping myself up on my elbows so I could look down into his face. He smiled at me, a little bemused, until he seemed to sense that my thoughts were veering down a more serious path. His hand dropped from my hair, and already it scared me, how much the loss of that brief contact caused something to hollow out in my stomach.

“I need to finish my dissertation,” I said.

“Okay.”

“I had a chapter due to my advisor like, a week ago,” I said. “And then I still have another chapter after that, and a bunch of work on the conclusion and the bibliography and god, the formatting, it’ll be a nightmare because I’ve been copy-and-pasting citations in as I go . . . and Conner is coming over tomorrow to help with the house, and I know he’s going to want to debrief about the proposal fiasco and brainstorm new ways to do it. All I can say is if he’s planning a flash mob or anything involving equestrian dressage, he’s on his own, because I don’t dance and I’m not getting on a horse.”

“You’ll get it done,” Sam said. “And if I can help, I will. Not with the dissertation, because my only contribution would be to Select All and then make the font the same, and I assume you know how to do that yourself.”

“I do,” I said. “They taught a whole class on it my second year.”

“Well, there you go. I’ve already proved my ability to edge a tight corner with paint, and I’d welcome the opportunity to show off again. If that’s me swinging my dick around too much, just let me know.”

I gave a surprised snort of laughter. Already I could see what a bad influence I was on Sam. I would’ve made that kind of crass comment when we first met, just to shock him. But now here he was, although even in the dark I felt like I could see the color slant across his cheeks. I hoped he never lost that.

“I’m just saying I may need some space,” I said, suddenly more serious. “Not in a Taylor Swift kind of way. I do want to be with you . . . I just have a lot going on. I need you to understand if I have to hole up next door for a couple days to finish a draft or whatever.”

“Phoebe,” he said. “I get it. I don’t expect you to drop everything to be with me. We can take it slow, okay?”

I nodded, swallowing around the lump in my throat.

“If you still want to head back next door, though, you should probably do it. That position is not conducive to me giving you space.”

I glanced down. My arms were pushing my breasts together, making my cleavage look even deeper than usual. “Oh my god,” I said. “My tits look amazing.”

“I know,” Sam said. “That’s my point.”

“They may never look this good again. Take a picture.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

I slid up against his body, until I felt the hard length of him on my thigh. “We can start with the space thing in, like, twenty minutes,” I said.

“Forty-five?”

“An hour, max.”

“I can work with that,” he said, and grabbed my ass with both hands, pulling me on top of him.





NINETEEN





I DID EVENTUALLY MAKE it back to my dad’s house, although not until two in the morning. So when Conner showed up bright and early—without bothering to text first—he didn’t quite get the reception he’d obviously been hoping for.

“This is dedication,” he said, holding up his injured wrist, which was now wrapped in a simple bandage. A full cast had ended up not being necessary, or else Conner hadn’t wanted to pay for it. It wasn’t clear. “If I could’ve been this responsible in college, I wouldn’t have failed so many eight a.m. classes.”

“How many did you sign up for before you realized eight in the morning was too early?”

He scrunched up his face, thinking. “Four? To be fair, I only failed one. I dropped two others and skated through another with a B-minus. The prof even stopped coming by the end of that one.”

I’d been so focused in college, determined to take as many classes as possible and maintain a mind-boggling number of lists to keep everything straight. Sometimes it felt like the only semiwild thing I’d done was the time I’d performed a parody version of Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” for a fundraising event for the undergraduate literary magazine. I’d consumed an uncharacteristic amount of liquid courage beforehand, so all I could remember was the first line of the song. Wake up in the morning feeling like Joan Didion / I grab my laptop I’m out the door I’m gonna write some fiction. After that it was a blessed blur.

“So,” Conner said, waggling his eyebrows like something out of a cartoon. “The neighbor, huh?”

“I can’t believe you and Shani took a bet on it.”

“After the party, Shani was like, oh, now I see why she’s so obsessed with him,” Conner said. “Which I was fine with, because I’m secure like that. She said she bet there was more going on there than just your supposed fear of being mutilated in your sleep, and I said, nuh-uh, you don’t know my sister. She really does think about serial killers that much.”

Bizarrely, I was kind of touched by Conner’s defense of me. But I didn’t feel like giving him that ammunition, and I really didn’t feel like discussing Sam. So instead I turned my attention to the pantry, trying to see what paltry breakfast I could scrounge up. I wasn’t normally a big breakfast-eater, the occasional Waffle House trip notwithstanding, and the leftover groceries at this point appeared to be mainly Pop-Tarts or granola bars.