Follow Me(34)

Convinced I had awoken over nothing, I closed my eyes and rolled over, nestling beneath the soft new sheets I’d received from a start-up linen company in exchange for a review. Comfortable even when your sleep isn’t, I drafted in my head. No, that’s terrible. It should be something more like—

Scratch.

My eyes flew open. What the hell was that? I was almost certain it had been a footfall in the alley, and I lay still as a corpse in my bed, listening closely. I heard nothing—which, rather than reassuring me, made my skin prickle. Someone was out there and they weren’t moving through the alley. No, they had stopped right outside my window. The window that overlooked my bed.

With my pulse thundering in my ears, I carefully turned to face the window, pretending I was flipping in my sleep. I opened my eyes as much as I dared and peered up at the glass. I’d covered it with curtains in a cheerful yellow-and-cream chevron pattern, and in the space where they gapped, I saw the outline of something dark. I caught my breath. A shoe. Jesus Christ.

There was no reason for someone to be in that alley. It wasn’t a through street—just a narrow gap between two buildings. There was a gate at each end, ostensibly to keep people from using it as a footpath, but the gates were rarely latched and it wasn’t unheard-of for people to use it to cut through the block. That’s all that it is, I told myself. Someone trying to take a shortcut.

I remained perfectly still, watching the shoe, waiting for it and its owner to move on.

It didn’t.

Goddammit.

Don’t freak out, I told myself. I’m sure it’s just Ryan. He’s probably just looking to see if you’re home so he can try to break in again.

“Go,” I hissed at the window.

And still the feet remained.

I’m going to have to do something, I thought. I can’t just lie here all night with creepy Ryan outside my window.

My first thought was to call the police. I smiled as I imagined red and blue flashing lights pulling up outside, catching Ryan in the act of harassing me. It wouldn’t be so easy for Leanne to ignore his deplorable behavior then. My grin faded as I thought about what would come afterward: more middle-of-the-night buzzers, more illicit entries into my apartment, more of me feeling unsafe in my own home.

And what if it’s not Ryan? I challenged myself. What then?

I pictured myself calling the police, reporting a suspicion that someone was outside my window. I saw the officers rolling their eyes about silly women living in basement apartments and losing their pretty little minds over any passersby. How long would it take them to respond to a nonemergency like that? By the time they arrived, whoever it was could be long gone. Or what if the officers arrived and found it was nothing other than a homeless person looking for a safe space to sleep? I would feel awful.

Having talked myself out of calling the police, I climbed from bed, slipped my feet into flip-flops, and armed myself with a bottle of pinot grigio. It wasn’t the most conventional of weapons, but it would give me something to threateningly swing should Ryan—or whoever it was—lunge at me again. I gripped the neck tightly and hoped I wouldn’t have to use it.

I made my way through my front door and gate quietly, not wanting to alert the owner of the feet to my arrival. The night air was hot and sticky, and still a shiver ran down my spine.

Come on, Audrey, I chided. Let’s do this.

Keeping as close to the front of the building as possible, I crept to the corner, where I paused and listened. I heard someone breathing—panting, really, a disturbing sound that both convinced me this was no innocent party and enraged me.

I jumped around the corner, brandishing the bottle over my head, and shouted, “Hey!”

A shadowy form leapt up from a crouched position and sprinted down the alley away from me. I lowered the wine bottle as I processed what I had just seen.

He jumped up. That sick fuck was crouched down, looking through my windows.

Trembling with righteous fury, I ran back into my apartment, where I paced the floor.

Had that been Ryan? I couldn’t tell, it had been dark and I’d been blinded by adrenaline.

All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in that apartment any longer. I grabbed my purse and took off.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





HIM


Is this what a heart attack feels like? I wondered as I sat on my couch, clutching at my chest as I struggled to breathe normally. My entire body felt clammy, my pulse a runaway train. How could I have screwed things up so completely, so irreparably? Had Audrey seen my face?

I shouldn’t have been outside her window. I knew that. Of course I knew that. I told myself I was just there to see if she liked the flowers I’d left her, but that was a lie. I knew she liked the flowers: she had Instagrammed the bouquet that very night, captioning the image Surprise flowers are the best flowers. She’d appended the caption with an emoji of flowers and one of a face with heart-shaped eyes, and then a string of hashtags, ranging from #flowers to #someonelikesme.

No, the truth was that Audrey was a drug to me, her small, heart-shaped face a high I couldn’t stop chasing. Once I had been able to control myself, but now that she was here in DC, breathing the same air I was every single day, I had fallen completely off the wagon.

And so I stood outside her window for hours. My stomach rumbled and my legs cramped and still I didn’t leave. I was mesmerized by her sleeping form, could have watched her chest rise and fall all night long. She was so perfect, so dizzyingly, heartbreakingly perfect, that part of me longed to wrap my hand around her delicate throat and press my thumb against her windpipe gently, lovingly, until she stopped breathing, so she would stay just like this forever.