He isn’t kidding about there being no way out of his penthouse. After Ari leaves, I try the elevator again, realize there’s no getting out that way and then search the space for emergency stairs.
Fortunately, I find some. Unfortunately, that door is locked up tight, just like Ari’s bedroom door as well. If a fire occurs, I’m as good as dead, but it doesn’t appear he cares much.
Everything else is fair game though, but after he leaves, I can’t bring myself to look around. To run my fingers over the spines of all the books I’ve read, to pluck a string on the cello, to stare at photos I’d taken several years before I made my life the mess it is.
And that’s how it goes for several days after.
Every day, Ari leaves and I’m alone in his penthouse. Food is stocked in the fridge, clean clothes are left in my room, there’s a television to watch if I want, but that’s it.
He’s essentially trapped me with the relics of who I once was from the time the sun comes up to the time it goes down, and I refuse to touch any of it.
I spend my nights in bed sleeping soundly, waking up from a dark oblivion I’m not used to, but only because I also wake up each morning to find the sheets rumpled, my legs sticky and the telltale ache between my legs that someone had been there taking what they want.
Apparently, I can get him off despite what he claimed. But he prefers the sleeping version of Adeline. The one that reminds him of who I used to be.
Ari is right that I sleep better after a good fucking, what he doesn’t know is that I’m not completely unaware.
What happens to me while I’m sleeping occurs the same in dreams. And it kills me to realize that the diaphanous shadow I’d never been able to reach has solidified into a demon who has wrecked my world and stole me away as if he owns me.
But touching him, feeling the weight of him finally...it sets my heart at ease, and I’m not crying out anymore with the desperation to hold onto him.
I should be fucking terrified of what he’s doing. Angry. I know that. Ari is a stranger, if that’s even his real name. He’s a ghost. One that shows up when I’m not looking and is gone when the sun dissolves the shadows of the night.
In a way, this past week has been spent like all the years he’s followed me. I don’t know what he does for a living. Where he’s from. What his hobbies and interests are, even though, on that one, I can take a guess. I don’t know what he’s thinking or why he thinks what he does. I don’t know when he’s watching, and that’s the most fucked up part of all.
All I know is he’s a beautiful man, one who can drive my body to places it’s never been, and he’s obsessed with the woman he thinks I am.
The woman I used to be.
A fucked up young girl who was spinning out of control without knowing which direction to turn next.
Maybe I’m still that girl, because it shouldn’t be comforting to wake up every morning knowing he’d been there. It shouldn’t make me sleep better to know he’s standing over me.
I should be terrified.
But I’m not.
At least until the morning comes when I wake up to clean sheets and my pillow on the floor. To clean thighs and my blankets wrapped around my legs. To dreams that had me crying again because the shadow never came.
He never showed up. And that terrifies me more than anything.
Jumping out of bed, I don’t bother going to the bathroom first before running down the hall barefoot and in nothing but a t-shirt.
So many thoughts are colliding in my head.
Maybe he got in a car accident and is hurt or dead. Maybe I’m stuck here, and nobody will know to look for me. Maybe he slept somewhere else, found another woman to obsess over.
That last thought hurts the worst.
Turning the corner, I stop dead in my tracks when I’m pinned by a pair of brown eyes I don’t recognize. A short shriek tears from my throat to see a stranger, my body jumping back behind the wall as I peek out at him.
The man cocks a brow and reclines lazily on the couch, his expression stern, but the faint smudge of