lived in her house, the more tangled I got in these cases, I wanted to know. I wanted to see the face of the person that did this. Not just that, I wanted to see into his mind. I wanted to talk to him. Know him.
That wasn’t healthy. But I knew that. I just didn’t care. I felt connected to him. Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to try and use my superior smarts to try and find a vicious serial killer who liked to torture women, but I wasn’t giving up my book or my research.
Research which consisted of fucking Saint and trying to figure out his connection with Emily.
The man who was sitting here, staring at me, not looking away, not embarrassed to be doing it. He did not seem affected, talking about his dead fuck buddy with his current fuck buddy and having been accused of her murder.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted that temper, that control, to explode.
“Are you suicidal?” he asked, breaking our silence. Interested but not concerned. Probing but not urgent. He was asking the question as if he were observing me for science more than anything else. Like he didn’t overtly care what the answer was. Like he didn’t care about me.
It was refreshing.
“No,” I said, after considering it. I knew why he was asking this question. I was surprised he hadn’t asked sooner. He got the details of things. Of me. So likely, he would’ve noticed my ankle hadn’t been hurt enough to explain me lying in the cold for hours. No head wounds. No limbs severed. I’d considered why I hadn’t fought harder every day. “Not suicidal. Just…tired.” It was the first time I’d admitted that. Weakness.
“Too tired to get up and limp back to your house?”
Again, curious, not worried. Not like he was going to offer to talk it out with me or put me in some kind of facility with locked doors and little cups of pills.
I shrugged. “I guess, at the time I must’ve been.”
I waited. For more. For questions. For assumptions. For judgment.
Nothing came.
My head was throbbing, the space behind my left eye the worst. Even though I made millions describing things—and doing it really fucking well, if I did say so myself—I was always at a loss to explain the depth of that pain. The blazing hot knife digging through my skull, the dull ache that turned into a throb. I had been convinced for a while it was a brain tumor.
I tended to think things like this.
Diagnose myself with the help of my computer and an internet connection. Hours lost over trying to match up my symptoms with a terminal illness. I hadn’t died of any of these illnesses I spent too much time convinced I was suffering from, but that didn’t dissuade me. Life had taught me the worst did, and could, happen to me. I didn’t have the luxury of stupidity or naiveté to think it wouldn’t happen to me.
Though I didn’t go to a doctor.
Didn’t go that far.
I was happy to drive myself into faint hysteria and then eventually forget about what I was meant to be dying of.
This particular ailment hasn’t disappeared like the others. Though it could be due to the eye strain of staring at a computer for seven hours, combined with dehydration, caffeine overuse, and the whisky from last night.
Last night.
The reason for all of the words staring back at me. Accusing me of something. Of using a man to fuel my passion. Leaning on someone else to create. But I brushed that off. He might’ve helped spark something, inspire something, but he wasn’t the one dehydrated, tired, drained, and dealing with a splitting migraine. No, I created this story. Which was what it was turning into now.
A story.
It was going to be my best.
I knew that.
Although I couldn’t say that out loud.
Though I wasn’t superstitious, it seemed like a bit of a bad omen to announce something like that to the universe. Plus, I didn’t need to make any announcements; the book was going to speak for itself.
It was going to speak for a lot. Including the victims of this serial killer. Most notably, the serial killer himself. Of course, I couldn’t know whether or not he would be caught by the time my book was published. That wasn’t going to be for at least another year, so the odds were not in his favor. It was hard to get away with murder these days.
But then again,