“I think,” I whisper when the silence is too loud. “I’m lonelier than I let on.”
The air shifts. He doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t say anything comforting or sweet.
But heseesme. I feel that. And that, somehow, is better than words.
We stay like that—silent, breathing the same air. Every so often, one of our bodies shifts and we end up even closer together.
“I should go,” I say eventually, though I don’t move.
“Probably,” he says while still holding my feet hostage in his giant hands.
Neither of us moves.
I glance at my phone—we’ve been here for almost an hour. The house is too quiet, too still. If I stay any longer, Imight do something reckless. Like fall asleep next to him again and never want to leave.
But then, just as I start to shift upright, we hear a pounding. Not on Jericho’s door, but nearby. My house is the only other possible source of the sound.
Then a voice.
Sharp. Slurred. Unmistakably male.
Jericho is on his feet before I am. His posture changes in an instant. Gone is the quiet man I was just spilling my guts to. This one is rigid. Coiled. Ready for something I can’t see yet.
The knock comes again, louder this time.
“Nora!” a voice slurs outside, loud enough for the whole neighborhood down the road to wake up. “I know you’re in there!”
I go still. My blood runs cold.
Jericho’s head snaps to me. “Dick?”
I nod.
His jaw clenches. “Of course it is.” He doesn’t wait for more. Doesn’t look back.
He opens the door and steps outside. Gone is the man I was just beginning to know. He’s been replaced by this quiet fury. Shoulders squared, eyes dark and unreadable, voice low enough to scare our fearless Karina.
I don’t follow him. I just grab my phone in case I need to call for help and stand by the open door in the shadow, hands gripping the wall.
“Get off her porch,” he barks as he strides toward my house.
Dick turns around, stumbling forward. His face is flushed with a copious amount of alcohol.
“So the whore went right to you, huh.” His disgusting words are accompanied by a hyena laugh.
Jericho crosses the driveway in three giant steps and lands next to Dick, grabbing him by his collar.
“Don’t say another word,” he hisses into his face.
“Yeah? Or what?”
Jericho says something I can’t hear, but it’s something that makes Dick laugh, which is not the reaction I would expect under the circumstances.
“Ye-ah,” he slurs loudly. “I knew you were one of us.”
That makes Jericho furious—his shoulders square even more, if such a thing is even possible. He growls something back to Dick’s face, and I desperately want to hear what. So, naturally, I tippytoe toward the edge of the porch which is closer to my house in hopes that it’ll be easier to hear something. Anything.
And it is.
