“I’ll take care of it for you,” Karl said.
“Thank you,” she said, breathing out a sigh of relief. No way she was going to argue and say he didn’t have to. If he hadn’t offered, she was pretty sure she’d be begging him to…after she woke up from passing out. “As a thanks, I’ll go get dinner for us. What do you want? Subs, pizza, Chinese?” Anything to get her away from this mess.
Karl lived alone. He’d been there for years. She’d put him around mid-forties, maybe closer to fifty. He was nice and always had a friendly smile or wave.
She brought him extra cookies when she baked and leftovers when she made too much of something for dinner.
It drove Fredrick insane, but this had been her place first and she wouldn’t be mean to her neighbor, who was always there with a helping hand, just because she had a boyfriend.
“You don’t need to do that,” Karl said. “You already bring me over food all the time.”
“As a thank you for things you do for me,” she said, nodding her head. Karl often grabbed her garbage cans to bring out or pull in when she wasn’t home. Sometimes her decorations flew off the porch and he’d retrieve them if he noticed. “And because I can’t stand here and look at that.” Urgh, her heart was still hammering away and she had to get out of there.
Karl laughed. “Fine. If you want to get a pizza, then I’ll share a slice with you.”
“Perfect,” she said, climbing back into her SUV. She placed the order and drove away while Karl went into his house to get what he needed.
The minute she parked outside the Italian restaurant, she made another call.
“What do you want?” Fredrick asked.
The humor in his voice gave it all away, followed by his annoying squeal of a laugh. “You’re disgusting. Seriously? Can you get any lower than that?”
“You like salmon.”
“It’s a dead fish covered in flies. There were probably maggots on it already.”
An involuntary gag crawled up her throat causing her to cough. Her hand was shaking again. He really had no idea how much this upset and frightened her. It was like he preyed on her deepest weakness.
Fredrick laughed again, then countered with, “You sewed the crotch of my pants tighter.”
“Why would you say that?” She’d gotten five pairs of his work pants and two pairs of jeans done before she had to move on to everything else she’d done to his shit.
He was always adjusting his junk in his pants and it drove her batty. Maybe it was time he felt some of what she was.
It was rude, disgusting, and just plain nasty.
If his pants didn’t fit right, he should buy a different style.
He complained he liked the way they looked, but he shifted funny in them.
All she did was tailor them for him. It’s not like she was a seamstress. If he bothered to look he would have known it.
“Don’t play that game with me,” Fredrick said.
“You’re the one who enlarged your private parts in the picture. I would have thought you’d appreciate the fact you might grow down there.”
She heard him snarl. “You had no right to go through my phone. Nor do what you did. Do you know what was in those texts that ended up going to my mother?”
Meredith couldn’t hold the laughter back. She had to admit, that was one of her better ideas, and the first one she did.
This was at least calming her after the flies on her porch.
The minute Fredrick went into the bathroom to shower off the other woman he’d been sleeping with, she quickly changed the contact information in his phone, putting his mother under Lana’s number and Lana to his mother.
If he wanted to send dirty texts and dick pictures, let them go to the woman who created him.
“You really should be careful what you put in a text,” she said.
