“Believe it, baby,” Peyton kissed me, gently at first, and then with more passion, straddling me now on the bed, her warm legs tight around my hips.
“We’re going again, right?” I asked, feeling my dick harden for her. Just as I thought she was about to slide on, she chuckled and rolled off of me, leaving me naked, vulnerable, and hot for her in the middle of the bed.
“I have to go to work,” she said, digging into the duffel bag for her scrubs. “I have to commute now, remember?”
“That reminds me, have you talked to Maggie yet?”
“I’m going to call her on the way to work,” she said. “But I’m not hoping for anything. The girl whose place I filled in for is probably back now or coming back soon.”
“What happens if they don’t have a spot for you?”
“Then I’ll commute,” she said with a shrug. “Lots of people do it, right?”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but it wasn’t something we would have to worry about now. If worse came to worst, Peyton could continue to look for a job before her two weeks was up. And if worse came to worser, I had enough money put aside to comfortably support both Peyton and myself. But I also knew her better than that. She loved to work. She’d always loved school, too. She’d go out of her mind crazy as a small-town housewife.
“I’m going to try to go shopping tonight,” she said as we snacked on leftover pizza for breakfast.
“You don’t have to do that.” I got up to rinse my now empty cup of coffee and kissed her, pulling her into my arms and against me.
“I want to do it,” she said with a smile. “Especially since I’ll be staying here after work for a while. I want to eat, too.”
Slipping my arm around her waist, we gathered our work things and walked out together, side-by-side into the elevator and down to the parking garage. Peyton was in the middle of telling me about some of her coworkers back home when her voice caught as we rounded the corner towards her car.
“What the fuck,” she murmured, and we both stopped dead, our eyes resting on her car—or what was once her car, anyway. Someone had vandalized it from the front to the back. Windows were shattered in, and glass littered the asphalt. Her front bumper was smashed in with something that would have had to have been a tool like a steel bat, and both mirrors were shattered and hanging from loose hinges. A key mark down the side was also prominent, and on the shattered windshield was what looked to be a folded note.
“Christ,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my cell phone to call the police. “What in the hell happened here?”
“I don’t know,” Peyton breathed, looking like she wasn’t entirely convinced she was looking at her own vehicle. “Who would do this?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I said honestly, dialing 911. “But I’m not sure you’re going to make it back to the city today. Do you want to borrow the truck?”
“No,” she said softly. “I want to figure out who did this.”
I called Hansen to let him know that I’d be late to work, and Peyton called her boss back in the city to let them know she wouldn’t be making it in today. We stood in the garage until the police arrived, sitting together on one of the resting benches near the stairs, both speechless and horrified all at the same time. I had wanted desperately to grab and read the note, but Peyton had held me back, reminding me that this was a crime scene, and I should wait for the cops. It didn’t matter much one way or the other, because of course the person didn’t sign their name.
You are dead.
Peyton’s hand fluttered over her mouth as she read the words on the paper, her hand trembling as I reached out to hold her up, my eyes pinned securely on the note. I felt something similar to fear simmer in the pit of my stomach, but more than fear, I was angry. Angry that some mere human being thought they could threaten my fiancée, the love of my life.
I would kill them. Whoever it was, I would kill them.
“Do you have any idea who might want to hurt you?” the officer asked Peyton, and she glanced at me, biting her lip anxiously.
“An ex-boyfriend, maybe,” she said. “We had a—a falling out. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that night.”
“Makes sense,” the second officer said, but somehow I still doubted this. I would let them check who they needed to check to get to the bottom of this, of course, but some small part of me knew that this had nothing to do with Jake. He was too much of a pussy. I’d scared the piss out of him the last time we’d crossed paths. Literally.
But then again, maybe I was wrong.
“If you give us his name and contact info, we can check into it,” the first cop said. “We get cases like this occasionally, and often it does turn out to be a scorned ex-lover. Just call us again if this happens—until we know who did it, that’s really all we can do.”
Peyton and I shook the officer’s hands, and I escorted her back upstairs and into the house. Her legs were shaky, weak, and her skin was pale as she sat shakily down on a stool, putting her head in her hands. I went to the cupboard for a glass and poured her some ice water, sliding it across the island for her before coming around the counter to wrap my arms around her from the back.
“I can’t believe he would do this,” she murmured, shaking her head over and over again. “I knew he was scum after the other night, but I didn’t expect I’d see him again, let alone hear from him, so to speak.”
I said nothing to this, only continued to physically comfort her. My mind was elsewhere, doubting her words, doubting the circumstances.
“I forgot to tell them about the prank calls,” she said, finally looking up to rub a hand over her face. “I bet he stood out there and vandalized my fucking car in between phone calls to me.”
