The call ended, and I tucked it back into my pocket. I didn’t remember getting on my bike or riding back to my apartment. It was a place I bought in the center of town. It made for an easy alibi: claiming you were home, setting things up to make it look like you never left most days. Luckily, I’d never needed one, but I liked to be prepared for the worst.
Eden’s apartment was half the size of this one – a shithole, if I was being honest: peeling wallpaper in the hallways that probably contained more lead than was legal. But inside her apartment, the world shifted. She’d made it feel like a home. I knew this because I’d installed hidden cameras in her apartment last night. They gave me an isolated view of her world and her life. One feed faced her couch and the front door behind it. Another pointed towards the kitchen.
I sat on my mattress, flipping on the CCTV feed from her apartment on my laptop, and I waited. Nothing stirred, other than the occasional motion of the cat. She seemed to keep the animal at her apartment half of the time, and at the cafe for the other half. Eden came home late, took off her shoes at the door, and fed the cat. She turned on music that barely reached my mic feed. Jazz, maybe. Something slow.
Then she danced alone. Spinning in the middle of her kitchen, barefoot and smiling like she’d just remembered she was alive. She smiled alone, for no one but herself. I leaned in, something cold and sharp twisting in my chest. It wasn’t the smile itself; it was what it meant. People didn’t smile like that unless they stillbelieved in something, unless they loved themselves, and still had the notion that tomorrow was always a better day.
This innocence was what made her so dangerous for me. I knew I had already fucked up. This wasn’t mercy or attraction… it was something deeper. The moment I spared her, I doomed us both. This obsession was a rot that would spread through me and inevitably infect her, if I wasn’t careful.
I moved from the bed to a chair, setting the laptop on the table. In the darkness of the room, I sat and watched her.
She was an anomaly I couldn’t understand. Iwantedto understand how her mind worked, how this black world hadn’t tarnished her in some way. I watched her dance, pressing my fingers against my temple like I could squeeze the thoughts – of stabbing her to death, firing a bullet into her brain, takingthislife – out of my skull.
She danced until she was yawning, swaying on her feet like she was drunk. She curled up on the couch under a blanket that didn’t match anything else in her apartment. She fell asleep with her head on the arm of the couch. I noticed how she often chose the couch over the bed, and I wondered why.
I slept in the chair that night with my gun on my lap.
I dreamed about her for the first time.
I woke up sick to my stomach.
Chapter nine
Eden
“Pressure Points”
Hestartedshowingupat the end of the day. I had been giddy the first time he came back, but then he just kind of sat in the corner, and I realized he was pretty but also a really grumpy person. I hated people who didn’t know how to smile. It made me want to do everything in my power to get them to crack. He just sat there and watched. Wasn’t he interested inanything?
Tonight, he showed up thirty minutes before close – the place was dead. I smiled at him when he entered.
“The usual?” I asked, raising the muffin on the plate I had saved for him.
“Yeah.” He didn’t turn to me when he spoke, just continued walking past me to his spot in the corner. He paid in cash every time. Always tipped, even though I was certain he didn’t always touch the drink. I'd find it half full some days, abandoned near the window. I started wondering if he bought it just for an excuse to stay. If that were the case, wouldn’t he try harder to socialize? Instead he just acted like a creep.
A coffee-shop cuck, if you will.
I made his coffee and put it and the muffin in front of him, and then I carefully took a seat across the table. He looked up, fixing those dark eyes on my face. I could feel the weight of his gaze, and I wasn’t sure if I liked it, hated it, orlikedit.
“Okay if I sit here a second?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Great. Please control your enthusiasm, sir.
“Is it just you here?”
I looked up, surprised by the question. “Um, yeah. I have a guy that helps me a couple of days a week. Jay. I think you might have been here when he was working. Otherwise, just me. There’s not too much work or anything. I mean… we’re not exactly bustling.”
“You walk home?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just a dangerous part of town. Do you walk home?”
I blinked. “Dangerous? I think that’s kind of subjective, don’t you?”
I did feel myself falter, though, because he was right. The bloody ghost on the pavement down the street was proof of that danger. That’s why the rent was cheap and buildings were available.
