Staring at it now, I’m not sure what to make of it. She’s been hiding it somewhere, though I wouldn’t know where. For all my moral failings, I have enough decency not to have a camera in her bedroom.
I could argue that it means something, but Gabi has always loved anything soft and fluffy. Besides that, there’s the small, irritating as fuck detail that she’s been writing about some other guy in her journal, and I don’t know who the hell he is.
She wants to keep things ‘casual’ because of him, and that alone is enough to earn him a place on my hit list.
There’s an entire playlist on her phone dedicated to him, and the way she describes him in her journal doesn’t help.
Brivido (Bree-vee-doh): a shiver, shudder, or thrill.
If he were a shark, he would have been a megalodon—built for destruction.
The way he looks at me hijacks my entire nervous system.
Feeling his presence before I even see him.
Words that settle under my skin.
When he’s in my orbit, I can’t concentrate on anything else.
If he were a song, he’d be C.O. by R&C.
Everything she writesabout him is abstract and sensory-heavy, and for someone who analyzes patterns all day long, I can’t figure it out. But that’s probably a good thing. I doubt she’d ever forgive me if I killed her crush.
In the years since I basically told Gabi to fuck off, I’ve tried to do the right thing and let her move on. I probably sped up the process by being an asshole to her at every turn. I knew eventually, she’d find someone else. He was always some mythical, distant creature that I’d fucking despise no matter what. Whenever I considered her future, I fantasized about ripping his throat out, whoever he was. But it always felt like I had time before that happened.
The future has a tendency to sneak up on you, though, and now she’s engaged to my dipshit cousin and crushing on some other random asshole.
It bothers me that I don’t know who she interacted with before I started watching. There’s no record of him anywhere on her phone, so they must have only talked at school. But since that was pre-Julian, I have no way of knowing who it could be.
The fact that she’s still pining for him, though? That’s a fucking problem.
I hate the way other men look at her. It triggers every territorial instinct I have when they start sniffing around.
Admittedly, I may have made a few of them shit themselves when they got too close. A little violence and a lingering threat go a long way. Still, on principle, I’d like to choke the life from their eyes.
Letting that thought go for now, I move around her bedroom and look through her things. All her books are special editions of historical romances in various pastel shades. But one title appears in five different versions.
Pride and Prejudice.
Presumably, this is the Mr. Darcy she seems to obsess over in her online reading groups. A flip through the pages confirms it.
I set it aside, making a mental note to take home a copy so I can see what’s so special about this asshole.
Everywhere I look, there’s something quintessentially Gabi. Fashion magazines. Nail polish in every shade of pink that’s ever existed. Tea sets and fancy stationery. One half of her closet is an explosion of feathers, sequins, and pink. The other is all black.
I frown at a skirt the size of a thimble, wondering where she’s worn it and whose eyes I need to cut out.
In another drawer, I find her underwear, identical to the pair I stole.
I’ll never look at cherries the same again.
The blow-dryer in the bathroom switches on, and I wander back to her bed and sit down, propping myself against the headboard. I yank the stuffed teddy bear out of the covers and pose him beside me before I grab her phone from the nightstand.
I already know everything she does on here, but it’s something to pass the time while I wait. When I unlock thescreen, I check out her private Instagram page that only her friends know about. The bio reads:Probably overstimulated. Social skills still loading. Control-alt-delete that awkward thing I said.
Scrolling down, I find selfies of her and Beppe, along with pictures of her and her friends eating pastries, drinking mimosas, and celebrating every possible milestone with ice cream. Gabi always gets bubblegum.
In the mix, there are also a few random outfit-of-the-day posts, one of which I’ve burned into memory. She’s wearing a pink plaid skirt, white knee-high socks, and a cardigan. She looks like a geeky little librarian, and I’d give my left testicle to fuck her in that outfit just once.
