The soft snores of the man beside me cover the house’s silence, and Bear’s warmth seeps into my feet, giving me some sense of normalcy.
What’s not normal is what I did an hour ago on my knees.
The Oakland Nightstalker has his hand on my hip while he sleeps.
His sleeping implies he has some trust in me. Enough to think I won’t slip out of bed and murder him.
I barely made it through the first time I tried to kill him with my psyche intact. A second intentional attempt would unravel me.
I try and fail to fall asleep before slipping out of bed without rousing my stalker or my traitor dog.
Wandering to the only other room I know will entertain my restless brain, I drop into the computer chair and acclimate myself to his system.
It would be easier if I could keep the mouse on the correct screen. However, it has gone missing twice, and I have had the worst time finding it.
His computer is unprotected, but a man like him doesn’t worry about someone breaking in. He’d just kill them.
A chill runs along my spine, causing me to sit straighter as I click on a file on the desktop with my name on it.
File after file comes up, each with a matching date. Each is a video.
Clicking on one from December last year, I hear my cough echo through the room.
Shit.
Fumbling with the system, I finally get it turned down before clicking play again. There has to be a reason he kept this file.
Last year, before Christmas, I caught a nasty chest cold that I was sure was going to turn into pneumonia.
It didn’t, thank god.
My cough sounds awful.
My stalker enters the room, placing a bag down on the edge of the bed. He checks my forehead for fever before shooting it with a temperature gun I’d left lying on the table.
The black-and-white video doesn’t tell me if I still have a fever, but he places it down and doesn’t seem too concerned.
Maybe not, then.
Opening his bag, he removes a contraption and screws a small mask onto it, then kneels at the edge of the bed and places it over my face.
A nebulizer, I realize.
He gave me nebulizer treatments in my sleep?
Sitting back, I breathe through the heavy emotion lumping in my throat as my eyes well.
I don’t think anyone’s ever cared for me so selflessly. Sure, he’s a psychopath, but he has to have some redeemable qualities.
He kept me from getting worse.
I click on another video. He’s standing beside my bed, just watching.
It was earlier in his stalking, only two months into sneaking into the house.
Bear wanders in, giving him a growl. When he turns to look down at Bear, the skull on his mask glows in the camera’s night vision.
He pulls something from his pocket and tells Bear to sit.
