They were not. You had to read things right. And he’d gotten it wrong so many times.
Brooke was different. No one spoke to him the way she did. No one drew him in the way she did. It was all he could do to attend classes and keep up his grades when all he wanted to do was be with her.
Soon.
He stood in front of her door, wishing she discovered him standing outside. He imagined she’d throw her arms around his neck, kiss him, and say, “I’m so glad it’s you,” when she discovered the gifts came from him.
She’d be so happy. She’d know how much he loved her.
They’d finally be together.
But first, he wanted to romance her and show her how much he wanted her.
She deserved that.
He wanted to give her everything her heart desired.
He’d make her fall in love with him a little at a time, until he was all she thought about and wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Brooke stopped short in the middle of the dorm’s hallway, staring down the long corridor at the box outside her door. She approached it cautiously and froze when she spotted the picture on top of it of a couple sitting at an outside café table. A man had his face buried in a woman’s neck as he kissed her, but the woman’s face had been replaced with Brooke’s face. Her stalker had writtenThis will be you and me soon!in what had to be Brooke’s favorite red lipstick.
She’d lost a tube of it from her purse. She’d left it unattended for like two minutes in the library while she returned a book to the stacks a week ago.
The fear built in her gut and rose up to her throat, choking off her air. Scared, she sucked in a slow breath and let it out to calm her racing heart and the anxiety she’d developed since returning to school after Christmas a month ago.
“I can do this.”
“Do what?”
Brooke jumped, spun around, and gasped out her fright when her friend Mindy Sue surprised her. “Don’t do that.”
Mindy Sue held her hands up in front of her. “Sorry. What are you doing?”
Brooke stepped to the side, unable to put into words what had been happening to her these last few weeks. @youseeme had gone from leaving her online messages to leaving her pictures of her he’d taken without her knowing around campus and in town with gifts. He liked to leave them on the bulletin board attached to her dorm room door.
Mindy Sue stared down the hall. “Shit. Another one.”
“My favorite morning treat from the Donut Hole. And a message in my lipstick.”
“What the actual fuck!” Mindy Sue folded her arms over her chest like she wanted to protect herself from this madness. “Maybe you should go home. Fix things with him. Tell him and your mom—”
“No. I can handle this. I’m a grown-up. Cody made his choice, and I have to live with it.”
“Then it’s time you talked to campus security and the police and let them know someone is stalking you.”
She didn’t want to believe that, but the evidence had been mounting for months. This person hadn’t just been commenting online, he’d been in her life, at her home, following her at school.
They walked all the way down the hall to their door. The box of donuts seemed innocuous, except that it came from the shop she loved. Put that together with the creepy photo/note and other items left at her door—the scarf she’d tried on in a boutique downtown, the earrings she admired in a shop window after picking up a coffee at the local Starbucks, and the margarita pizza someone had delivered to her dorm room from her favorite pizza place while she studied for a test—all that equaled stalker.
Even creepier, someone had covered the bulletin board hanging on her door with a collage of photos of her on campus with friends, at the café where she loved to grab a snack, standing by the bike rack, talking on the phone. In the center was a picture of her sitting on the lawn, her back to a tree, and her face turned up to the sun, tears streaming down her face. Whoever was watching her wrote on the back,I miss you more.
Mindy Sue opened the box and stared at the half dozen each of chocolate glazed and sugar donuts. Brooke’s favorites. “That’s seriously creepy. Are you sure you have no idea who is doing this?”
“None. As far as I can tell, the pictures of me all over campus and town span the last month.”
Mindy Sue pointed to one of the photos on the board. “That’s us outside the movie theater two days ago. And at the library about ten days ago.”
