Maybe if I wasn’t so consumed by my work, I’d find someone who could make me feel what he once did. But I haven’t even come close to that in all these years.
Unbelievable.
I take a sip of the red wine, and the taste on my tongue makes my stomach shiver. Butterflies shamelessly explode in my core. I can’t even remember the last time someone made me feel like this. Or made me feel anything at all.
So I guess I’m alone in my bathtub, drinking my expensive wine and touching myself.
Again.
Pathetic, but here I am.
I graze my hand between my thighs and down my center. Heat spills through me as I keep touching myself, letting the images in my head take over. I place my right leg on the tap to widen my legs and sink lower into the bathtub, keeping the glass in my left hand above the water. I’ve left the bathroom door open so I can hear the music from the living room.Preciousby Depeche Mode is playing as I slow my breathing and focus on the flashes in my mind.
What does he look like now?
Does he still wear everything black, his messy hair falling over his eyes? Did he finally quit smoking?
Suddenly I hear some noise coming from the living room and my heart seizes, a violent skip, like a tiny heart attack.
I jerk upright in the bathtub, my naked skin squeaking against the surface as I scramble up, water splashing around me, the red wine spilling onto the bathtub corner and the rug beside it.
My heart is hammering so loudly I can hear it in my ears, and the heat in my body is rising fast enough that I need to get out of the water immediately.
I stand there, wrapped in a towel, just waiting for whatever horrific fate is coming for me.
This is becoming my little horror routine. Since I started digging into the Vermilion Organization two years ago and exposing some of their underground operations, I’ve been having these episodes—moments when I feel the presence ofsomeone in my apartment who’s most likely here to kill me and shut my big journalist mouth for good.
But nothing ever happened. Except for the time I found one of my articles ripped to pieces and covered in something red. It didn’t look like blood, but I sent it in for analysis anyway.
It was red wine. The guys from the lab laughed at me.
Idiots.
I know what I’m getting myself into, and not even those invisible ghosts in my apartment can stop me.
I’m a little delusional too. It comes with the job, same as the drinking.
After a few minutes of silence, I decide no one’s here after all.
I just quickly look around the two-bedroom apartment.
No messages.
No severed heads.
Good.
I guess it was nothing. As usual. Just the old apartment. Panic attack gone.
I dry myself with the towel and put on some sleep shorts with a tank top, admiring myself in the closet mirror and sipping more wine.
I’ve figured out that if someone really came here to kill me, I couldn’t actually do much about it.
My life feels pretty hollow anyway. All I care about is my job at the paper. I don’t have any significant other or at least a situationship to care about. My mother is so lost in her own head she probably wouldn’t even realize I’m gone.
I should get a cat, so she can cry over my dead body and let my neighbors know there’s a dead woman who didn’t feed her cat for days.
Ew.
