And as soon as she pictured them, she knew he had a point.
“I’m going with you no matter what. You know I’m going to go with you no matter what. But at least let me tell you about other possibilities, first.”
“You have twenty seconds to tell me about other possibilities.”
“Okay, okay. So, there’s the guy in the apartment down the hall.”
“What about the guy in the apartment down the hall?”
“He sometimes goes to the wrong door. He wanders here and then he just wanders back. Don’t you think that’s what you might have heard?”
It sounded plausible, when she was saying it.
But his answering expression immediately made it less so.
And so did his eerily deadpan tone. “You have a guy in your building who wanders to your door even though your apartment is the one at the end of the hallway.”
“Yeah. But...it’s not that weird.”
“What does this guy look like?”
“Like a normal guy. Like a college kid.”
“Truly like a college kid? Or like someone who wants you to think he is?”
“I don’t know what the diff—” she started to say.
Then had to cut herself off. Of course, she did.
Her mind was currently blowing.
Suddenly, she could see almost everything about the guy, from the letterman jacket that was just a little too on the nose, to the almost too perfect buzzcut use above his ears. He even walked in that loping way some of the guys on campus did—as if he desperately wanted to get every little detail right.
And then there was the way she felt when she caught him looking.
Like he can see all my secrets,she thought, and suddenly couldn’t breathe.
But that was fine. Isaac was right there, just waiting to get her going again.
“There it is,” he said. “Now, go pack a bag.”
* * *
Half of her expected someone to kill them the second they stepped out of her apartment door. But the other half was still trying to rationalize and explain away. Several times, she almost asked him who he thought the letterman guy really was—and that urge intensified once they were out in the hallway.
It was completely empty. No one was waiting for them.
She couldn’t even smell the lingering scent of Axe body spray that the guy liked to lather himself in. There was nothing. And there continued to be nothing all the way up to and into the elevator. In fact, once they were safe inside, she almost laughed.
See, there’s nothing to worry about, she went to say.
Then the elevator started to go up instead of down, and that rational half of her started to slip. Of course, it did. He cursed the second they started moving. He spat the wordfuckas if them going to floor twenty was the worst fucking thing in the world, and then he did something even worse.
He hit the emergency stop.
Or at least, he tried to.
But the problem was—nothing happened when he did it. The elevator just kept going and going, and she could almost feel the tension in him rising, and then, oh god, then, he spoke into the near vibrating air of the tiny little cube they were trapped in. No looking at her, no warm gaze full of reassurance.
