Page 4 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Oh, baby, you have no idea.”

My unintentional confession slides out with a laugh, and the next thing I know, my hand is resting on the wrist I’d been contemplating. It’s warm and solid. Strong. I bet I’d barely be able to wrap my fingers all the way around it.

Slowly, it occurs to me that I’m standing in the driveway with a death grip on my neighbor’s wrist, and I snatch my hand back in mild horror. Hugo and I are not the touching kind of neighbors, and he reminds me of exactly why that is when he spins away to plant his hands on his hips and squint up at the sky.

“Sun’s going down,” he says in that nasally, goody-goody register he sometimes slips into when we talk. “We should get inside before you get chilly.”

I cross my arms over my midsection as though I am, in fact, cold. Better he thinks that than the truth: it would be better for me to pull another all-nighter cleaning blood out of Fi’s little hatchback than to continue contemplating the girth of his wrists.

Not that it matters. Hugo’s too busy frowning at his phone to notice my little “I’m cold!” show.

“In a hurry?” I ask, curious despite myself. He’s never once acted like he had any place to be other than boring me to death.

“Huh?” He looks up, his expression so blank it’s like he forgot where he was for a second. “No. Sorry.” He slides the phone back into his pocket with a grin. “I’ve got an evening session tonight. Just keeping an eye on the time.”

“Don’t be late on my account,” I say. This poor guy, stuck inside all day doing remote therapy session after remote therapy session with no signs of an actual personality or social life. I’ve never seen him host a dinner party or have friends over to watch a game, and that goes double for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a polycule or whatever he’s into. I spent my first few weeks in the duplex building a case file on my new landlord, but he showed no signs of life whatsoever beyond the occasional snatches of music or, like, PBS documentaries that permeate our shared wall. Case closed. Hugo’s perfectly harmless.

The wind’s picked up while we’ve been chatting, and a particularly strong gust has Hugo hunching even more than usual. “Brrr,” he says, flashing me another crooked smile as he moves to block the breeze with his big body.

Yeah, he definitely watches World War II documentaries on PBS. Black-and-white ones.

We say a hasty good night, but I feel his eyes on me as I hurry into my garage and hit the button to close the door, stopping only to grab my bag from the passenger seat.

Once I’m inside, I walk through each room on the main floor, checking that the windows are still securely fastened, the triple locks on the doors are in place, and the fire extinguisher’s under the kitchen sink. I grab a sparkling water and a pack of frosted circus animal cookies, tossing another pack on the counter in case insomnia hits tonight and I need a three-a.m. can’t-sleep pity-party snack. Then I head upstairs to finish my security routine.

Everything’s in its place, but as the final step, I sit down at the desk in my bedroom to review the feeds on my massively expensive and massively worth it home security system. It’s the final confirmation that nobody came or went while I was gone, and only then do I feel comfortable changing into sweats and a hoodie to get to work.

But my mind won’t rest as I pop a pink-frosted camel into my mouth. It’s not just my horror over Mary’s fate that’s dogging me. It’s that tiny spark of life I thought I saw in Hugo’s eyes. It tugged at my gut, and now that I’ve touched his skin and felt the muscles and bone underneath, I can’t shake the thought of pulling that brief flash of awareness back to the surface. That, or stripping him out of that cardigan, stuffing it into his mouth so he can’t fucking talk, and riding him until I can’t talk either.

Girl, get a grip. You do not want to fuck the bore next door.

I’m just in a weird headspace tonight. Once I purge these thoughts about my neighbor’s girthy wrists, I can get back to more productive things.

Like, for example, figuring out who burned down Mary Glenn’s house.

Then figuring out how to kill him.

CHAPTER TWO

Hugo

The instant Rue’s cute little rear disappears behind her garage door, I grab my clippers and speed-walk inside. The roses will have to wait while we walk through her nightly security protocols together.

Okay, technically speaking, she doesn’t know I follow her from room to room on the other side of our shared wall. It’s just one of the secrets I’m keeping from her. Like the fact that my glasses are for show. That I’ve geofenced her car so I know when she’s within five miles of the duplex. That I die a little every time I say something designed to annoy her, and it works.

Oh, and that I sometimes kill people. Can’t forget that little nugget. But I only kill the ones who deserve it, and that will never be her. The world’s infinitely better with Rue Bellamy in it.

Mine is too, except for all the ways she makes it worse. Consider, for example, how I ignore yet another text so I can follow Rue from her garage to her kitchen, where she’s about to check her back door locks. If she’d asked me, I could’ve told her that her side of the duplex remained undisturbed today, but I respect that she wants to confirm it for herself.

When I moved to Chicago and bought this place four years ago, I was planning to be the picky-as-fuck owner who occasionally showed the vacant half to possible tenants while keeping the space empty as a privacy buffer and possible overflow storage. Then Rue got an email from a leasing agent last March that included my rental. She arrived for the tour, smiled at me, and I was a goner. Offered her a three-year lease on the spot.

To this day, I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that I was in my clinical psychologist cosplay the day we met. The positives of putting on glasses and a sweater every time we interact outweigh the negatives, for sure. A smart, gorgeous, normal woman like Rue would empty an entire can of Mace into my eyes if she caught even a glimpse of what makes Dr. Mohr’s rosebushes so healthy.

And then there’s the added wrinkle of her job working with the dead—“investigating, not cutting up,” as she puts it. Not the best occupation for the woman living next door and occupying my thoughts. Nevertheless, I helped carry her boxes in on moving day, trusting that my woman-repelling persona and the fence separating our backyards would keep us both safe.

That was the idea. But Rue and her sunshine hair, slow-blooming smiles, and bouncy tits have lived next door for five hundred and thirty-eight days, and I’ve spent all of them worrying about her safety, her happiness, and whether she remembered to put on sunscreen when she’s working an outdoor case.

Yes, there are diagnoses for people like me, and I know them all courtesy of my PhD in clinical psychology: narcissism, paraphilia, antisocial personality disorder, De Clérambault’s syndrome—wait, scratch that last one. That’s erotomania, which requires believing Rue’s in love with me. Wrong direction entirely.