Page 29 of Obsessed Mr. O’Brian

Even though tears still stream down her face, her lips lift in a wobbly smile.

She looks through me, not at me, as she extends the sketchpad toward my chest. I take it from her on reflex.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Shannon says it’ll be okay now that you’re back,” she mumbles before turning and striding across the room with eerie grace. She crawls onto the bed and settles back under the blankets as though nothing is amiss.

I turn my attention down to the notebook, but the room is too dark to make out what she drew, so I move to the other side of the island and tilt it closer to the nightlight. Fully expecting a blob of nonsensical strokes, I stare down in shock at a familiar scene.

With sweat smears on the floor-to-ceiling windows, the dresser broken, the bed lopsided from a snapped support bar, and clothes strewn haphazardly over the floor, the hotel room from my night of drugged sex stares up at me. I may not have seen it from this angle when I woke, but I’ll never forget the destroyed room. I’d never been so satiated and drained yet so hungry in my life. I wanted more of the unhinged woman from the night before. She’d been just as feral and passionate as I had been.

My heart pounds in my skull as I blink down in disbelief.

Millie drew a man lying in the bed with his limbs tangled in the sheets and his head under the pillow.

I bend closer to the drawing and squint.

Holy shit. His leg peeking out from the blankets has a thick, ugly scar running down the back and his muscular shoulder carries a circular scar.

When Regina tackled me to get me out of the high-voltage puddle, I landed on a broken glass bottle which resulted in a thin, round scar on my shoulder.

Millie drew me wrecked and sprawled out in a hotel bed after the most sensual night of my life.

This can’t be something she saw with her own eyes. I had wild, raw sex with Regina, not Millie. Right?

Even as I dismiss my skepticism, I know deep in my soul—as I always have—that Regina was never the woman I slept with that night. Even with the haze of drugs clouding my senses, it never sat right that I would have slaked my lust with the woman I had never felt even an ounce of attraction for despite owing her a life debt.

I flip to the previous page in the sketchbook and freeze in shock as I stare at my dead self. With dark swirls in the puddle around my head and raindrops splashing on my face, my sketched form lies on the sidewalk with whisps of smoke curling up from its flesh.

Bloody knees bracket my ribs and petite hands, one stacked over the other, compress my chest.

Millie’s hands. Not Regina’s.

Disbelief and horror rip through me.

This can’t be real.

But I already know the answer. I’ve always known.

I flip the page again anyway. The same horrible scene fills the paper.

I flip again. And again.

Countless unknown faces, all too mature for their youthful eyes, smile up from the paper amid scenes of blood and death.

Over and over, my dead face fills the notebook, sometimes with more smoke wafting from my skin and others with larger swirls around my head.

I stop at the first drawing and blink in disbelief.

The old bus stop behind our school fills the edges of the page. Regina preens in the background using a compact mirror. Her hair seems to be the only dry thing in the frame. My sixteen-year-old self stares out at me, except in the drawing he’s looking down with nervous hope, wonder, and adoration at the person drawing the picture.

He’s staring into my eyes.

No, not my eyes. Millie’s eyes.

These are Millie’s memories.

I had a crush on Millie, not Regina. Millie tackled and revived me during the accident. Millie was the woman I fucked with wild abandon.

No matter how much I thought I owed Regina, I could never bring myself to fully commit. My concussed brain couldn’t remember, but my body did.