Page 10 of Sweet Temptation

All I could see was the dark form, definitely a man. But that wasn’t one of my friends out there. I knew it, even though I couldn’t see him clearly in the shadows.

People showed up in my yard all the time, for parties. But this was not that.

This was unwelcome.

Everything in me told me this was wrong.

What the hell was he doing out there? Was he looking for the key? The one in the coffee can in the bushes?

Did he know about the key?

I considered marching into the sunroom and throwing open a window, yelling at him. Maybe that would scare him away?

But the hairs all over my body were standing on end, and something made me stay right where I was. Walking into the sunroom would leave me exposed to him, even in the near-dark, with nothing but a wall of windows between us.

What if he had a weapon?

I stood frozen, afraid to move, barely able to breathe… as I watched him reach up the glass wall of the sunroom… and feel along the edges of the windows.

I set my water glass down on the bar, my heart pounding so hard that my hands shook. Then I backed slowly away. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I just backed out of the room, turned, and ran down the hall and up the stairs to my bedroom.

I ran into my room and grabbed my phone, which was charging on the nightstand… wondering all the while if the doors were locked. Did my friends lock the house when they left?

I dialed 911 as fast as I could with trembling fingers.

The whole time, I could hear the faint scuffling noise outside—the sounds of a man trying to break into my home.

And God damn, it took them a long time to answer.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“Someone’s trying to break into my house!” That’s about all I could get out of my mouth. There was a lump in my throat. I could hear the sounds, down below my bedroom balcony.

The curtains were closed over the sliding glass doors to the balcony, moonlight streaming through.

Were they locked?

I backed toward the door of the bedroom, listening to the sounds from outside, even as the operator asked me questions. I gave her my address. She seemed to be trying to calm me down, though I thought I sounded calm.

Inside, I felt hysterical. I could hardly make my legs work to get back down the stairs.

The operator double-checked my address. She assured me that the police were on their way. She felt very, very far away.

“Stay on the line,” she kept telling me, as if she thought I might hang up. “Where are you now, in relation to the suspect?”

“I’m in my living room, at the front of the house. I can see him outside, through the windows…”

He was out there, in the shadows outside the sunroom. I watched as he reached up the glass wall again… And this time, he grabbed onto the edge of the window and held.

Then he hoisted himself up and started climbing the wall.

It seemed to take hours.

Hours inside of minutes inside of split seconds… As I stood inside my dark house, watching a man climb up the wall of my sunroom… waiting for the police to arrive in a scream of sirens and the pounding of booted feet… As the operator kept asking me to keep talking, keep telling her what was happening. What I was seeing.

“He’s up on top of the sunroom at the back of the house. He’s trying to get up onto the balcony off my bedroom!”

“Do you know him?”

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