Page 80 of Heart So Hollow

He cuts her off again. She’s pouring her soul out to this guy, and for what I don’t understand. At the wedding, she acted like she could take him or leave him. Marco pokes his nose beneath the bed skirt. My eyes dart to him, petrified, as he sniffs along the carpet and then looks right at me.

He meows.

I clenched my jaw, my heart pounding against my ribcage, panic building with each twitch of Marco’s cute little whiskers.

“No, don’t—”

Marco crouches down and inches further under the bed skirt, peering at me with curiosity. He takes two steps toward me.

“Hello?”

I hold my breath, my eyes darting between Marco and the underside of the box spring. Hannah goes silent and the voice on the other end of the phone is gone. Something hits the wall with a thud, making my muscles seize in terror. Although startled, I remain motionless, not moving a muscle as Hannah’s phone hits the carpet and bounces into the middle of the floor.

I’m dead. I’m so dead. Why is everything ending up on the floor right here?

Hannah doesn’t move right away. Instead, she takes a series of deep breaths, punctuated by sporadic, muted gasps. A small part of me feels sorry for her, sniveling above me on her bed, having been spurned by her prince in tin foil.

But my sympathy is short-lived. This is also the woman who flirts with my fiancé, went through my house, and stole my shit. She can go to hell. I don’t care about her relationship problems, I just need to figure out how to get out of here before something humiliating happens.

After a few moments, the mattress shifts again and Hannah stands up. I watch her bare feet pace back and forth a few times. Marco is still crouched mere feet from me, halfway under the bed.

My entire body goes rigid as Hannah stoops down and reaches under the bed to take hold of Marco around his midsection. She pulls him out and lifts him up, cooing some gibberish kitten-talk to him.

I’m contemplating throwing up or having a heart attack when I realize Hannah is carrying Marco out of the room, leaving her phone lying on the floor. I listen to her footsteps move down the hall toward the kitchen, where the refrigerator opens, closes, and the pop of a carbonated can echoes through the hallway. Her sparkly crimson painted toes trudge back across the carpet, pausing to pick up her phone, and then continue to the bathroom on the other side of the bed.

I wait, ready to take my opportunity, listening as water begins gushing from the bathtub faucet. The flow pauses for a few seconds when Hannah pulls the lever for the shower. Then I hear water spray out of the showerhead. Still, I remain perfectly still, waiting for the right sound.

There it is.

As soon as I hear the intermittent splashes of water being squeezed out of hair onto the bottom of the tub, I scurry out from under the bed, the lipstick tube still clutched in my fist. It’s probably melted by now. I leap from the room and tear through the apartment on tip-toes as silently as I can. I unlock the door and immediately slow to a normal pace as I step into the arctic blast outside. Making sure to re-lock the doorknob, I smoothly and silently shut the door.

Moments later, I’m nonchalantly floating down the stairs and out to the sidewalk behind the building. Adrenaline still pumping, I keep my guard up until I roll out of the parking lot and I’m safely back on the road as if I was never there.

When I get home, my nerves are thoroughly shot. Bowen is unloading sub sandwiches and bags of chips onto the table.

“Get everything you needed?” he asks, blithely unaware of my dramatic getaway.

I glance down at the plastic CVS bag dangling from my fingers, one box of tampons tucked inside. I nearly forgot to stop at the drugstore in the wake of my perilous escape.

“Yeah, I did,” I call as I saunter down the hall to the bedroom to deposit the box under the sink.

Once in the bathroom, I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out the black and gold lipstick tube. I pop the top and examine the reddish-brown wedge at the top of the metal tube. Rotating it between my fingers, I wonder if Hannah had the audacity to use it or if she just coveted it like a total creep.

I look in the mirror and slide the lipstick across my bottom lip and then my top. I cock my head, studying myself, and press my lips together. Arching my brow, I mouth to my reflection.

Fuck you, bitch.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Brett

Present

“I don’t know why I’m still like this,” I muse, gazing around Judy’s office as I try in vain to pick apart my idiosyncrasies.

“Because it hasn’t been that long,” she smiles in such a way that makes people—or at least me—feel like they’re finally arriving to the proper conclusion after searching blindly for so long.

“I don’t think this feeling will ever go away.”

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