Page 12 of Primal

Part of why I don’t is that I’ll have to face the fact that what I’ve been going through hasn’t been the longest dream of my life. If I didn’t wake up this morning to find my very expensive perfume missing, and my phone perched delicately on top of my lace panties in my drawer, I’d say I was hallucinating.

That seems to be the game he’s playing: take something, leave something. That way, I’ll know that what we’ve been doing is real.

“Are you sure?” she pushes, not convinced in the slightest that there’s nothing wrong. “You seem stressed, Kiara. And have you found your phone yet?”

I avoid her gaze as I nod, feeling too ashamed by the things that have been happening right under her nose. No matter how many times I decide to finally talk to her about everything, I end up chickening out for one reason or another. I don’t want her to feel unsafe in her own home, to be so stressed out that she can’t live in peace.

“I found my phone, but now my perfume is missing.”

Missing, not misplaced, because I didn’t lose it. It was taken from me. That’s something that doesn’t arouse me.

“Kiara, that’s your favorite perfume,” Grandma says sadly, thankfully not noticing my word choice. If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d go so far as to say she even sounds a little disappointed.

Once again, I look away. That perfume was my mom’s favorite, too. I’m glad he didn’t take the years old bottle that actually belonged to her, because then I think I would lose it. But, still, the bottle he took was over two hundred dollars, and I want it back.

My fingers absently rub the heart-shaped locket dangling from my neck. My baby picture is on one side, and a picture of Mom and me at the carnival when I was a kid is on the other. It was a gift from her on my eighteenth birthday, the last one I would ever get to celebrate with her. It’s been two years since she died, but it still feels like it was just yesterday.

Grandma puts a hand on my arm. “You’ve been forgetting things, misplacing everything, getting distracted and irritable. Baby, if you’re tired of taking care of me, I can get someone else in here to help out.”

Is that what she thinks? That she’s been a burden on me?

Turning to face Grandma, I grab her hands and look into those light brown eyes that are so like mine and Mom’s. “Grandma, don’t even start thinking for one minute that you’re the reason I’ve been so off lately. I just have a lot on my mind, is all. But it has nothing to do with you. You understand that, right?”

The corners of her eyes wrinkle as she smiles warmly. The sheer love for me on her face brings tears to my eyes, and when she holds her arms out, I fall into them and let out all of my emotions. The fear of losing my grandmother too soon, the ache of knowing that when she’s gone, I’ll be all alone, and the frustration of this whole situation with the masked man in general. It’s a lot.

“I don’t want to keep pushing you,” she says softly, rubbing a hand soothingly over my back like she used to when I was four and afraid of the monsters under my bed. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here to listen.”

“I love you, Grandma,” I say pathetically into her shoulder, sniffling.

She places a soft kiss to the top of my head. “I love you, too, baby.”

CHAPTER 12

KIARA

Two weeks later

“Have you told your grandma what happened yet?” Yolanda asks me over the phone. It’s ten 0’clock at night, and I’m sitting on my window seat, looking out through my bay windows to the field behind my house. The moonlight glints off the blades of grass from the drizzling that’s started.

I chew on a fingernail and scan the large open field to the abandoned neighborhood beyond it. For some reason, the masked man hasn’t been back in a few weeks. Not physically, anyway. He texts me several times every day, and I ignore them.

Well, I don’t respond to them. He gets left on read every single time, and I feel like that will come back to bite me in the ass one of these days.

“No,” I say with a sigh, toying with my locket. “I just can’t right now, Yo. I don’t think I ever will.”

Yolanda says something to someone, and I feel bad for calling her when she’s at work.

“Do you want me to call you back tomorrow?” I suggest.

“No, it’s fine. I just need these people to leave me the hell alone when I’m on break,” she says irritably. “Anyway, has the man come back to finish what he started?”

And by that, she means take the things he didn’t the first time, because, again, I can’t tell her what actually happened between us. I haven’t even told her there was another man in the house, because she really would call the police herself.

“No,” I say again.

She sighs. “Well, at this point, I guess it’s better to just try to pretend that night didn’t happen.”

If only you knew…

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