Page 92 of Stalker

I set it down on the small table and walked away from it, almost as if it would blow up at any moment if I stayed too close. Or maybe that was just my erratically beating heart that could blow up any second.

Part of me wanted to tear into it right away, and the other part of me wanted to throw it down the garbage shoot without cutting the tape open at all. So instead of making a rash decision either way around it, I walked away and busied myself with a steaming hot shower.

I stripped down, ridding my body of the clothes I wore for the last almost twenty-four hours straight, and turned the water on. And as with most days, I stared at the gold bracelet still wrapped around my wrist when it caught my eye.

The only piece of Dane I allowed myself to keep, because it had been about me. The jewels in the eyes of the skull matched mine. When he gave it to me, he told me he wanted me to wear it in honor of choosing myself above everyone else for the first time in my life.

Yet when I was alone, it reminded me of him. And that was one minor reason I kept it on.

Additionally, it was locked, and I would have needed to break it in order to take it off, but I wasn’t prepared to destroy it. Not yet, at least.

I scrubbed every inch of my body even though it wasn’t hair wash day to stay as busy as possible while I wrote out a pros and cons list in my head.

To open it, or to not.

To know if I was crazy, or to not.

“Fuck.” I sighed, staring at it thirty minutes later after avoiding it as long as I possibly could. Ihadto know!

I grabbed a knife and slit the tape open, but instead of setting the knife down, I held onto it, like I may need it for whatever was inside.

Though when I pulled out the carefully packaged mass in the center, nothing at all made sense.

It was a tablet and a cell phone.

My hands shook as I eyed up the technology I hadn’t afforded myself since I left Lincoln’s house three months ago. I didn’t want him to have free access to me like he did when I lived there, so I went without.

I was the only almost thirty-year-old in the world without a cell phone. And I didn’t hate it.

But eying up the fancy block in my trembling hand, a shiver ran down my spine, knowing he could have been watching me again already through it. That familiar excitement of being the very center of his attention bloomed in my lower belly.

A folded piece of paper sat between the phone and the tablet, and I hesitated before pulling it free. My hands shook so hard I nearly dropped it twice before I could get it open.

Almost instantly, my heart fell to my stomach when I saw the manly script written across the entire piece of paper.

Dane.

My heart ached immediately from just seeing hishandwriting.

I fell down into the kitchen chair as my eyes started flying across the words, eating them up with an intensity like a starving man’s first smell of food in years.

Puppet,

My achingly beautiful Puppet. I’ve started and stopped this letter a hundred different times since finally locating you four days ago. I haven’t been able to stop the spiral inside of my head every time I realized you were finally within reach for the first time in months.

I can’t describe the burning need building inside of me every single second of every day since you ran away from me.

I’m crazed by your absence.

I’m feral for your touch.

I’m desperate for your love, again.

Puppet, I love you. And I can confidently say I’ve never loved another human being on this planet before. Not once.

Not until I met you. It wasn’t by choice; it wasn’t a decision I had any control over. It was necessary.

You. Are. Necessary. Peyton.

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