Page 11 of The Facade

Was someone on the balcony?

My heart raced at the thought of someone climbing up the tree out there to get to my second story balcony.

What did they want?

Should I check? Or should I ignore the sound and hope it was my imagination or that it would just go away?

Tap tap tap.

Who the heck would be out there?

A thief? A murderer?

But then, would a murderer really knock before entering?

Yeah, probably not.

I peeked over my covers, trying to see through the window beside the door, and my heart jolted when I saw a tall, dark figure.

Should I run and get my dad? Or Carter?

Carter’s room was closer, just across the hall from mine. And he had been lifting weights more, he could probably take care of whoever might be out there.

Tap tap tap.

“Cambrielle.” I jumped when I heard my name, soft and muffled through the door. “Cambrielle.”

Mack?

I frowned as I pushed my covers away and climbed out of bed. I knew Mack had joked about sleeping in my room earlier, but had he been serious?

I turned on my bedside lamp so I could see where I was stepping. I peeked through the window to make sure it was actually Mack and not some psycho coming to kill me in the night. Sure enough, Mack was standing out there in his bare feet, wearing only a pair of gym shorts.

And even though I should probably pretend like I was sleeping through all of this and ignore him, I turned the deadbolt on my balcony door and opened the door to see what he wanted.

“Hey,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, realizing too late that I wasn’t wearing a bra under my thin pajama shirt.

But instead of saying hi or explaining what he was doing outside my room in the middle of the night, Mack just stepped over the threshold, almost bumping into me with a dazed look in his eyes.

That was when I realized that he must be sleepwalking again because the vacant look was all too familiar from the times I’d found him wandering through the woods outside last month.

“Hey Mack,” I said in a soft voice that hopefully wouldn’t startle him. “Let’s get you back to your room, okay?”

But he didn’t hear me because he just kept walking around my bed and started pulling the covers down on the side opposite from where I’d been sleeping a moment ago.

“Oh, no, no, no, you don’t.” I hurried around the bed to stop him from climbing under the covers.

I grabbed his bare arm just below his bicep to tug him away from my bed. But he didn’t budge. Instead, he just kept trying to climb in.

“Mack, you can’t sleep in here,” I whispered. “Just come with me back to your room.”

But as I pulled on his arm with all the strength I had in my barely five-foot-two-inch frame, his feet might as well have been cemented in the ground.

Usually, I didn’t mind being so much shorter than the giants in my life since lots of girls were short, but Mack being over a foot taller and outweighing me by almost a hundred pounds did make it hard to have any sort of physical power over him.

I pulled on his arm one more time, but he straightened his elbow at the exact same moment. Instead of pulling him back, my hands slipped over his long, toned arm and I fell backward with the force, crashing into the wall.

Nothing like a huge thudding sound to alert my whole family to the fact that I had a teenage boy trying to climb into my bed.

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