Page 35 of Prey

I screwed up my face. “You’re crushing on her?”

He shrugged casually. “I don’t know about crushing, but she’s…” Gunner trailed off, refusing to finish the sentence, but I could tell he was catching genuine feelings for the girl.

“Just go easy, Gunner. Alright?” I stated, patting his shoulder, hoping like fuck that he won’t do anything stupid if she rejected him. Even though the prospects of this girl being Annika were slim, I wasn’t overly concerned about that. I had to ask, “What would you do if you discovered she was Annika?”

He shook his raven head and flicked his eyes about the room. Every time someone moved, he watched their behavior with that unflinching stare. “Tell Mikky.”

18

It was late afternoon when I returned to my room; I knew he had been there before I unlocked and opened the door. It was a hunch, sharp instincts, then warily. When I opened the door, I was greeted by his scent of cigarettes, cologne, and burnt wood. Half of me expected him to be sitting there on my bed wearing a mask, eating popcorn. Eating popcorn? I don’t know why I thought he’d eat popcorn, but the pop of purple on my pillow caught my eye first, then…damn…the envelope. My money.

In a panic, I snatched the envelope to find that he’d opened it but breathed a sigh of relief when he hadn’t taken any money.So, what was his purpose in breaking in here if he didn’t take anything? To scare me. The more he did this, the more I became less fearful and more angry.

I opened my drawers and noticed he’d been through my clothes, and a shudder traveled down my spine. Suddenly, all my clothes seemed unclean, and I started piling them on my bed to take to the laundry room. He must be one of those voyagers who got a kick from sniffing through women’s underwear. Creep. I should’ve asked Judith for a gun.

Should I report the stalker to Carly, the hall director? No. She seemed doubtful when I reported someone breaking into my room and writing TRAITOR on my door. I knew security cameras were erected in several places, but I still had to ask Carly to view them. He seemed to have gone through my textbooks, and I freaked out at the thought of him accessing information on my laptop. He’d have to know the password, but it didn’t stop me from checking a search history to see if I managed to get past the blockade.

The laptop mainly contained my assignments from my freshman year at another college before I transferred here to study marine biology. There were also emails to Judith and my carefamily, who took me in under the Witness Protection Program. But the stalker wouldn’t view them as interesting unless he searched for something specific.

Snatching my phone, my fingers trembled across the screen so much that I kept having to delete three messages because they were unreadable before finally sending the last one.

Me: You broke into my room again!!!

I tossed my phone down angrily on my bed, then paused over the small yet intricately beautiful purple flower resting on my pillow. It was a flower he had picked from the bush outside the hall'sfront door, so there was little effort, but still, stupidly, that single flower, that small gift, created an explosion in my heart.

A single hot tear trickled down my cheek, and I wiped it away with the back of my hand and sniffed back my never-ending loneliness. I was unnoticeable, like a cobweb in the corner of a room or an ant running across a leaf. You had to look hard to see me. And he did. He saw me.

Okay, he was weird and creepy, but he noticed me. He picked a flower and placed it on my pillow as a romantic gesture because he saw me. He also went through all of my clothes, but I couldn’t find anything missing, so…oh god, my stalker was a perpetual panty-sniffing creep, and I was falling for him.

I hadn’t even met him properly, but I was falling for him because he showed me attention. I was such a lonely loser. I took the crumbs offered, and he crept into my heart after Shaun fractured it.

Scream Mask Freak: I’ve broken into your room only once.

Huh? Oh yeah, that’s right. He was denying the TRAITOR on the door crap. Should I believe him? No.

Me: U left the flower on my pillow?

Scream Mask Freak: Yes.

I swallowed back the rising emotion. He admitted it. He admitted he had left the flower there.

Me: Did u go through my stuff?

Scream Mask Freak: What r u doing tomorrow?

Me: Why?

Scream Mask Freak: Coffee?

A one-word answer wasn’t enough for me to know what he was suggesting. My optimism, laced with loneliness, might bereading into this, so I needed clarification before I made a dick out of myself by jumping to conclusions.

Me: Elaborate. What do u mean by ‘coffee’?

I waited five minutes for a reply, and when I was met with silence, I took a large bundle of clothes and went down to the laundromat room on the ground floor, assuming that by the time I returned, a message would be waiting.

Once, in the laundromat, with my bag of clean clothes touched by my stalker's hand, I stumbled across a familiar face sitting on a bench, head down, reading a Kindle.

“Cheetos? I mean…” she looked up under those glasses, and my hand twitched to the glasses on my face to adjust them. Sometimes, I forget they’re there; other times, I forget to put them on because I didn’t need glasses to see; it was just part of my disguise. I’d become better at it by ticking boxes every day.

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