Page 32 of Stalker's Toy

“When I was a teenager,” she says, picking up the story where she left it. “There was a fire.”

I say nothing and simply wait.

Mia twists her hands, wringing them as she stares blankly at her art.

“It took everything,” she continues, trying to mask the fragility beneath. “Everyone dear to me.”

Still, I wait.

“It left me alone,” she finally confesses. "Orphaned.”

I let the emptiness drag on, waiting to see how much more she’ll give.

She doesn’t know that I can wait forever, if that’s what it takes.

She doesn’t know how good I am at taking.

“It’s the screams that stay with me.” Her voice isalmost gone now.

Her eyes are red with the ghosts of her own survival. “Even now. Even in my dreams.”

She exhales in a quiet rush, and I see the scar tissue of her heart through the skin of her words.

I see it pulsing, vulnerable, raw.

Mia stands there, stripped bare by her confessions.

It’s almost as delectable as her body will be, on display for me to devour.

Finally, I shatter the silence. “How was your life after the fire?”

She looks at me.

Her eyes are vacant, but they won’t stay that way for long.

Not with me here.

Not with her past breathing down her neck and my expectations bearing down from the other side.

“Shit.”

She exhales, a long, drawn out breath.

“Pure and utter shit.”

The confession begins.

“I went from living in a beautiful home with my parents…” She draws another ragged breath, but the words pour from her lips as though they’d been there forever. “... to being thrown into foster care when they passed away, leaving me with no family when I was fifteen.”

She’s so damn fragile.

It’s all she can do to keep it together.

It’s delicious, the way she leaves herself so bare, so exposed.

I know how it will end, but I want to see it break apart in front of me.

I want to see her shatter.

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