I'm at her door in seconds. Handle locked. I almost smile. Good girl. I move around to the kitchen window and find it unlatched, which is something we'll talk about later. The window is small, positioned directly above the sink, but I get through it, and when my foot clips a lemon-shaped coffee mug on the way down it hits the tile with a clank that seems enormous in the quiet apartment.
I hold still. Nothing. She's completely out.
The apartment is citrus and lemons everywhere, yellow and green in the kitchen, pink and white in the living room beyond it. Small and carefully put together. It smells like her.
I find her bedroom. She's folded over her trash can, unconscious, hair falling across her face.
I move it back and tuck it behind her ear.
She's stunning even like this, which is inconvenient information.
Who are you, Goldilocks.
I run my hand slowly down her back and she arches into the touch without waking, a small unconscious lean towardwarmth, and the electricity that moves through my fingertips is immediate and unreasonable and I pull back.
Not like this. Not with whatever's still in her system. I've done things I'm not proud of, made choices I've stopped trying to justify, but I know exactly where the line is and I don't cross it. Not here.
I find the water bottle on her kitchen table and move it to her nightstand within reach. Take one last look at her. Then I go back out the window, careful and quiet, and ease the latch back into place from outside.
The cop resettles into his spot. Once he's parked and watching the lot again I move, not toward the cars but toward the community pool at the far end of the complex.
The vending machine by the gate looks like it's been through a few disasters. An iguana is stretched out beside it in a patch of afternoon warmth, completely unbothered.
I kick the machine casing on my way past. The iguana bolts into the bushes.
Good. Now I'm the only predator in the area.
I stand there for a moment with that thought.
What the hell am I doing?
I haven't looked twice at a woman in years. Haven't wanted to. I got good at not wanting to, built the discipline into the same muscle memory as everything else. And here I am circling a woman's apartment complex, breaking into her kitchen, moving her water bottle three feet so it'll be easier for her to reach when she wakes up.
Lingering this close is reckless. Dangerous. Every hour I spend in her orbit is an hour I'm not invisible.
But distance feels worse. That's the part I can't think my way around.
It's the same pull that tightens in my chest when Ma coughs too hard in the next room. The same thing that has me scanning parking lots and checking locks and standing between people and whatever I think is coming. I don't know how to be near someone I've decided to watch over and also keep my hands to myself about it.
That should worry me more than it does.
I pull out my phone. Check the time. Ma needs her meds before her shift and I've been sitting in a stranger's parking lot for the better part of an afternoon.
I head back to the truck and navigate around the cop one more time, easy, unhurried, just a man leaving a complex he had no real reason to be in.
CHAPTER 20
HARVEE
When I wake up again, the light in the room is wrong.
Dimmer somehow, softer, even though I never touched the lamp. I lie still for a moment and try to locate myself in time. Morning or afternoon or something in between, I genuinely can't tell. My head pulses with my heartbeat. My tongue feels like sandpaper dragged across dry concrete.
I push myself upright slowly, everything protesting, and scan the room.
Bedside table. Lamp. Trash can. Half-empty water bottle.
Everything where I left it. And yet my brain won't stop whispering that something is wrong, won't stop cataloguing the air itself, which feels heavier than it should, used somehow, like the oxygen has been rearranged.