Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 95340 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95340 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
“What’s it doing?”
“Staring at me. He’s over the closet.” Perched. Like a squirrel.
“Are you going to open the window?”
“Hell no I’m not opening it,” I hiss.
At least not from inside the room. No fucking way.
“Why not?”
BECAUSE I’M SCARED, THAT’S WHY!
What I actually say, through clenched teeth, is, “I don’t want to move.”
Lizzy is silent for a few seconds. “Brodie, you’re going to have to. You can’t stand there all night.” Then she asks, “Should I come in?”
I shake my head. “No.”
SAVE YOURSELF!
In a calm, measured voice, I add, “The good news is, he hasn’t destroyed anything.”
“That’s good.” Pause. “We really should try to open the window though.”
And by we she means me.
I shake my head again, vigorously. “Nuh-uh. He’s right there.”
“If he’s sitting near the window, that makes it the perfect time to open it.”
I wish she would stop talking.
No fucking way am I getting any closer.
No way am I going to—
CHAPTER THREE
LIZZY
From inside my bedroom, Brodie lets out a bloodcurdling scream that could wake the dead. The kind you’d hear coming out of a teenage girl in a horror movie.
One who’s being murdered.
Then he comes bursting through the door, his large body almost plowing me down as he dramatically slams the door closed behind him, collapsing against the wall.
“I-it...it...almost…” He huffs and puffs and puffs some more, like someone seriously out of shape that’s just run up twenty flights of stairs, and I know he’s not out of shape because he’s on the hockey team of a division one university.
“Almost what, Brodie?” I patronizingly ask, crossing my arms because he has been blowing this situation out of proportion since the second he walked into the house.
“A-almost…got…me.”
Oh, brother. He’s being so dramatic.
I put a hand on his shoulder, patting him like a child. “What happened?”
He clutches a hand to his chest. Honestly, he does. “It lunged at me.”
“Did it lunge at you, or was it just jumping to a different spot?”
“At me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because. One second, he was c-chilling there, looking at me with his tiny beady eyes, and the next, he was jumping at my fucking face like MacGyver.”
Who the hell is MacGyver?
I don’t ask.
He is so worked up.
I try not to laugh. “Did he get you?”
Brodie cocks an eyebrow as if he’s insulted I’d even have to ask. “No, but he could have.”
“But he didn’t.”
“But he could have.”
“Well.” I pause. “Where did he go when he landed?”
“I didn’t look.” He huffs some more. “I was too busy screaming.”
Yeah, I heard.
The whole neighborhood probably heard. “So he didn’t touch you, he didn’t eat you, and you didn’t see where he went after he lunged.”
Not helpful.
Not at all.
“Correct.”
When Brodie stands to his full height, I finally notice how much larger he is than I am.
How tall.
How broad.
How good he smells.
Even though the situation is serious, I can’t help noticing all these things about him because I’m a warm-blooded female, and that’s what I do.
“What do we do now?” I can feel myself worrying my bottom lip. “My landlord isn’t scheduled to be here with the pest control guy until tomorrow, and I can’t get ahold of anyone.”
He considers this for a few seconds. “We’ll open the window and hope he hops out at some point tonight.”
Brodie shoulders his way past me, elbow brushing against my right boob as he heads toward the front door.
I follow, trudging behind until we’re both standing outside my bedroom window, side-by-side, staring up at it. It’s not as low to the ground as it seems from the inside, and I scratch my head, debating our options.
Ladder.
Stool.
“You’re gonna have to climb up on my shoulders. There’s no other way we can reach it,” he announces, the exact opposite of what I would have suggested as a solution.
I’ve seen cheerleaders’ stunt teams, but I’m not bendy or flexible and cannot imagine myself climbing on this guy, let alone being able to balance and not fall off.
“That’s never going to work…”
“You’re tiny. It’ll be easy.”
My girly insides get a little mushy when he calls me tiny because I’m not tiny in the least. He’s just massive.
“Well,” he says impatiently. “Do you have a ladder?”
“No.” I pause. “Do you?”
He shakes his head. “Just get up on my shoulders and push on it if you can. The window is unlocked, thank god.”
He gives instructions as if it were going to be easy to hop onto his shoulders and jack a window open—as if I do it every day.
“But I’m…” Naked.
Not wearing underwear.
No bra. Just this robe. Because I thought it would be a good idea to lounge around after my shower and not put clothes on. Because I did not think anyone would see me, let alone need to boost me up on their shoulders.
N – A – K – E – D.
My unfinished sentence lingers, and I know that he knows I’m not wearing anything beneath this pink wrap.