Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91504 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91504 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
A shiver snakes up my spine. It’s too cold to be outside without a jacket. Behind me, there are footsteps—a figure moving closer. Maybe Gabriel has come looking for me?
Or maybe there’s another random person wandering the streets in the middle of the night.
I don’t want to deal with either, so I bolt back the way I came. Left instead of right. Right instead of left. And suddenly, I’m in front of the storage unit once again.
No Verizon store. There was no Verizon store. He smiled like he knew that already.
I stop, lean against a building, catch my breath once again. Maybe the Verizon store closed. Maybe it had been there, but now it’s gone, and he didn’t realize.
Or… he knows I was looking for him, wandering about near his apartment.
The thought seizes my insides. What would that even mean? I chew my nail, and my guts twist—God, the sex was exactly what I needed. Rough and punishing. It let me relax. It’s addictive. I can understand Rebecca’s desire for her boyfriend to do it that way. Especially if that’s what she’s used to. I mean, how could you go back to normal after that?
Maybe I was too quick to leave. I just got so freaked-out, surrounded by the remnants of his life from before. The life I destroyed. God, I’ll have to say something to him after all this. No sane woman just runs into the night after having sex with a man. The doctor-patient thing is obviously still a huge problem. Maybe I can spin it that way. Will he see through it?
Wait—does he see me right now?
I look left, then right. The street is empty, so I close my eyes. A long exhale brings me back to myself. To the moment. To the cold New York street, the concrete building pressing into my back. I need to go home. Need to shut my door, lock it, and pretend this never happened. I’m an awful, awful person. Tracking the man whose family you destroyed. Then letting all this happen…
But as soon as I push from the wall to go, I look back up at the storage unit and let myself wonder what he might have hidden in there. What would cause him to go back day after day and spend not five minutes or ten minutes, but thirty minutes, an hour, in its depths?
Once I would have said it was his family’s belongings. Maybe he holds his wife’s favorite sweater up to his face the way I have yours, inhaling that lingering scent, fearful that one day it will dissipate into nothingness, and she’ll be gone the way you’re gone. That last trace, vanished.
But I can’t think that anymore. Gabriel’s apartment is still filled with his wife’s things.
I stare at the brick storage unit once again.
I need to know.
Need. Not want.
I don’t even understand why I need to know. Not even the good Dr. Alexander could tell me that. But it’s a craving that comes from deep within my soul. And there’s no stopping me from feeding it this time.
Across the street, a man is walking down the block. He holds two boxes in his hands, one on top of the other. He slows as he approaches the storage center, sets the boxes down in front of the door. My eyes widen. He’s going in… Before I know it, before I have a chance to think things through, I’m jogging across the street, and I reach for the door the man just opened with a key card.
“Let me get that for you,” I say. He turns and I offer a friendly smile. “My unit’s just down the hall.”
If I were a man, the guy probably would’ve thought twice. But I’m no threat to him. At least, that’s what he thinks. Luckily, I don’t look as unhinged as I feel.
“Thanks a lot.” He picks up his boxes and steps inside, walks to the right a few paces, and disappears into a waiting elevator.
All the while, I’m holding my breath, and my heart feels like it’s about to burst at any moment. Once he’s gone, I blow out a shaky breath and tread to the right, the same direction I’ve watched Gabriel go many times before.
I count the units as I walk. Finally I’m making good use of the random notes I jotted down all those months ago. At the time, they were nothing more than scattered thoughts—scribbles from a woman on the verge of a breakdown.
Cigarettes.
Small coffee.
Corn muffin.
Twelve.
The last item being the window count from the storage unit entrance, the window where I watched a light flicker on every time he entered.
I arrive at the unit and stand in front of it. It looks no different from the other garage-type doors surrounding me. It’s painted blue, and a round lock hangs from its latch.