Page 16 of Prey

Come for me.

Come...

I come. Hard. Uncontrollably. My whole body arches off the bed. The sound that escapes my throat isn’t human, it’s something primal, something that’s been caged for months and just broke free. My release spills over my hand, over his sheets, over his jacket. I lie there, panting. My body is trembling. My mind is blank. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears.

What did I just do?

I came in his bed. In his jacket. In his sheets. He’s going to know. He’s going to know someone was here. He’s going to…

I don't care.

I want him to know. I want him to come home and smell me and wonder who was here. I want him to think about me the way I think about him. I want him to have to choose to keep me or get rid of me.

I don’t clean up. Not completely. I strip off his jacket. Hang it back in the closet. Adjust the sleeves so they hang exactly the way they did before. I spray his cologne in the air to blur my scent with his. I leave the sheets in the mess they are in. A stain on his sheets. A damp spot on his pillow.

I leave my sweat. My smell. The evidence of what I did here.

He’ll notice. Or he won’t. Either way, I’ll know that I was here. That I touched him. That I took something he can’t get back. And if he decides that’s too much, if he decides I’m too much, he can leave.

People always do.

Chapter 9B

Cain

I wake before my alarm.

The room is dim. The city has a soft glow beyond the windows. For a moment, I lie still. Listening to nothing. Just the hum of the building, the distant thrum of traffic, my own breathing. I turn my head. The pillow smells wrong. Not wrong. Different. My cologne is there, faint from yesterday morning. But there’s something else. A scent that doesn’t belong to me.

I sit up.

I didn’t sleep well, but I remember last night. I came back too tired, and abit tipsy. Took a shower and straight to bed, I noticed it, but I didn’t care enough at that time. Now that I think about it, my sheets were more tangled than they should be.

I pull the blanket back. There’s a faint mark on the sheet. Small. The kind of stain you only see if you’re looking for it and I’m looking. Someone was here.

My first instinct is the one I’ve trained into myself over years. Check the logs and eliminate the threat. Instead I swing my legs over the side of the bed and walk through the apartment. The living room is untouched. Everything is exactly where I left them.

The bathroom is the same.

In the closet, one jacket hangs at a slightly different angle. The black one from yesterday. My favorite. It looks normal. But when I touch the sleeve, I can almost feel phantom fingers there.

He was in my office. He was on my desk. He was in my bed.

Of course it’s him.

I lean against the closet door. Close my eyes. Picture him here. Jacket hanging off his shoulders, too big. Lying on my bed, face pressed into my pillow, breathing me in like oxygen. I walk back to the bedroom. Sit on the edge of the bed. My hand rests on the stain. He wanted me to find this. To know. To be forced into a choice: stop him, or keep him.

The decent choice, the legal choice, the one HR would insist on, is obvious to terminate him. I don’t pick up my phone. I lie back down. Press my face into the pillow. His scent hits me again. Fainter now that I’ve disturbed the sheets. But still there.

Oh Grey you broke into my home. You touched my things. You left yourself on my bed. You think you’re forcing my hand.

You’re right.

I’m not calling security. I’m not changing the code. I’m not washing the sheets, yet. I’m going to the office. I’m going to look at you across that desk, watch you pretend you’re perfect, and decide exactly how far I’m willing to let you go before I finally close my teeth.

Chapter 10

Cain