Page 146 of Letters From A Stalker

The words almost make me smile.

Tell me about that.

Of course.

Not who is he? Not when did this happen? Kai Blackwood is going to therapist the hell out of this until I give him nowhere left to hide.

“I don’t know whether seeing him is the right way to describe it,” I say, trying to keep my own tone casual even though my heart is beating so hard it feels like he should be able to see it through my blouse. “We don’t date. We don’t go out anywhere together. It’s mostly sexual.”

There. Something passes behind his eyes. It disappears so quickly that I could convince myself I imagined it, except the muscle near his jaw tightens once before smoothing again.

“How do you feel about the arrangement?” he asks.

I almost laugh from nerves. “You mean how do I feel about being fucked by him?”

His gaze remains steady. “I mean how do you feel about whatever exists between the two of you.”

The careful correction sounds exactly like him. That somehow makes everything worse.

“It’s complicated,” I say, watching him closely enough now that I notice the slight tightening of his fingers around the pen before he leans back in his chair.

“What makes it complicated?”

For a second, I consider how much to give him and in what order, but I didn’t exactly come into this room with a plan.

“He isn’t somebody I met in any normal sense.” I keep my voice deliberately even, though my heartbeat has become painfully loud beneath my ribs. “He started watching me before I knew he existed. At my house. Then he started leaving letters, telling me things he’d noticed through the windows, things he couldn’t possibly know unless he really had been there. At first it scared me, then the letters changed, became more sexual, and somewhere along the way I stopped being afraid of finding them. I started looking forward to them.”

Kai doesn’t interrupt. That is almost worse than if he did. His face remains composed behind his glasses, but the pen has stopped moving entirely and something in the set of his shoulders has gone unnaturally still.

“He started giving me ways to answer him,” I continue. “Not by writing back. A lamp left on, standing at the window, little things that let me decide whether I wanted him there. Eventually he asked me to let him inside, and I did. Since then, I’ve let him come back more than once, and yes, before you ask, it became sexual.”

The muscle near Kai’s jaw tightens — there — so small that I might never have noticed it before today. Now it lands like another stone in my stomach.

His voice remains controlled when he finally speaks. “When you let him inside, was that something you genuinely wanted, or did you feel that refusing him might have consequences?”

The question makes my throat tighten because I have heard its meaning from another man over and over again, written in black ink and whispered through a mask.

Choice. Always a choice. But now I realize that it never was, though, was it?

“I wanted him there.” I manage to say.

Something in Kai’s posture eases, almost imperceptibly. I hate that I notice.

“I still don’t know who he is,” I add before he can ask anything else. “He hides his face, changes his voice when he speaks and comes to me either wearing a balaclava or a motorcycle helmet. I don’t know his real name, where he lives or what he does for a living, and yet I keep letting him into my house because I like being with him.”

Kai sets the pen on top of the notebook with an almost exaggerated care that makes my stomach turn.

“I know how fucking stupid it sounds,” I add.

His brows draw together immediately. “I wouldn’t call it stupid.”

“I would.” I let out a brittle laugh and look away, folding my hands together in my lap. “What kind of woman willingly lets the man who has been stalking her through her windows into her bed because his letters turn her on?”

“Julia.” There is a warning beneath my name.

I keep my eyes down because I know exactly what happens when I start talking about myself this way in this room.

“What does that say about me? That I’m getting healthier? That months of therapy have apparently brought me to the enlightened conclusion that sleeping with my stalker is personal growth?”