Page 82 of Letters From A Stalker

Still awful.

I see the fire you try to hide.

Still not awful enough.

My eyes drift toward the last lines without needing to read everything between them.

You are mine, Little Ember. Even if you don’t know it yet.

I lower the page. Maybe he got bored. The thought is absurd enough that I almost laugh, except the little sting beneath it is embarrassingly real. He watched me closely enough to write that. Whatever he thought he saw apparently interested him enough to come onto my property and leave an anonymous letter against my front door. Then nothing. Perhaps he saw more. Perhaps whatever mystery he imagined existed beneath the woman eating leftovers on her sofa and arguing with her coffee machine turned out to be far less interesting up close. That thought annoys me for reasons I absolutely refuse to examine before noon on a Saturday. It shouldn’t matter whether an anonymous man finds me interesting. It should matter considerably less whether he finds me attractive. I don’t even know whether attraction has anything to do with this. For all I know, Man in the Shadows is seventy-three, collects human teeth and considers me an excellent candidate for a lampshade. That should help. It does not.

The problem isn’t really him. I know that. It’s the old, ugly little assumption underneath the thought. People leave when they know enough. People become interested and then discover something better. I can be wanted temporarily. Useful indefinitely. Interesting until somebody looks closely. Kai would have a fucking field day with that. The thought of him makes me fold the letter immediately.

“Nope.”

I slide it back into the envelope and return it to the drawer. I am not doing therapy alone in my living room while holding correspondence from a possible criminal. There are boundaries. There should be boundaries. I close the drawer with perhaps more force than necessary, turn Fleetwood Mac louder and go back to cleaning.

It’s late afternoon when the house looks like people who have never met me might reasonably believe I have my life together. I have showered, changed into soft black leggings and an oversized cream sweater, taken my hair down and put on enough mascara to distinguish girls’ night from severe illness. There are two bottles of wine chilling in the refrigerator, pizza dough I kneaded this morning before even washing my face, and three different bags of snacks on the counter because Tessa and I have never once correctly estimated how much food two women require for an evening of sitting down.

Her overnight bag lands against my hallway wall at six seventeen. Tessa follows it into the house carrying another bottle of wine despite having been explicitly told we already have enough.

“You said you were bringing pajamas.” I mutter, closing the front door behind her, and in true loser fashion, taking a look against my threshold for black envelope.

Fuck me sideways and flip me over like a pancake, that’s pathetic.

“I did bring pajamas.” Her voice jerks me out of my self wallowing state over my actual stalker. Or lack there of.

I point at the bottle. “That is not pajamas.”

“That is emotional support.”

“You know I have two bottles in the refrigerator.”

“Yes, but those are your bottles, and this is my bottle. If we drink yours first and then need mine, I have contributed. If we don’t need mine, I take it home and have lost nothing.”

I stare at her. “That is disturbingly logical.”

“I’m an adult woman with a retirement account. I make excellent decisions.”

“You once dated a drummer named Cody because he had nice forearms.”

“He had exceptional forearms, and we were twenty-six. Don’t rewrite history because you’ve become judgmental.”

She hooks one arm around my shoulders and kisses my temple before heading toward the kitchen as though she owns the place. I smile and follow because she kind of does, in a bestie-intimate way.

Within forty minutes, the carefully organized kitchen has been destroyed. There is flour on the counter because I let her finish off the dough, mozzarella on the floor and a suspicious amount of wine missing from the first bottle. Tessa has decided the pizza needs enough garlic to permanently eliminate both of us from the dating pool, while I am attempting to save the overly kneaded dough and stretch it into something vaguely circular and pull it into shapes that would be more useful for a geography assignment than baking.

“Mine looks like Wisconsin.”

Tessa leans over from beside me and considers it. “No, Wisconsin has more confidence.”

“Fuck you.” I fake frown.

“You invited me.”

“You kneaded the shit out of it.”

Eventually we abandon all concern for appearance, cover both pizzas in whatever we can find and put them in the oven. Ten minutes later, we carry them into the living room along with wine, blankets and the streaming-service decision we will spend longer making than we spent cooking dinner. It isn’t until halfway through the first slice that Tessa looks at me over the rim of her glass.