The distinct feeling of not being a

The distinct feeling of not being alone surrounded me. Tiny hairs rose all over my body. My chest rose and fell rapidly as I stood there. Maybe I should’ve said something to the guys about the weird stuff happening in my apartment. If I had, they would’ve demanded to come home with me, but it had seemed too foolish to mention, too weird and unexplainable.
Now, I thought I might have a heart attack.
Blindly, I reached out, my fingers brushing the shade of the lamp before finding the tiny switch. I flipped the light on and a soft glow spread across the living room, but the shadows seemed to have darkened everywhere else.
Reaching into my purse, I wrapped my hand around my cell phone and pulled it out. I quietly inched forward, placing my purse on the recliner. Holding on to my phone, I went into the kitchen, turning on lights.
Nothing out of place.
As I opened up the dishwasher, half expecting to find a bra-and-panty set stuffed in there, my breath hitched in my throat as my ears strained to hear sound.
Something—something came from the back of the house, where my bedrooms were. The sound of a door shutting softly? I wasn’t sure.
I spun around, heart racing. Fear tiptoed over my skin. Had I heard a door closing? Or was it just my imagination? At this point, I couldn’t be sure, but I grabbed a huge-ass psycho butcher knife out of its block.
Taking a deep breath, I made my way through the entire apartment. Nothing was out of the ordinary, no doors open when they shouldn’t be or vice versa, and with all the lights on, even the bathroom’s, I plopped down on the bed, sighing.
I really needed to go to the local church and order an exorcism.
Glancing down at the scary knife I still held, I sat it on the bed beside me and then I looked at the phone. I could totally text Reece. Tell him I thought I heard something in my apartment. He would come over, and it wouldn’t be a lie, but . . .
But it wouldn’t be right.
That . . . that was like reaching a whole new level of desperation, and I wasn’t to that point. Yet.
I didn’t get much sleep. Weirded out by the way my apartment felt when I entered and everything else that had been going on, I woke up every hour until the sun rose and then I finally gave up.
At the butt crack of dawn, I found myself in my studio. The Jackson Square painting forgotten, I stared at a blank piece of canvas and then I grabbed my paintbrush. There wasn’t any thought behind what I was doing. My hand had a mind of its own. I was on autopilot. Hours passed, and my back and neck ached from sitting so long in virtually the same position.
Rubbing the cramp in my lower back, I leaned back in the stool. I tilted my head to the side and muttered, “Fuck me.”
The background of the painting was the robin’s egg blue of my kitchen walls and the bright white of the cabinets. No big deal there, but it was what was in the center of the painting that made me want to get a lobotomy.
The skin tone had been hard to capture, mixing browns and pinks and yellows together until I got as close as I could to the golden tone. The shoulders had been easy to shape on the canvas, but shading the contoured muscles had been the hardest. My wrist didn’t appreciate all the hard work it had taken to get the right curve of his spine, the corded muscles on either side. The black pants had been the easiest.
I’d painted Reece like I had seen him in the kitchen Tuesday morning.
Squeezing my eyes shut, it did nothing to ease the burn in my eyes or stop the tears from building. Frustration rose in me. I knew without looking at my phone that it was past ten in the morning. That knowledge made my chest ache and my stomach feel wrong, like I’d eaten too much.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d waited two days.
Dropping the paintbrush on the stand, I hopped up and went to my phone. Without thinking too much about it, without stressing myself out any longer, I typed Reece a quick text.
I miss you.
God, that was so bizarrely true. I went almost a year not speaking to him and I had missed him during that time, but that want had been cloaked in bitterness and anger. With that gone, all that remained was how much I missed him.
I deleted that and typed Are we still on for today?
Then I also backspaced the mother out of that and finally settled on Hey.
Bringing my phone into the bedroom, I took a quick shower and blow-dried my hair. I even curled lazy waves into it and put makeup on so I’d be ready just in case . . .
Then I paced my living room and kitchen, too wired to sit down, and with each passing minute, that frustration and panic pecked away at me.
Twelve o’clock dragged into one and then two and when I had only thirty minutes left to get ready for my shift at Mona’s and there was no text or call, that teeny, tiny spark of hope that I’d been holding close to my heart extinguished.
Reece had lied to me.
For the first time since I’d known him, he had lied to me. Because I knew in that moment, he wasn’t going to call me.