I was right too, managing to storm the front doors with no one on my tail. The night concierge, Crystal, looked concerned, the young thing still new to the role. She shouldn’t be scared, however, as armed guards were stationed at the door, both of whom had their guns drawn and pointed at me until they recognized my face.
“Someone was following me on the path.”
They holstered their guns, each looking at the other before turning to Crystal for direction. At barely twenty, she couldn’t direct her way out of a paperbag, let alone handle a potential danger.
So I did her job for her. “Call the police to report a prowler. They’ll set up foot patrols in the vicinity. They should anyway, given the area.” You couldn’t dump a bunch of millionaires in a handful of buildings and not expect those looking to skim a bit off the top forcefully to notice.
The door behind me opened suddenly, a brown-haired man stepping in. I’d never seen him around before, his square jaw and piercing green eyes more than memorable at a glance. I flicked my head to the guards in response, hackles raised. He was no doubt the person who’d been following me. I may have not seen him, but the timing of his arrival was too perfect to be a coincidence.
“Sir, please list your apartment number and provide ID,” the shorter guard, Mitch, ordered, hand resting on his gun.
The new arrival’s eyes bounced between all four of us. “I’m here to visit my girlfriend,” he said flatly.
“What’s her apartment number and floor, sir?” Mitch wasn’t having it, his jaw clenched tight as he studied the stranger.
“I’m not sure, sir,” the stranger replied. He put two hands up slightly to show he meant no harm, uneasy at Mitch’s hand resting on his gun. If he thought that was bad, he should’ve had two of them pointed at his chest like I’d just experienced.
“What’s her name?” I asked, throwing him a lifeline from a few feet away. If he really was there to visit, that much would at least get him inside.
His green eyes fixated on me, fear morphing into something else. Something else I couldn’t quite put a finger on. “Keely.”
All the air was sucked out of me at his response, knowing for sure he’d been the person following me. “Keely what?” I asked, refusing to show that he had me cornered.
“Boyle,” he replied, a taunting smile slicing across his face, bright white teeth emerging.
“I’m sorry; there’s no Keely Boyle in this building,” Crystal called, having immediately searched the name in the resident records apparently. “You’ll have to leave.”
The man didn’t flinch at the news, eyes still locked on me. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he was. I could picture the press lanyard around his neck. He likely saw the photo of us in the paper and ran from there. “Seems like she gave me the wrong address,” he mused.
I still didn’t cave, but my insides were burning. Kee had no idea where I lived, and my name wasn’t listed online to search for an address. I’d paid good money to make sure of it. He was bluffing. He had to be.
“Have a good night, everyone. I’ll have to give her a call.” He shot me a parting wink before turning on his heel and fleeing back into the night, a tornado left in his wake.
All that was certain was that my days living in Boston were numbered, and that I owed Kee a sliver of truth before she unknowingly got sucked into it.
Keely
I could kiss whoever invented curl cream, the serum taming my corkscrews like nothing else. Thanks to its almighty power, all I had to do was change after work, and I was good to go.
Skinny jeans, sneakers, and a tee were my oh-so-fancy attire of the evening, comfort key to enjoying the night. Rick and I were catching a psychology lecture together at the library, meeting at my place beforehand since it was a few blocks away. I was genuinely surprised how much fun we’d had during our geek-out grub sesh a week earlier, the hour-long back and forth the only time I’d smiled coming to terms with what Ethan had done.
Initially, I thought he was busy. But slowly as the week unfolded, I was confronted with the fact that we were finished as friends. It blew a hole in my heart, so any distraction was worth exploring, even a lecture on a Tuesday night.
I still hadn’t said a word to Lil or Jorge, too embarrassed about falling for the old fuck-and-chuck routine hook, line, and sinker. He’d caught me alright, and in the end, I was just another fish he threw back without a second thought.
A spritz of my favorite perfume almost made me feel human. That is, until I turned around, the sight of my bed forcing my heart into my stomach. It was there that I thought my dreams were coming true, only to have them shattered cruelly moments later.
I always pictured Ethan to be gentle as a lover. I wasn’t sure why, seeing that I had no business guessing how anyone was in the sack with my relative inexperience, but he was always kind to me. Patient. Sweet. I never expected him to be so rough, the purple bruising still visible on my hips from his fingers, the rawness of the encounter seeming like unbridled passion at the time.
Now it felt wild. Savage. Cruel. He took what he wanted and left. He hadn’t answered my calls or texts, abandoning me with what-ifs, twisting the knife in the one spot he knew it’d stick the furthest and do the most damage.
The thought brought fresh tears to my eyes, but a knock at the door had me wiping them away desperately, not wanting to be that girl. I could handle it. Men were pigs all the time. I