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“You moved her into my apartment!”
My eyes flew open and I looked around in a daze, trying to understand what was going on around me. The clock on the wall said it was four in the morning. The entire place smelled of whipped cream and lighter fluid. And Nicholas Hunter was standing in front of my bed.
The first thing I did was pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The second thing I did was glance beneath the covers to make sure I was wearing some kind of pants.
“Nick?” I squinted in the dim light, trying to make sense of it all. It looked like he was actually wet again. But dirty too. Covered in something I didn’t recognize. “I don’t—”
“Yes,” he shouted, “it’s me! Nick! Your only client! The man who pays for this awful excuse for an apartment! The same man who you totally fucked over tonight!”
I cringed beneath my comforter, wishing it was just a dream after all.
“What are you...” The remnants of sleep began to fall away, and I started putting things together for the first time. Starting with the most important. “You came to my apartment?!”
“You moved a FUCKING LUNATIC into mine!”
Oh right...that.
“Okay, listen,” I sat up a little straighter, raising my hands peaceably between us, “I get that you’re mad, I really do, but...”
But mad didn’t begin to cover it. I had seen him mad. I had seen him unreasonably mad.
I had never seen anything like this.
In a single movement, he perched on the mattress beside me. An overwhelming and nonsensical array of scents followed like a dense fog, and it was all I could do to keep it together as he leaned in very close, speaking right into my face.
“Mad? You think this can be covered by mad?” A host of chills ran down the back of my spine. He sounded almost as frightening as his father. “I don’t know what’s been going on these last few days, Abigail, but you’re going to fix this—now!”
Then all at once, it clicked.
My face lightened in surprise, then dulled with a kind of abstract disappointment.
“Oh gosh...you slept with her, didn’t you?”
It was probably the only thing I could have said to make him pause. At first, he just stared at me blankly, like I was making some kind of ill-timed joke. Then he leaned back with a look of revulsion so real, it had no place darkening his handsome face.
“You think...you think I had sex with that woman?”
I didn’t say a word. Anything I said at this point would just dig me in that much deeper. I stared at the crushed strawberry still clinging to his hair.
His eyes tracked mine, before suddenly understanding. Then flashing with fresh rage.
“I didn’t fuck her, Abby!” He leapt to his feet and gestured to his filthy clothes like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She set me on fire!”