I woke up in the middle of the night with a start. Sitting up, I groaned as I looked around my room trying to locate the cause for waking me. My alarm clock showed it was well past 3am. I could hear the steps creaking out in the hall as somebody made their way up the stairs. Sliding out of bed, I walked over to the door to my room. As I rubbed the sleep from my eyes I opened the door and stuck my head out in the hall. I caught my friend Alex opening the door to his bedroom.
Alex is my best friend. We've known each other since our freshmen year of high school. We were so close that, when it came time to decide where we would go to college, we chose to go to the same school. Because of how inseparable we were, we shared the same freshmen dorm room and now in our sophomore year we had an off-campus apartment together with a couple other roommates.
"Alex?" I asked, "What are you doing getting back this late?"
"Oh... Hey David," he muttered, apparently not expecting me to be awake.
He looked disheveled and out of sorts. His 5'10" frame looked a little sweaty and his brown hair was messy.
"I was just at the library finishing some work," he said as he walked into his room, throwing his backpack to the floor.
"Okay..." I said, not fully believing him, "Well get some sleep bud. We have class early tomorrow."
"Yeah I know," he said sounding somewhat annoyed.
Deciding it was probably best that I let him be and focus on getting a couple more hours of sleep; I retreated back into my room and closed the door. My name is David. I'm a 20-year-old college sophomore. I stand at about six feet tall with blonde hair and hazel eyes. My lean athletic body was a result of high school sports and a high metabolism.
This wasn't the first time I had been surprised by my roommate's actions. Alex has been acting strange lately. Really, it seemed as though it started ever since we began the spring semester a couple of weeks ago. Alex had been more agitated and distant. He was getting in more arguments with his girlfriend Olivia, and he hardly ever chose to go out at night with me anymore. What was even stranger was that he would disappear for hours on end multiple times during the week. And, Alex never seemed to give a convincing answer. I knew him well enough to tell that there was something he was hiding from me. After a few weeks of this I was beginning to get worried about him.
A couple of days later I had my opportunity to find out what was going on. It was in the middle of class late one afternoon when I got my first clue. We were both busy taking notes during an especially boring lecture. Alex started to get a bit fidgety in his seat and was taking glances at the clock.
"Shit," he cursed under his breath before laying his pencil down.
I chuckled quietly at him knowing full well that it was nature calling. He got up and excused himself as he hurried out of the classroom door in search of the bathroom. Since we always sat next to each other in class Alex felt fairly comfortable leaving his belongings at his desk. It was no surprise to me when he left his phone sitting on his desk with his other materials. I redirected my attention back towards the professor shortly after Alex left the room. I didn't want to miss anything she said. Class notes were very important for the exam in this class.
Alex wasn't gone for more than a minute before his phone lit up and buzzed a notification. Not usually a nosey person, I didn't pay much attention to it. But, when it lit up again with another message quickly after the first, I became interested. I leaned across the aisle surreptitiously to take a quick glance. There was no contact name to go along with the phone number.
The first message simply read, "my place, 15 minutes."
That was all that I was able to read before the screen went dark again. This piqued my curiosity. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't walking back in. Tapping the home button, I proceeded to scan the rest of his lock screen notifications. Quickly, I checked the second text he received.
"Don't make me wait again. You know I can find someone else," the message read.
"What's all this about?" I asked myself.
This all struck me as very strange. Immediately I began thinking of anything that would help me piece this together. I couldn't remember any strange people or places that Alex and I had visited recently. I wanted to brush it off as a wrong number. That excuse seemed plausible since he hadn't saved the number in his contacts. But, with the way he's been acting lately, I just couldn't discard my suspicions. Hitting the 'lock screen' button, I went back to writing my notes as I waited for him to return. The entire time I was scribbling notes down I was thinking of those messages. Alex returned from the bathroom a couple of minutes later. He slid back into his seat while the professor droned on.
"Did I miss anything exciting?" he whispered to me.
"Oh yeah, you just missed it. The professor took her top off and showed her tits off to the class," I quipped.
"Fuck off," he chuckled.
"No really, they looked good for her age," I said continuing to joke with him.
I positioned my notebook so that he could copy what he'd missed. Alex laughed quietly while he started to jot down the notes. A few minutes passed as the sounds of diligent scribbling and tapping feet resonated around the room. Suddenly his phone buzzed again on his desk. I had never known him to be a jumpy person, but he practically hopped out of his seat at the sound of his phone. He clawed for his phone and read the new notification quickly before unlocking his phone to read the now list of messages.
"Fuck!" I heard him curse under his breath.
I glanced over at him. He was furiously typing away on his phone now.
