The evening started with me finding out that someone broke into my apartment. I was pretty sure it was only going to go downhill from there.
It wasn't a big, obvious break-in, or anything. I didn't find the door hanging wide open with the lock shattered and big crowbar marks on the frame. I'm pretty sure that would have alerted my neighbors-I know they pay a lot of attention to what goes on around here, because I'm used to getting knocks on my door at eleven o'clock at night from someone who saw a guy in a hoodie walking down the street and wanted to know if I could 'check it out'. Even someone picking the lock probably would have had to deal with a few nosy tenants recording the whole thing on their cell phones.
But when I put my key into the lock, it turned smoothly instead of catching. And I remembered turning the handle on my way out this morning and feeling it rattle back and forth under my fingers; nothing helps you develop good habits about locking your door like taking the statements of burglary victims who 'just popped out for a few minutes'. That meant someone must have unlocked it while I was at work, and Maintenance would have left me a text if they were stopping by. That meant it was someone who had a key... and it didn't take a detective to figure out who had a key to my apartment.
I should have taken it back days ago, but every time I thought about talking to Jen again, I just hit a wall. I told myself there wasn't any big hurry, she probably needed time to cool off anyway and if I pushed things now we might end up losing our friendship, but... those were all just excuses. I didn't talk to Jen because I thought that she was going to make things weird and uncomfortable again, and I wanted to put that off as long as possible.
It looked like it wasn't possible to put it off any longer. With a sigh of resignation, I opened the door and went inside.
I wasn't surprised to find Jennifer in my living room. I wasn't even surprised to find her dressed in skimpy lingerie; she'd made it pretty clear in our last conversation that she wanted me to be her first time with a woman, and I didn't think she'd stopped by to apologize for making unwarranted assumptions about my sexuality. I knew she was here to try to convince me that I was 'really' gay, or bisexual, or whatever she'd decided she was after thirty-two years of being happily straight, and I knew Jen well enough to know how she went after someone she had the hots for. It didn't involve a lot of subtlety.
But... Jennifer didn't look like she was there to seduce me. She looked like she didn't even notice that I was there. She didn't react to the door closing behind me at all. She just slumped down in my favorite chair like she was trying to use the seat as a mattress, her legs spread wide and her cooch sticking out off the edge and a huge fuck-off vibrator sticking out of her cooch. Her eyes were half-open, just the whites showing, and she was drooling and mumbling like a junkie on the edge of nodding off.
I stood in the doorway for what felt like a solid minute, trying to fit my head around what I was seeing. I came in expecting to see Jen sitting on the couch or something, not... not fucking herself senseless with my goddamn vibrator like I wasn't even there, soaked in sweat and babbling incoherently. Even after the weird, insistent way she hit on me last week, even after all the crazy passive-aggressive texts she left me... this felt messed up. For the first time, I wondered if she had a drug problem or a nervous breakdown or something. I approached her carefully, my hands itching to do something stupid like pull out my gun. "Jen?" I asked her, not liking the tentative sound in my voice. "Jen, you in there? It's me, Shelly."
She didn't respond. At all. Her eyelids fluttered a little, but I couldn't tell if that was because of me or if she was just getting a lot out of the big rocket between her legs. Her fingers didn't stop teasing her nipples through the sheer, clinging fabric of her camisole, and she kept muttering like she didn't even notice I was there. This close, I could make out some of what she was saying-it was some sort of nonsense chant, something about, "...guh luh fkk toy fuh mss morra, mma guh luh fkk toy fuh mss morra..." I couldn't make it out, she was slurring the words so badly, but I could tell it was the same thing every time. I leaned in a little closer, trying to make out the words...
And then I felt something sting me in the back of my neck, just where it met the shoulder. I spun around, kicking myself for being stupid and complacent-I figured I knew what I was dealing with when I saw Jennifer. It didn't even cross my mind that she might not be alone. But when I turned, there was a Caucasian woman standing there, a tall woman with angular cheekbones and chunky glasses and long black hair pulled into a tight bun. She was staring at my neck with a smug expression on her face.
I reached back and found a syringe still sticking out of my body. I pulled it out and stared at it stupidly. The plunger was pushed all the way in.
"You really are a terrible detective, Miss Kittridge, aren't you?" she said. I reached for my phone, but suddenly Jennifer sprang to her feet behind me and pulled my arms behind my back with a grip that felt impossibly strong. I never thought of Jennifer as buff-even when she did join me for my workouts, she always tapped out a good twenty minutes before I did-but she made up in determination what she lacked in strength. It was like she couldn't imagine her arms moving, and so they didn't.
