Present, Ten Days Earlier
I could feel my own breathing coming back to me, slightly lower than where I exhaled it. Running along the slatted wood of the closet door, blowing over the curve of my chin. It's been nearly fifteen minutes, since I last moved. Raising my hands in the cramped space, I rubbed a bit of the numbness out of my wrists and fingers. When the time came to move, I'd have to be fast. Faster than her. Rolling my shoulders backward, I stifled the urge to sigh. She wasn't here yet, but I still kept quiet.
Inside of the closet, even to my own nose, the smell of myself was strange. My cologne was almost strong enough to be overpowering;
Dylan Blue
by
Versace
. Very different than the sticks of
Dove
I usually bought from the Shopper's Drug Mart down the street, and which I'd worn to the
Greystone Annual Charity Gala
earlier that evening. Below it, the heady scent of tar-heavy cigarettes choked me. I didn't smoke, but an hour ago I'd smoked three
Pallmall Red
s, back to back. Holding the smoking tip under my chin and around my hands, watching it play in thin lines between my fingers; replacing the smell of me with its own.
My three-piece suit hangs in my closet. I'd traded it out for a grey turtleneck, charcoal dress pants with small white lines, and a pair of black socks. I've tugged a ski mask over my head, hiding my features; I cut the eyeholes together, and the single long hole was slight ragged at the corners. A length of black rope, ten feet long and purchased specifically for this purpose at the local
Stag Shop
, is tucked into the back pocket of my pants. I can feel the top of it, pressing against my shirt and hanging down over the edges of the pocket.
Tonight, I'm going to rape my friend. More on that later. But first, maybe I should give some context. I'm a fucking monster--but I'm a very
particular
classification of monster. The worst kind. The human kind.
In a way, it all began when I met Hailey Cahalane; fourteen years ago. We'd met during the second year of high school. Second period physics. We became friends almost immediately. We both liked art and history, we both smoked a lot of weed, and we both didn't like spending much time at home. Me because my parents were usually away, and I preferred to spend time near the river than in an empty bedroom. Her because her father and uncle were usually home, and some kind of ex-IRA wingnuts. Her family had come over from Ireland to Canada a couple of years earlier, following some kind of event that Hailey didn't discuss. She didn't talk about her mother, either. I assume the two are connected. I've never pressed her on the subject.
We attended the University of Windsor. She got her Masters in financial planning and business management, while I finished a major in business and computer science before switching to accounting. We began to live together, in Windsor. There's been a couple of years, in between then and now, where one of us has moved out. Usually to live with a new partner. Somehow, we always end up coming back.
Hailey and I have never slept together. Maybe that's strange. My friends certainly thought that it was; that a man and a woman could live together for nearly a decade, and not have sex at least once. But we just... didn't. Hadn't. We'd talked about it, of course, but somehow it had never felt... right. Not the right time, not the right place. We lived together, we worked together, we liked one another a lot--if something went wrong, it was going to go
disastrously
wrong.
This, most of all. This had the potential to destroy everything. Including me.
But none of that explains why I'm standing in Hailey's closet, feeling a finger and thumb over the length of rope in my back pocket. Feeling the slightly spongy tenseness of their threads.
For that, we need to fast-forward a year. Hailey and I had been working on an accounting project for our business,
Greystone Financial
. We'd traded laptops. Comparing statements. Sitting in the living room, a half-drunk pot of coffee between us, I'd had her laptop balanced on my legs. Going through her directory, I clicked on a plain-looking folder marked '
Outgoing Drafts
'. Inside of it were dozens of documents, neatly organized into names.
"James, right?" I asked, referring to the statement we'd been discussing for the last twenty minutes.
"Yeah," Hailey nodded absentmindedly, tracing one finger down the screen of my laptop as she read. She'd had to do that since high school. Apparently it helped her eyes track, so she could read faster.
I clicked on the folder titled '
James Laurmer
'. It didn't occur to me that the last name was wrong.
When the document opened, I frowned in confusion. It wasn't a spreadsheet. It was a Word document. Scrolling to the bottom, I looked for the spreadsheet at the end; it wasn't there, so I scrolled back up. As I did so, a word caught my eye.
Cunt.
It was strange, because even though a lot of accountants make little notes in the margins of documents, that
usually
wasn't one of them. Sometimes. Not often. I'd certainly never heard Hailey use that word. I wouldn't have used it around her, either. My eyes scanned quickly, and my disbelief only grew.
"No! Please, no!" She cried, trying to hold her legs together against the mens' hands. There was five of them, and only one of her. It didn't work, her cunt held open and glistening as the first man--James--stepped between her knees, his dark cock--"
I very nearly slammed the laptop shut. It took everything inside of me to act casual, bringing the pointer to the red
X
at the top of the document and closing it. Clearing my throat, I glanced up at Hailey.
