Not Who You Thought (BxB Drama-Romance)

The Girl Next Door

Now

It's the summer of the cicadas. They don't come out of their hibernation every year, only every seventeen years do they make the migration from below the surface of the earth to the world above. All night and day they sing and whine, their carcasses littering the front step to my house and drying out in the corners of the rooms. No matter how much I vacuum, I can't seem to get rid of them. I sweep them out of the house and into our yard everyday.

It's a sticky, humid summer, which is normal for Connecticut. We live on the side of the lake where the houses are more ramshackle, made of shuttered siding and thin walls that aren't meant to be lived in all year long. The houses on this side are small cottages; on the other side of the lake are where the wealthy New Yorkers have summer mansions. You would think that living on the lake would bring a breeze that gave a reprieve from the heat, but that's only been happening at night the past week.

My mother goes to work for a later shift at the hospital today. From my bedroom I can smell the breakfast she is making. Soon she will start knocking on my door to tell me I shouldn't sleep past ten, which I will object to by explaining I don't have a shift at the local hardware store today. I believe I deserve my sleep in the summer, since I work hard at school all year round.

My phone says it's nine-thirty when I hear a rapping on my window. My window is directly along my bed, so the sound is reverberating in my ear drums. I groan and pull up the shade, already knowing who is standing there.

I watch him grin, his teeth canine and slightly sharp. Whenever he bites me it hurts, though he never breaks my skin. I had a dream once that he opened his mouth for me to file his teeth down. I woke up feeling guilty, and the next time I saw him I kept looking to make sure his teeth were still the same whenever he smiled.

Bending down to speak through the crack in my window, his mouth is practically pressing against the screen. "Wakey wakey, bitch."

"Charlie, you can go through the front door," I mutter, dropping the shade. "I'm not taking my screen off so you can climb through my window."

"It's more fun this way," he says through the shades. I shut the window so I can't hear him anymore, his voice muffled. If he wants to see me, he'll have to go through the front door and ring the doorbell like a normal person.

It only takes five minutes for my mom to knock on my door and tell me what I already know. "Lucas, Charlie is here to see you. I made breakfast and invited him to stay."

I know what is happening on the other side of my door; my mother is standing there with her knuckles raised mid-air to knock again and Charlie is gloating behind her. He's probably standing there with his hands shoved deep in his front pockets, wearing one of those vintage crewnecks he likes to alter by ripping the neckline open with scissors to show more skin.

My mom loves Charlie because he is polite to her, and becomes enraptured whenever she starts gossiping about other nurses at work. He loves to gossip and he loves my mom. She thinks we're best friends since he's been coming over regularly the past nine months. Being friends with Charlie is like feeding a stray cat; you give him kindness on a predictable schedule and he keeps coming back.

When I open the door, I'm mostly right about what I will see; my mother is standing there in teal scrubs and Charlie is standing behind her. I was wrong in that he isn't wearing one of his destroyed sweatshirts, he's wearing a black turtleneck even though it's supposed to be in the high eighties temperature-wise today. He looks funny; his top is tucked into the waistband of athletic shorts that certainly aren't meant for men, considering how short they are. I can tell he is already overheated since there is a gleam of sweat on his upper lip where his perspiration gathers. He isn't gloating and he isn't smiling either.