Words by You

Drawing Lines (and Sticking to Them)

The sound of my phone vibrating jolted me awake. My bedroom was still dark, not a wink of sunrise peeking from behind the curtains. Because it was so late, I was instantly certain the call was from work. Only they could be so unconcerned about decent sleep schedules. Exhaling a groan, I squirmed an arm out of my blankets to claw for my phone.

Instead of the staffing office, Sunnie's voice came on the line.

"Hey."

"Why are you disturbing my sleep?" I rasped.

"You home?"

"Yes," I dragged a hand over my face. "Why?"

"I need to come over." The words came tight and clipped. Her voice was soft, like the air had been knocked out of her lungs.

I sat up, getting more alert. "What's going on?"

"I was getting home after my shift, and there was a car parked nearby that I'd never seen before," her next exhale came out shaky. "I didn't think much of it until I got close. It was Jeff."

Any trace of sleep vanished. "Are you sure?"

"I saw his face. He was just staring at my apartment window. Like he knew which one was mine."

I threw off the covers, heading for the staircase. "Come over right now. I'll wait up."

Twenty minutes later she was at the front door, barefaced and still dressed in her uniform. It was obvious that she'd just finished a shift, but her eyes were empty of fatigue, her body as stiff as an iron board.

"Sorry about this," she said.

"Don't even start with that," I ushered her in, glancing down the street before I shut the door. "You want tea, coffee, or whiskey?"

"The booze please," she went straight for the couch, collapsing down and pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. I went to the kitchen to make our drinks, watching her in concern. Not a word came out of her until she got her glass and drained its contents in one go. "Fucking shit," she hissed, pulling a face. "That helps."

"Tell me everything."

"It's like I said. He was waiting at my apartment."

"Did he notice you?"

"No. I was coming from the opposite side of traffic. My headlights were right on him, but he was too focused on staring at my window to look over." She dragged her hands over her face.

"Are you sure it was yours?"

"Unfortunately, yes." She reached for the bottle, filling her glass and downing another shot. Over the past six months, she'd tried many things to deal with the stress of a stalker. Venting, kickboxing, eating copious amounts of chocolate lava cakes. Alcohol was the most recent addition to her coping strategies, but this was the first time she had to crack open a bottle for this reason in weeks. Things had been quiet. Peaceful.

"Have you seen him at the hospital recently?" I pressed.

"No. I checked with security a couple days ago and they said they haven't seen Jeff." She hissed the name like it was acid on her tongue.

Jeff Simmons was an old car crash victim. Apparently, he'd fallen asleep behind the wheel on his way home from a 16-hour shift at a construction site just outside of the city. Sunnie had been one of the paramedics that arrived to find his car utterly mangled from flipping over the highway's cement divider. Instead of a corpse, there was Jeff: covered in road rash and cuts, but otherwise alive. She'd done her job, sitting in the back of the ambulance with him until they made it to the hospital. It had been 20 minutes of routine care for a non-routine accident.