Total pages in book: 188
Estimated words: 179812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 899(@200wpm)___ 719(@250wpm)___ 599(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 179812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 899(@200wpm)___ 719(@250wpm)___ 599(@300wpm)
Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little bit. As in, I’m not done with him. Sadly, I’ll never be done with him, no matter what happens or what he does to me. All I need is a little space, but it just came out. Plus I’m so angry at him right now. I don’t want him to barge in here with flowers, looking like a wreck because he realized he’s fucked up. I can’t let him make my heart race and my belly quiver when his realization is right. As in, he has fucked up.
Except I haven’t heard from him in the last couple of minutes and I don’t like that either. Has he really left? I can’t even hear him moving around out there or breathing or growling or any number of caveman things he does when he’s pissed. And despite myself, I dash back to the door. I put my hand on the wood and lean in. I press my ear to it, trying to ascertain if my suspicions are correct, when I feel something.
A prickle on the back of my neck, and I spin around.
I see him through the glass, standing far back, at the furthest corner of his backyard, right opposite the window. I notice his chest moving even faster now, punching his t-shirt, swelling so high up that it might tear the fabric as he stares at me. With an intensity, dark and thick, that makes me press my spine to the door. He doesn’t have his flowers anymore, no, but he does have something in his hand.
A soccer ball.
His soccer ball that he kicks around sometimes in the backyard, playing by himself. Snow would sit on the steps and cheer him on while I’d stay away, in the kitchen or upstairs, because I was trying to do the right thing.
He’s spinning it between his hands now, between his long, dusky fingers as he stares at me, and for a few seconds, I don’t really understand why he would have a soccer ball in his hands while staring at me through the locked window.
And then it hits me.
It hits me even before he throws the ball up in the air. He lets it come back down and ricochet up. Which is when he moves. I’ve seen him do this move a hundred times before, on the field, before he scores a goal. He steps back, kicks his leg up in the air and hits the ball sideways. And he hits it so hard that the ball rends through the air, wrecks the very molecules of it, flying toward the net to score the winning goal.
Only in this case, the net is my locked window, and the goal is the giant explosion of the glass shattering.
It really feels like a bomb went off in here, the sound of it so loud and blaring. I even act like it because I put my arms over my head and duck down. Even though I know there wasn’t any need for it. The spot where I’m standing is away from his path of wreckage. From the path of the ball that shatters the window and hits the wall, knocking down the picture of a black and white soccer trophy. Which also shatters as it hits the floor.
I stare at it in disbelief. I stare at the floor in disbelief, pieces of glass scattered around. Not only on the floor but also in my bed. On the nightstand, the dresser by the window. The armchair. Somehow though, they haven’t made their way over to me. They’re on the floor around me, within arm’s reach but they somehow haven’t touched me. Like he planned it that way. Like when he decided to bust a soccer ball through my window at the speed of however many miles per hour, he also told the glass how to shatter and decide where the shards may fall.
This is… This doesn’t happen in real life, does it? People don’t have their windows explode by a man who then reaches in and unlocks it, never once breaking eye contact with me.
Never once looking away, he puts his hand on the sill laced with jagged pieces of glass, and I flinch when I see blood ooze out of his palm. He doesn’t seem to feel it though, the cut, because he doesn’t even blink. Then, heaving himself up, he lunges inside, his feet thudding on the floor. And I think he’s so smooth about it, so graceful, that if not for the glass crunching underneath his boots, I wouldn’t be able to hear him come in at all. Like I wouldn’t back then, when he’d sneak into my room in the middle of the night.
Crazily, I think that’s impressive. But I shut down my wayward thoughts and focus on him. His eyes are shining with a strange, almost manic light. His mouth is parted with the force of his breaths, and his arms and fingers are bloody where the glass has managed to cut him. He looks dangerous. He looks threatening. He looks unhinged.