Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
But why?
“Yes,” I said, but I couldn’t seem to force my head to travel up, to find the source of the voice.
I guess he picked up on that, grabbing my silly strawberry-shaped ottoman, and pulling it closer, so he could drop down and get on my level.
If the uniformed officer was attractive, this guy had movie-star good looks.
He looked like he stepped off of one of those police procedurals full of young, hot detectives led by one older, more rough-around-the-edges one. The guy who bent the rules to the point of breaking them at times.
He had a wide, strong jaw, warm brown eyes, dark hair that was a little mussed, further confirming my off-duty theory.
“I’m Detective Wells Vaughn,” he said.
He even had a TV-star-cop name.
I was pretty sure I gave him a nod.
But maybe I just stared at him.
I couldn’t tell.
“I need to ask you a couple questions about your attack, if you’re up to it,” he said.
The other cops had already asked me that.
The attractive blue-eyed guy and the lady cop they’d called in to make me feel safer after my ordeal.
“Okay,” I agreed, my voice sounding hollow and tinny to my own ears.
“Can you tell me what you remember?” he asked, reaching for one of those little notebooks.
It looked like it belonged to a baby nestled in his giant hands. The pen was almost comically small.
“I’d just brought my tea to bed,” I told him.
“Do you know what time that was?”
“Nine-thirty, give or take. I’d just turned on a show—“
“What show?” he asked.
“How Well Do You Know Your Neighbor,” I told him. “But I was streaming it,” I added, knowing he was trying to make sure of the timeline, but the show would be no help to him.
“Okay. And then?”
“And then I heard the floorboards creak,” I told him. “They’re old. They make a lot of noise when you walk on them.” I actually really like that about them. I used to think to myself that no one could ever sneak up to me in my own home because of how old it was.
The floorboards squeaked.
The doors grumbled.
The windows even made a shrill sound as you tried to open or close them.
It was a musical house.
And there’d been a sense of security in that.
A false sense, as it all turned out.
“Did you immediately think someone was there?”
How could I tell him that I was someone who was hyper-aware? That I believed every strange noise or suspicious shadow could very well be a serial killer just trying to get the better of me?
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” Detective Vaughn said. The tightness in his jaw showed signs of tension, but his voice stayed calm. “Did you go to investigate?” he asked.
“I went to my nightstand,” I told him, trying to wave back toward my bedroom, but the blanket stilled the motion.
“For your phone?” he asked.
“For my knife,” I corrected, watching the surprised quirk of his brow.
At that moment, in my mind, I had been thinking weapon then phone then escape. In my head, that was the way to survive this.
In retrospect, maybe escape first would have been the right move. But the windows were old. They didn’t always open easily. I was worried that I would get caught trying to pull one open and I’d be without a weapon or phone to call the police.
“I didn’t even get my hand on it before my bedroom door was flying open,” I told the detective as he scribbled on his mini notepad. It was the kind of chicken scratch that would likely even make him question what it said when he read over it hours later.
“What happened then?” he pressed when I fell silent, focusing on his handwriting instead of the incident.
“He was fast. He leaped over the bed, grabbed me, and tossed me down onto it.”
It was a bit of a blur, that part of the whole thing.
Adrenaline soared through my system, making me feel like my skin was buzzing. The only thing that was super clear was how high my body bounced.
“I’d gotten a new mattress this week,” I told him, even though I knew this detail was useless to him. “I’m not used to how springy it is.”
I felt like I was flying for a second before he was climbing over me, his knees pinning my thighs to the mattress, holding me down so that his hands were free.
“He had on a ski mask,” I said, knowing those were the kinds of details he was looking for. “But he was white.” No surprise. The majority of serial rapists were white. White, thirty or older, and the victims were overwhelmingly most likely to be under thirty.
But this wasn’t a normal sexual assailant.
Because he came with weapons.
Only eleven percent of rapists brought a weapon. Six percent with a gun, four with a knife. Most just used their bodies against women. Hands, teeth, etc.