The Suspect

chapter 15

Life tends to have an unhealthy mix of feelings and emotions. It works almost as if everything is short-lived. Well, it is true, isn't it? Whenever it's all sunshine and rainbows, there has to be a storm at some point. When you hit rock bottom over rock bottom, it drops you a prize that makes you feel like you just won a million dollars.

If you're not seeing where I'm going with this analogy, or it's perhaps a tad too philosophical—in simples terms, what I'm trying to say is...

Life is a fucking lie. It's a load of deceiving bullshit. Take the man standing in front of me for instance. My life the past year has been nothing but failure after failure. Failure is living its beautiful life rent-free right inside my body. If Tatum were even a hippotamus I would be happy. No scratch that, I would be fucking ecstatic.

What he is, is quite essentially even worse than the worst possible thing I could probably think of. I would expect something relieving and oh so very merry, like a breakthrough one of the cases or I don't know maybe a man that doesn't go calling me a psychopath every single day.

It's simple. Men. That's it. They are the problem. The one standing right in front of me, the one quite literally breathing the same air as me is the epicenter of the downfall caused by the earthquake that tore apart my life a mere ten months ago.

He looks down at me as I peer up into those deceiving blue eyes. I won't let myself get absorbed and pulled right into them as I did the last few times.

"I'll stop acting like that when I feel like it," he bites out and all I want to do is shove him into the fire crackling right beside him.

"Would you look at that; at least we can agree on the concept of you being an absolute grade-A asshole," the grin that forms on my face is so wide it almost hurts. But then again, my whole body hurts so it may just be because of that.

Sighing and stepping back I finally say, "I'm five seconds from leaving so if you have anything valuable to contribute now's your chance to do so or you're going to lead me to believe that you were playing me all this while,"

I would hate to think that's true, and how much ever I don't want it to be, there's a little voice in the back of my head that tells me he is. If he continues to taunt me and behave like an egotistical dick, then I'm sure walking right out of this one and not looking back even once.

"I grew up in Houston," he starts off and for a second I wonder why he's telling me this but I let him continue, "Tyler and I weren't very close. Actually, he didn't know me at all, so I didn't expect it."

Now I'm confused.

"You didn't expect what?" I ponder and he dops his head, sighing loudly. I can see through him, and aside from his large ego, I can sense pain and guilt as clear as a bright, sunny day.

"I didn't expect it. It was out of the blue, out of the ordinary and well, weird," he says but it doesn't help clear my confusion in the least.

Feeling fatigued all of a sudden, I walk back to the couch and sit down, "If I wanted to know about your history, I would—well actually I don't really want to, so get to the point,"

He flinches, almost like he's hurt from my comment and I feel a little bad that it did.

"Look, about two days before he...you know," he shakes his head like he's trying to get that out of his head but I'm afraid that isn't possible right now, "I received something in the mail. It was a letter addressed to me from Tyler Williamson. I thought maybe he wanted to get to know me, so I was anxious to open it."

"What was written in it?"

"I was expecting a fucking long ass letter, but all it was was a few lines," he suddenly gets up and disappears into one of the rooms. I'm about to follow him when he walks out holding a little piece of paper in his hand.