His Identity

15

"What the fuck?" I stare at him wide-eyed, momentarily forgetting that I'm only in my towel. 

He has even bothered to turn on the lights. Just wow.

Nick tilts his head to the side, his eyes roaming over my figure as he takes his lower lip in between his teeth before snapping his eyes back up to my face. "Why don't you put something on? After that, we can talk."

Shit. Right. Clothes.

I rush over to my wardrobe, grabbing a shirt and a pair of shorts before going back in the bathroom to get dressed. Once I'm done, I come back out to find that he's now sitting on the edge of my bed, having discarded the cigarette.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I ask, glancing at the clock, "it's almost five in the morning!"

"I came to help like I said I would."

"What?" I stare at him in confusion, "no, you said that a week ago and then you disappeared. I thought you were not being serious."

"Something came up," he says simply with a small shrug, "and when I say I'll do something, I do it."

"Well maybe you can come another time considering I'm about to go to sl—"

"—  Sleep can wait," he cuts me off, getting off my bed as he walks over towards the posters on my wall. He stares at them, "what have you got here? Harry Styles?" scoffing, he continues to look around, having completely dismissed what I said, "I feel like I've just walked in a teenager's bedroom."

I bet his room's all black and white with skulls or death threats he wrote himself on the wall for the fun of it.

"Why don't we do this whole help thing later?" I ask, not really having the energy to deal with him right now.

He turns to look at me and shakes his head slowly, "I can't. Did you really think I'd come here at what, five, when I could've done that later?"

"Why can't you?"

"Because I can't," I roll my eyes at his response while he moves over to my office table where I had my laptop on and several papers scattered everywhere. I didn't really have time to clean that mess up. I keep saving it for later and well... later just never came.

"Let's see," I watch as he picks up a sheet of paper and began reading, "mysterious disappearance of The Sh— " I head over towards him and grab the page from him before he can read further, placing it back on the table. "Hey wait. What the fuck?"

"I don't want you here right now."

Instead of replying, he goes to grab that sheet of paper again. This time, I don't stop him. He brings it before his eyes and I stare at him as he reads it. I stay quiet and wait for his reaction.

His lips are tugged in between his teeth and his brows are furrowed in concentration, his eyes moving from word to word.

He appears to be interested in it. Did he already know about this?

I was looking into my dad's disappearance when I found several similar disappearances. 'The Shadow' apparently was someone who had also disappeared as well but he was found after two something years. I just thought that this information was worth to stay so I printed it and kept it there in case it gets useful in the future.

"Why are you looking into this?" Nick asks, finally speaking up after over three minutes reading a page. I assume he just went over it several times because there's no way he took that much time to read one page.

"Because," I snatch the paper back, pointing towards the bold font, "he disappeared, see?" 

"But," he grabs the page back, placing his finger near the word 'returns' as he mimics, "he reappeared, see?"