Lover of Mine || Taennie (Continuation Of Hush)

chapter 10.

  An hour later, I made and ate a late night snack, cheese spread on gram crackers, cleaned the kitchen and watched some TV. In some dark corner of my mind, I could not forget the message that warned me to stay at home. It was easier to write it off as a wrong number when I was safe in Jisoo's car, but now that I was alone, I didn't feel nearly as confident. I considered playing some Chopin to break the silence, but I didn't want to deny myself the opportunity to hear other sounds. I didn't need someone sneaking up on me from behind....

  Pull yourself together! I ordered myself. No one will sneak up on you from behind. After a while, when there was nothing meaningful left on television, I went up to your room. My room was almost clean, so I arranged the closet according to the colors, trying to keep busy so I wouldn't be tempted to fall asleep. I would be most vulnerable when I fell asleep, so I wanted to postpone it as much as possible. I dusted the desk and then arranged the books in alphabetical order. I consoled myself that nothing bad would happen. I will most likely wake up tomorrow and realize how ridiculous my paranoia was.

  Then again, maybe that message was sent to me by someone who intended to cut my throat while I was sleeping. On a creppy night like this, nothing was too impossible.

  After a while I woke up in the dark. The curtains at the other end of the room fluttered when the electric fan was turned on them. The air temperature was too high, so my stretchy undershirt and women's boxers were sticking to my skin, but I was too lost in imagining worst-case scenarios to even think about opening the window. Looking away, I blinked at the numbers on my watch. Almost three in the morning.

  An angry rumble vibrated through the right side of my skull, and my eye was so swollen it was closed. Turning on all the lights in the house, I groped barefoot to the freezer and prepared an ice pack made of ice cubes in a plastic bag with a zip lock. I dared to look in the bathroom mirror and groaned. A vicious purple-red bruise bloomed from my eyebrow all the way to my cheekbone.

  "How could you let that happen?" I asked my reflection. "How could you let that bitch beat you up?"

  I shook the last two paracetamol capsules out of the bottle in the cabinet with the mirror, swallowed them and curled up in bed. The ice burned the skin around my eye and it made me shiver. As I waited for the paracetamol to work, I wrestled with the mental image of Lisa getting into Taehyung's Jeep. The scene unfolded, rewound and unfolded again. I turned and adjusted myself, I even put a pillow over my head so as not to extinguish the scene, but it was vibrating just out of my reach, challenging me.

  About an hour later my brain was exhausted from thinking of all the imaginative ways I would like to kill both Lisa and Taehyung and I fell asleep again.

  I was awakened by the sound of the lock being unlocked.

  I opened my eyes, but found that I was seeing everything in the same poor quality black and white shades as when I had gone to England in my dream several hundred years earlier. I tried to fix it by blinking to regain normal vision, but the colors of my world remained the colors of smoke and ice.

  Downstairs, the front door opened with a deep creak.

  I didn't expect Mom to come back until Saturday morning, which meant it was someone else. Someone who didn't belong inside.

  I looked around the room for something I could use as a weapon. A few small picture frames were arranged on the bedside table, next to a cheap shop lamp.

  Someone's footsteps softly crossed the hardwood floor in the hallway. A few seconds later they were heard on the stairs. The intruder did not stop listening .

  is there any sign that someone heard him. He knew exactly where he was going. Quietly getting out of bed, I picked up the discarded tights from the floor, stretched them between my hands and leaned my back against the wall right next to the door of my room, a damp and cold sweat covering my skin. It was so quiet I could hear my own breathing.