Follow Me

by Kathleen Barber

  “How about this?” I offered. “I’ll pour you a glass of wine, but you have to listen to me talk about my day.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  While Nick worked his way through two glasses of wine, I told him about the opening of the Rosalind exhibit and how the possibility of promotion was tied up in it.

  “That promotion is as good as yours,” he assured me, leaning over to kiss me. “You always get everything you want.”

  My response to Nick was, as ever, Pavlovian. All he had to do was brush my skin and I melted into a mindless puddle of lust. I tilted my face to his, our lips meeting. With his hands tangled in my still-wet hair, Nick pressed his body against mine and walked me backward to my bedroom, his mouth trailing down my neck as he did so. The backs of my legs hit the edge of my mattress, and Nick moved one of his legs between mine, the fabric of his jeans rubbing against my bare skin. My body automatically sloped toward him, closing the already postage stamp–sized distance between us. Leaving one hand in my hair, he moved the other to loosen the towel still knotted around my chest.

  “Stop,” I said suddenly, surprising us both.

  Nick froze in place, his body still tight against mine, the heat of him still burning through the cloth between us. His mouth just inches from the tender skin at the base of my throat, he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  The sensation of his breath on my flushed skin made me shiver and I almost gave in. After all, what was wrong? I hadn’t intended to say “stop,” hadn’t even realized the word was forming. As I wildly searched my brain for an explanation, Max’s face appeared in my mind’s eye. I almost laughed. Max? We had been on exactly one date, and I was choosing him over Nick? Nick, who had been in my life for a decade? It couldn’t be—and yet that’s who I was picturing as Nick’s fingertips nestled themselves into my flesh.

  “Audrey?” Nick asked, pulling away slightly to look me in the eyes.

  “I’m really tired,” I said, a half-truth that would buy me more time to sort out my feelings.

  Nick laughed and looked at me expectantly, waiting for the punch line. When none was forthcoming, he blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  I took a step away, his fingers falling from my side, and forced a yawn. “I’m just so, so exhausted. I really need to sleep.”

  He cocked his head at me and licked his lips. “Aud, babe, give me, like, fifteen minutes, and then you can have all the sleep you want.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Nicky. Not tonight. Rain check?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, brow wrinkled in confusion. He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Hey, Audrey, you … you would tell me if something was going on, right?”

  I hesitated. Was something going on? But I couldn’t tell Nick about Max, not before I had even committed to a second date, and so I looked him in the eye and said, “Of course.”

  He nodded and lingered in my bedroom doorway, as though I might change my mind and ask him to stay.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll see you another time then, I guess.”

  What’s with me? I wondered, slumping down in my bed as Nick’s departing footsteps echoed through my apartment and he let himself out. In the last seven years, I hadn’t ever refused Nick, not even the time I was nearly delirious with a fever.

  But I also hadn’t ever been intrigued by anyone quite like I was intrigued by Max.

  * * *

  UNABLE TO FOCUS ON WORK after Nick left, I curled up in bed with a fresh glass of wine and my laptop. I was working my way through a binge session of Gossip Girl when I heard a now-familiar scraping noise in the alley. I paused the show and listened intently, partially believing it was just that damn cat and partially worried about that shadowy figure who may or may not have followed Cat and me home from the bar.

  I caught my breath as I heard not just a scraping but a shuffling.

  Shit.

  Someone was out there. Terror climbed my throat, and I tried to think rationally. Last time I had confronted someone in the alley, I’d made the mistake of charging at them with that shoe. They’d fled into the night, and I’d been left without even a description of the creep to give to the police. This time I needed to be more shrewd. I would sneak out there, capture this disgusting Peeping Tom on my phone, and then call the police. Even if he booked it before they arrived, at least then I could give them a suspect. Maybe they would catch him and I could finally relax.

  I opened the front door and gate as quietly as I could, but nearly blew my cover when I tripped over a random cardboard box in my walkway. I covered my mouth to mask my surprised inhalation, shoved the empty box out of the way with my foot, and began creeping along the building to the alley. Once I’d reached the alley gate, I took a deep breath and readied the camera on my phone. With my pulse thundering in my ears, I peered through the gap between the gate and the building.

  There was no one there.

  Confused, I threw open the gate and stepped into the alley, turning around to see every corner of it.

  It was only when I pivoted back around that I realized the gate at the other end of the alley was ajar, swinging slightly on its hinges as though someone had just gone through it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  AUDREY

  I woke groggily, consciousness sticky with the remnants of a sleeping pill. Unnerved by the incident with the near miss with someone in the alley, I’d been unable to sleep. At two in the morning, exhausted but wired, I swallowed an Ambien and fell into a dark, dreamless slumber.

  I reached for my alarm-bleating phone and found that it wasn’t charging in its usual spot on my cardboard box–slash–nightstand. Only after riffling through my tangled sheets did I find it in bed beside me, along with my laptop. Rubbing my eyes, I plugged in my phone and set about my first task of the day: checking the Hirshhorn social media accounts. I gave a cursory glance to the hundreds of comments that had appeared on the posts about the Rosalind opening, promising myself I would read them more fully once I was at the office and had consumed some caffeine—preferably enough caffeine to give half the city the jitters.

  Next, I checked my personal account and found a bunch of messages about Gossip Girl (Chair 4ever!, You’re prettier than Serena!, I ♥ GG!), including one from Nick: That’s what you’re doing instead of me? Lame, Aud. Lame.

  I lay back on my pillow and turned the camera on myself, fanning my hair out around my head like rays of the sun. I experimented with a few different angles before taking a selfie using a filter that gave me puppy ears. I uploaded it to my Story with an animated GIF of a dancing cup of coffee.

  That’s enough procrastination, I told myself sternly. Time to get out of bed.

  I was just setting down my phone when it buzzed with a text message from Cat: Lunch?

  I hesitated. Cat had been really weird lately. She seemed incredibly invested in my accepting Max’s invitation for a second date, so much so that it had made me a bit hesitant to respond. Was there some history between the two of them that I didn’t know about?

  I sighed and pressed a hand to my tired eyes, promising myself I would text her later.

  * * *

  I REALLY SHOULD HAVE followed Nick’s advice to buy a coffeemaker, I thought as I finally left my apartment, still feeling bleary and disoriented. As I swung open the gate, I noticed the empty cardboard box I’d stumbled on last night was still on the lawn. I leaned over to grab it for the recycling and paused, noticing for the first time that my name was scrawled across the top in thick, black letters.

  I crouched to investigate and gently lifted one of the unsealed flaps. Flower stems. The box wasn’t empty after all. I smiled, thinking back to the beautiful orange blooms I’d found on my gate last month. My secret admirer had returned. I eagerly tossed open the other flap and froze. Stupefied, I stared at the contents.

  Someone had decapitated the entire bouquet.

  * * *

  ACROSS THE TABLE from me at Sweetgreen, Cat’s jaw hun
g open as she stared at a picture of the flowerless bouquet on my phone. That morning, I had snapped a photo and then promptly disposed of the stems—box and all—in the dumpster behind my building. As the heavy lid slammed shut, I’d felt eyes on me and looked up to see the dark curtains in Unit 1 swaying. Anger flooded my body as I imagined Ryan standing behind them, laughing to himself about scaring me with his childish prank. I’d thrown an infuriated double-middle-finger salute at his window and stormed away, already reaching for my phone to text Cat that we were on for lunch.

  I’d barely waited for her to sit down with her salad before I thrust my phone in her face.

  “Wow,” she finally said. “That’s intense.”

  “Right? Headless flowers? I’m totally creeped out.”

  “Is there any chance this was just trash that somehow got kicked toward your door?”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head firmly. “They were in a box labeled ‘Audrey.’ They were for me.”

  “That’s so disturbing,” Cat said, her thin shoulders shuddering. “What kind of person would do something like that?”

  “Well, my landlord’s dirtbag grandson, Ryan, is the obvious suspect. He was lurking around when I got home from work last night, and he watched me throw the box away this morning.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “It’s just that … Ryan is more of a ring-the-buzzer-until-it-breaks kind of creep. This feels more calculated.” I toyed with my fork. “You know, I can’t help but wonder about my colleague Lawrence.”

  “I still think you should report that guy to HR. I know you’re worried—”

  “Let’s put a pin in that,” I interrupted. “Anyway, I’ve been avoiding being alone with him at work, but yesterday he came up to me, chatting like nothing had happened. I snapped at him a bit—not as much as I wanted to, of course, since we were standing in the gallery in full view of patrons, but enough that he seemed upset.”

  “Upset enough to do something like this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” A thought suddenly came to me, and my spine straightened, each vertebra tingling. “Wait. You know what? Rosalind got headless flowers, too.”

  “The doll? Someone sent the doll headless flowers?”

  “In one of the dioramas,” I clarified, grabbing my phone and opening the museum’s Instagram account. I quickly found the photo I had in mind: the little blonde doll standing in her doorway, looking befuddled as she held a paper-wrapped bouquet of stems.

  “Here. Look at this.”

  Cat’s eyes widened. “Audrey, you posted this yesterday. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding. “I’m wondering if Lawrence used it as inspiration.”

  “Have you talked to Lena?” Cat asked, taking the phone and beginning to scroll through the comments. “Hasn’t she had problems with him, too?”

  “Yeah, but …” I trailed off as I saw the color drain from Cat’s face. “What is it?”

  “Have you seen this?” she asked, turning the phone to face me and pointing to a single comment: Roses are red, violets are blue, some flowers are headless, you could be too.

  “Jesus Christ,” I gasped, my hands shaking as I snatched the phone from her. “I can’t believe I missed that.”

  “Missed it? Do you have to approve the comments?”

  “No, but part of my job is to read them all and delete things that are inappropriate. You’d be shocked how many morons think our posts are the best venue for a dick joke. I delete hundreds of trash comments every day. But last night I blew them off because Nick was over, and then this morning I was exhausted when I was reading through them. I must have just glossed right over this.”

  I tapped the name of the offending commenter, someone calling themselves “zoomie098.” They used an avatar of a sunglasses-wearing wolf as a profile picture and a Chris Farley quote as their bio, and their grid was a mishmash of reposted memes in a bad imitation of FuckJerry. I relaxed slightly. I was almost certain this was just a lame attempt at a joke. Almost. I screen-capped the profile for reference and then deleted the comment.

  “Nick came over?” Cat asked sharply.

  I looked up, surprised. “That’s what you’re focusing on right now? Someone posted a rhyme about cutting off my goddamn head and you’re on my case about Nick?”

  “I just don’t understand why you waste your time with him, especially since I thought you were interested in Max.”

  “Nick just dropped by to hang out,” I said with a shrug.

  Cat gave me a dubious look.

  “It’s true,” I insisted. “When he went to kiss me, I actually sent him away.”

  “You sent Nick away? That’s a first.”

  “Trust me, he was surprised, too.”

  On the table between us, my phone vibrated. We both looked down and read the text that popped up from Nick on the screen: How about some real fun tonight?

  “Speak of the devil,” Cat muttered.

  “God, Nick, take a hint,” I said, rolling my eyes as I dismissed the notification. “Needy is not a good look on him.”

  “Audrey,” Cat said slowly. “You don’t think … you don’t think Nick might have left those flowers?”

  “Oh, please,” I said, bursting out laughing. “I don’t think Nick even knows how to find a florist. The man has never once sent me flowers.”

  “Maybe there’s some poetry in starting with dead flowers.”

  “No way. I don’t know who left those flowers, but it couldn’t have been Nick.”

  “If you say so,” Cat said, but she still looked doubtful.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  HIM

  I’d felt electrified as I used the shears, snipping the head from each orange rose and setting the stems carefully in a box. My hands had been bloody, my body still vibrating with a dangerous mixture of anguish and righteousness as I placed the box in front of her door, and I had walked away certain my message had been conveyed. But then the night had taken a turn, and I was no longer sure it had been the right thing to do. In fact, as I replayed the action on a loop in my mind, I became more and more worried I was only going to drive Audrey away from me.

  You know he just drives everyone away. My niece’s mocking words came back to me as I sat before a cheerful blue row house in Capitol Hill on a set of concrete steps I’d climbed dozens of times before.

  Across the street, I saw a sandy-haired woman lean over a high-end stroller, cooing at the infant inside. With a start, I realized this was the same woman who used to waddle up and down these streets, her hands cupping her massively pregnant belly. I wanted to rush across the street to congratulate her, peer underneath the awning of the stroller to see whether the baby had its mother’s sharp features, tickle its fat little feet. I restrained myself. The last time I had seen this woman, I had been shouting some things I wasn’t proud of, and I didn’t want to alarm her.

  But, oh, how seeing her and her infant made me smile. My body went warm and fuzzy as I imagined Audrey’s slight form swelling with the fruit of our union. Her small face would grow rounder, glow, as she carried our little one within her body, and when our beautiful child finally made its way into the world, she would look up at me from the hospital bed with a bursting smile and say, I love you. I love this life you’ve given me.

  I was stroking the downy head of our perfect infant and planning its future when I realized my ex-girlfriend Aly was standing at the base of the steps. Her cheeks were white and her shiny brown ponytail trembled; one thin hand clutched at the lapels of her navy suit jacket while the other drew her NPR tote bag across her body like a shield. Irritation flared within me. Aly had always been so dramatic.

  “What are you—?” she began, looking around wildly as if searching for help. Her dark eyes landed on the new mother across the street, and she opened her mouth as if she was going to call out but then seemed to think better of it. She looked back at me, tightening her grip on her bag. “You shouldn’t
be here.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Aly,” I said, standing up. “It’s been a while. Six months, right? Since you unceremoniously dumped me over text message?”

  She took a step backward, and something inside me clenched. For a split second, I envisioned grabbing that ponytail in my fist and using it to smash her plain face into the concrete. That would really give her something to be frightened of.

  I held up my hands to show her my palms. “Relax, I’m just here to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, taking another step away from me.

  “That’s not true,” I said, fury swirling hot in my gut as I remembered the cold message Aly had sent to dismiss me. I no longer see a future for us. Please don’t call again. I’d ignored her edict and called, and then I continued calling, my anger growing in intensity each time I heard her voice mail. And then I’d found myself on these same steps one night, waiting for her to come home, my fists like spring-loaded rocks at my sides.

  I swallowed hard, forced my hands to unclench. “Aly, I just want to know what I did wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.”

  “Again?” she repeated, her eyes narrowing. “Are you dating someone?”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped. God, how could I have forgotten how suspicious Aly was about everything?

  “I’m not—”

  “You were. You were looking at me like I could never have a relationship. I know that’s what your friend Leigh thinks, but she’s wrong. You’re wrong. You’re all wrong.”

  She tightened her mouth into an almost invisible line. “Don’t take another step.”

  I looked down, surprised to find that I was now standing only an arm’s length from her. “Aly, I—”

  “You need to leave.”

  “Aly,” I started, softening my voice.