I gasped. “You can see him?”
“Sweetie, see him, hear him. If I could make it more than three feet from the toilet, I’d attempt to taste him. Jesus, what was wrong with that tequila? I mean, we only had two pitchers.” She belched into the phone and paused. “Sorry, false alarm. Seriously, though. Why have I never seen this sexy as fuck man before? And why, in God’s name, are you keeping him locked away on your balcony? Put him back in your bed where he belongs.”
He wasn’t a hallucination or some hidden aspect of my personality. He also wasn’t a hacker. He was a man who was insisting that he was Jake Hopkins. Not only that, but he knew what I was writing.
It didn’t make a bit of sense, but he was real.
“Um, Aaris? He says he’s Detective Jake Hopkins.”
I was expecting her to tell me to lock myself in the bathroom and call the cops when I heard a soft moan. “Jesus, this could be the remnants of the tequila talking, but he could say he was Donald Trump and I’d find a way to roll with it for the night.”
I cringed at the image her words conjured up.
“Okay, I’m going to have to call you back.”
“Mmm hmmm… I see how it is. You’re gonna take my advice and get rid of your coochy cobwebs. Good for you, sweetie. Just give me sixty more seconds with his backside please,” she begged.
I ended the call and stared blankly at the balcony door. Jake met my gaze and gave me the middle finger before insisting again that I let him in.
Maybe he was just a crazy reader—like whatshername in Misery. He probably just wanted to bash my ankles in and tie me to a bed.
The last part dredged up some conflicting thoughts and I had to physically shake my head to clear them away.
“Focus, Hayden,” I chided.
I was just going to let him know that I’d been on the phone with the police. The actual police.
Yes, that was a good plan. He’d shimmy down off the balcony and be on his merry way back to Crazytown. Then, I’d be free to delve back into Laura’s story.
“I’ve called the cops,” I yelled toward the glass door as I retrieved my laptop from the couch, returning it to the desk in the corner. “They’ll be here any minute.”
Great. In addition to a tequila-induced headache, my caffeine had gone ice-cold on me.
I carried the coffee mug over to the microwave and nuked it for thirty seconds, feeling better than I had all morning. So, maybe I’d had a delusional man bust into my apartment, trying to convince me that he was a fictional character.
Surely, Hemingway had dealt with his fair share of crazies.
At the loud series of beeps, I retrieved the cup and added another healthy pour of creamer. Bootsy smiled up at me from a refrigerator magnet with the words, “Mama’s Little Khaleesi” dancing above her head.
It was my favorite and one of the rare pictures I had of her where she appeared to be happy.
Before I’d even slipped my fingers around the now steaming mug, a hand clapped down hard over my mouth. Instinctively, I bit down and threw my head back, connecting with something solid.
“Holy shid! You bid me and bucked up by node!” Jake shouted, managing to latch onto my bicep just as I made a run for the door.
I would’ve laughed at his poor attempts to speak through the blood running down the back of his throat, you know, had I not been running for my life.
Instead of breaking free, our feet tangled together and we went down in a jumbled heap on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. I let out a hoarse scream, the sound piercing my skull in thousands of places. His hard body moved, effectively keeping me pinned against the black and white squares. He was probably bleeding all over me.
“Let me go! I’ve called the cops—ow!” I let out another shriek, hoping that a neighbor would hear it and come to my rescue. Said shriek died in my throat at the feel of a cold barrel against my temple.
“Led’s try thid again.” I let out a startled squeak from the bite of a metal handcuff tightening around my wrist but fought the urge to shout again. I had no idea how itchy his trigger finger was and now was not the time to find out.
He rocked back on his heels and yanked me to my feet. I struggled in his grasp as he dragged me back into the living room before forcing me onto my desk chair where he promptly snapped the other cuff around the metal armrest with an ominous click.
I looked up at him in fear. I was alone inside my apartment with a nutcase. A nutcase with a gun and a sturdy set of handcuffs. He could do anything, and I’d be powerless to stop him.
I swallowed the bile that rose up in my throat and forced myself to appear unfazed by this most recent development.
Jake retrieved a roll of paper towels and mopped up the blood on his face. And then the blood on the linoleum.
My captor was goddamn Mr. Clean.
He tore another towel off the roll and rolled it up before inserting it up under his top lip. It gave him the appearance of a boxer who’d endured a very rough fight. The fullness of his lips was magnified by the positioning, giving him an almost comical appearance.
The fact that there was still a gun in his hands had me rethinking the flurry of jokes that popped into my head. We sat in silence until the bleeding slowed, then stopped.
Jake removed the towel and coughed to clear his throat. “You didn’t call the cops. And you’re not going to. See, the thing is, you locked a detective out on your balcony. I don’t think that’d go over real well with them. Lucky for you, I picked the lock.”
“You’re not even a real cop,” I huffed.
“You wanna play good cop, bad cop? Well, guess what, Sweetheart? Good cop is fucking done for the day and now you’ve got me. Here’s how this is going to work. Your pretty little ass is gonna sit in this chair until my book is where I want it—”
I jutted my chin up at him in defiance even though my heart was pounding like it did when I attempted exercise-type things. “And if I refuse?”
He holstered his gun and ran a hand over the scruff on his face with a harsh laugh. “If you refuse? Christ, is ruining people’s lives something you do for sport? If you refuse, then what happened with Rachel is just the beginning. I will drag your name so far into the mud that there won’t be a chance in hell of you getting it clean again. You’ll have to kiss your dream goodbye because no one wants to read books written by a plagiarizer.”
Spittle from his mouth landed on my cheek and I brought my free hand up to brush it away. “I am not a plagiarizer, you—you dick. I put everything into those books!”
He grinned, both dimples on full display. “Everything, huh? You can’t even write a decent sex scene. I wouldn’t say you put ‘everything’ into it.”
I strained against the cuffs. “Did you just use air quotes?”
He stepped around the chair, forcing me to turn to keep him in my sights. “Face it, Hayden, your writing is tame. Safe. No publisher wants that. You just don’t have what it takes—”
“Motherfucker!” I roared. “I had enough to throw you off a building, didn’t I?”
He spun my chair and sat down in the armchair across from me. “And how’s that working out for you? Readers just going crazy for your next release?”
Bootsy’s yowl stopped me from unleashing another stream of obscenities at Jake. She wound her way through his legs, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that I was handcuffed to a chair. Her howls grew in frequency and intensity, yet Jake stood completely still.
“She’s feeling stressed out. She needs to be petted and told she’s pretty.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re joking, right? She’s a damn cat, what does she have to be stressed about?”
I paused as the magnitude of my situation hit me full on. I was arguing with a character I imagined in my head and he was exactly like I’d written him.
A complete jackass. It made me remember why that thirty-story fall had been so exhilarating to write.
I inhaled and tried to center myself. “She’
s been exposed to a lot of crass language—”
“Most of which came from you,” Jake threw in.
I cleared my throat. “As I was saying, Bootsy has been through a lot today and I think she needs some calm-down time.”
He crossed his arms, causing his shirt to strain around his very muscular arms. His biceps had little baby biceps. What I wouldn’t give to squeeze—no, I was in control of my emotions.
I was not going to fall victim to his charms.
“So, you’re telling me that your cat, Bootsy, needs to have a timeout? Bootsy. That’s literally the cat’s name.” He said the last part as a statement, as if calling a cat, Bootsy, was unheard of.
I nodded. “Yes, Bootsy. The cat of House McFluffsalot, First of Her Name, Queen of the Apartment and Balcony, Khaleesi of the Litter Box, Breaker of Trinkets, Mother of Dragon-sized Hairballs. She gets stressed out from time to time so I let her watch bird videos on my iPad, just until she’s found her Zen again.”
Jake let out a low whistle. “Jesus Christ, lady. You’re a fucking lunatic.”
And that was when I knew for sure that Jake and I were not going to be close friends. In fact, I had illusions of shoving him off of my own balcony. You know, just to see if it stuck the second time around.
My nose whistled at the force of my inhale. “You know, for a cop, you’re pretty stupid. Do you really think that insulting me is going to make me more likely to help you?”
His jaw ticked in anger as he leaned in, resting his forearms on my knees. The heat from his body seemed to move straight toward my core, proving yet again that I was experiencing quite the sexual drought. “I know it might not mean much to you, but I had a life before you started meddling. I had plans.”
But, he hadn’t.
If he was who he claimed to be, then he had nothing going for him, other than being the department’s golden boy. Well, that and the fact that his bedpost had been whittled down to a toothpick thanks to all the notches in it.
I snorted at my own joke.
“You really are unhinged. Positively mental,” Jake noted dryly.
“So, if I don’t help you, then my writing career is over. What happens if I do help you? Do you just go away and everything goes back to the way it was before?”
He nodded. “I’ll go back, and it’ll be like I was never here. Look at me, Hayden. I’m thirty-four. I’m in the prime of my life here. I’m not ready for the retirement home.”
“Retirement home?”
“Yeah,” he remarked pensively. “That’s what happens to characters when they’re ‘killed off.’ They end up in Sunset; completely off the pages and away from the action. Usually, it’s your run-of-the-mill villains, but occasionally you get some older characters. If George has been at it, you get an influx of protagonists and some bad ‘Winter is coming’ jokes. That’s not really the point. I’m not cut out for a life like that. I can’t sit around playing bridge and eating tapioca pudding like I haven’t got a care in the world.”
I sat, openmouthed. I’d never considered what happened to characters once they were written out of a story. In all honesty, I’d never considered them as anything more than a figment of one’s imagination.
Jake sighed. “You’ve never killed a character before, have you?”
My phone buzzed just as I shook my head and I instinctively reached for it. Jake was faster. “Who’s Reid?”
“My brother.”
Of course it would take him this long to get back to me. He had a ‘real job.’ Maybe if he’d been better at replying to my texts, I wouldn’t be in my current situation.
“Well, you can rest assured knowing that he ‘had nothing to do with a psycho showing up on your doorstep’ and ‘maybe you should consider the possibility that your own actions have gotten you into yet another mess.’ Sounds like a great guy.”
“Says the man who held a gun to my head and handcuffed me to a chair,” I quipped.
“Oh, I wasn’t being sarcastic. I commend any man who’s managed to put up with you for longer than an hour or two and offer my sincerest sympathies.”
My head was pounding from the residual effects of tequila and adrenaline, leaving me in no mood to deal with any more shit. “Jake, with all due respect, I’m not going to change the ending to your story, and I suggest that if you want a different version, then you write it yourself.”
I was rewarded with the sight of his jaw clenching before he jumped up and began pacing my living room.
He spat out through clenched teeth, “I can’t change the ending myself, Hayden. If a writer kills a character, then only that fucking writer can fix it.”
I matched his pouty-lipped expression with one of my own. “Well then, Detective, sounds like you’re out of luck because this fucking writer is working on a cozy mystery.”
His fury gave way to confusion as he scratched the back of his head. “What the hell is a cozy mystery?”
I gestured with my free hand. “Cozy mystery—Cozies. Everyone knows what those are.” At his blank expression, I elaborated. “They’re crime novels where the main character is usually both a woman and amateur detective. She runs a bakery or works as a reporter; something that helps her interact with the people of the town she lives in. There’s very mild profanity and no sex scenes. Nice and tidy.”
His lips moved back into their trademark pout. “Well, I have to say that the fade to black scenes are going to be right up your alley; although I’m not sure about the cursing, as you have the filthiest mouth out of any woman I’ve met. And I’ve met some filthy ones.”
He said the last bit with a wink, and I rolled my eyes. I was well aware of his exploits. I’d written them, after all. “I’m quite familiar with your extracurricular activities—”
“I highly doubt you have any insight into what went on ‘behind closed doors,’” he interrupted. “You never wrote it. I’ll have you know that the women I spent time with were not only beautiful, but intelligent and cultured. We had amazing dinners and watched foreign films; hell, sometimes we even talked about the future and where we saw ourselves.”
Everything he’d just described was exactly what I’d been combing the city looking for. The deep timbre of his voice intoxicated me; making it almost impossible to have a coherent thought.
“Really?” I asked, my voice much breathier than it was only moments before.
His lips turned up into a wicked grin. “No. We fucked. Like normal people.”
The spell he had me under broke and I dropped my shoulders in disappointment. Not only were there no good men left in the world, there were apparently none left in books either.
“Good to know. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a novel to write. I just need you to uncuff me and see your way out.”
Jake nodded and came back over to where I was sitting. I dutifully raised my arm as far as the cuffs would allow, waiting for him to free me.
Instead, he sat back down in the armchair and picked up one of my magazines. “Go right ahead. I’ll just sit here and offer helpful input as needed.”
I rattled the cuffs loudly against the metal on the arm of the chair. “Trust me, your input will not be needed.”
He looked up from over the top of the magazine. “Oh, I think it will. And, since I have nothing else going on, I can give this my complete, undivided attention.”
I was going to murder him… again. Just as soon as I figured out how to pick the lock and free myself.
Four
A close friend or loved one might drop out of sight today. You may panic when he or she doesn’t return your phone calls. Don’t jump to conclusions, dear Libra. They’re preoccupied with matters that, for the moment, appear important and will contact you in time. When you do finally connect, you could hear some interesting news. Relax, go about your business, and look forward to the call.
“Do you have any food around here?”
I jumped at Jake’s voice and quickly switched my laptop screen back to the book I’d been av
oiding writing for the last two hours. I claimed I was doing research any time he peeked over my shoulder.
If he suspected that it was bullshit, he was keeping it to himself for the time being. I’d also secretly been emailing Aaris, but unsurprisingly, had gotten no response. Knowing her, she was still curled up in bed, sleeping off her hangover before her shift at the bar later tonight. My horoscope only confirmed that suspicion. I hoped that her ‘interesting news’ would involve ways to make Jake disappear.
Permanently.
For now, I was left to fend for myself with my captor.
“I was supposed to grocery shop today. Instead, I ended up being kidnapped and held hostage by a fictional detective.”
He nodded along as I spoke before adding, “Yeah, I didn’t need your life story. A simple ‘no’ would’ve worked.” He sighed and looked around the tiny kitchen, but food didn’t magically appear. “I’ll run out and pick something up.”
My stomach began to grumble, effectively destroying any chance of me pretending I wasn’t hungry. The queasy fog brought on by the tequila had dissipated sometime over the afternoon, leaving me ravenous.
It took my brain a second to latch onto his words. He was leaving to go get food. I was going to stay behind in my apartment.
Alone.
This was my chance to escape; or at the very least, alert Aaris to the fact that I was being held against my will. Not that I was convinced she was going to offer much help. She’d probably volunteer herself as tribute.
If I played it cool, there was a small chance I’d be out of this mess in no time. I went back to staring at the computer screen, clicking the mouse at random.
Completely casual.
Not at all suspicious.
“Are you hungry?” Jake leaned down into my line of vision and I shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe. So, I’m gonna take that as a no. Looks like I just need to grab enough for me.”
“Fine,” I muttered under my breath.
“I’m sorry, did you say something, Hayden?”
“I said.” I stretched my arm, testing the cuff around my wrist, much like a dog would a leash. A couple more inches and I would’ve been close enough to wrap my hand around his throat. I let out a disappointed sigh. “Yes, I’m hungry.”
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