30
A COLD NIGHT IN HELL
Eric hunkered down behind the steering wheel of his parked car and wrapped his arms around himself for warmth. How cold was it tonight, anyway? It must have dipped below freezing outside, judging by the way he could see his own breath.
A violent shiver overtook him, and he looked longingly at the Ferrari’s red push-button ignition. Maybe he should idle the engine for a few minutes. His fingers twitched, but he resisted the temptation. Not yet. He only had a quarter tank of gas left, and he needed to make it last all night.
Eric glanced at his phone to check the time. Just past eleven thirty now. He assumed he’d still be sitting here at midnight, counting down the New Year all alone. An hour had passed since that silent car ride back to Tessa’s house. She hadn’t uttered a single word until he pulled into her driveway, but he’d stopped her with a question before she got out.
“What time is your mom coming home?”
She had her face turned away from him, but he saw her shoulders draw upward at the sound of his voice. “What do you care about my mom?”
“You shouldn’t be alone in there,” he said. “Not tonight.”
She’d cracked the car door open. “Thanks for the ride.”
“I’m not leaving,” he’d called after her.
“If you think I’m inviting you into my house—”
“I’ll just sit out here in the driveway,” he’d interrupted, striving to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Just in case. I’ll keep an eye on things until your mom comes back.”
“Well, that should be around nine tomorrow morning.”
“Then I guess I’m sleeping in my car tonight.”
She’d exited without another word.
Now he trembled against the cold and swore under his breath. Damn, it was frigid. He’d thought it was bad outside the concert venue earlier, but the temperature must have dropped another twenty degrees in the hours since. He expelled a steaming breath, fiddling with his phone to distract himself from the impending hypothermia, and his thumb landed on its usual destination.
Twitter.
The police had frozen his second account—they needed it for evidence—but they’d left his @EricThorn account untouched. Eric stared down at his profile. He’d told Tessa in the police station that she should unfollow him, and he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d done it. Had she blocked him too? Deactivated her account? He couldn’t bring himself to check.
Instead, for some unfathomable reason, Eric clicked to compose a new tweet.
He didn’t know what he hoped to achieve. Tessa wouldn’t be on Twitter tonight. Not after what had happened. Eric didn’t bother aiming his message @ her, or at anyone in particular. Fourteen million followers would see it, minus one. He entered the words anyway, driven by a force he couldn’t explain. There was a pain in his chest—the last ember of a fire that hadn’t quite died. He had to give it one more try before the flame went out for good.
He hit Tweet, and his notifications lit up with the inevitable blizzard of replies. In the past, he would have viewed those messages with contempt, but now he couldn’t summon up more than a numb indifference.
Who was he to judge, anyway? He wasn’t so different from all those fangirls after all. In the end, he wanted the same thing they all did. A like. A reply. Maybe a follow back. Some sign of acknowledgment from an account that probably couldn’t hear him. Some tiny gesture that told him the words he craved: “I see you… I notice you… I know that you exist… I love you back… I love you too…” Anything to know that his message had been heard by its recipient and not shouted into an empty void.
Eric rested his forehead against the steering wheel, staring at his useless phone, but a sharp knock on the window interrupted him. He looked up, startled, and his body temperature spiked a few degrees at what he saw: Tessa, with her hands cupped round her face, peering at him through the glass. She hadn’t left him for dead out there after all. He cracked the passenger door back open.
“Do you have frostbite yet?” she asked.
Eric couldn’t help but grin at the sight of her. She’d changed from before. Taken a shower, twisted her hair into a thick braid, and scrubbed her face free of makeup. She’d decked herself out in a pair of mismatched pajamas covered by a ratty flannel robe. And on her feet, of course, she wore a pair of hot-pink bunny slippers.
“Nice slippers,” he said with a nod toward her feet. “Those are even hotter in person.”
She glowered at him as she climbed into the passenger seat and tucked her feet beneath her, out of sight. “Here,” she said, shoving a thick down comforter in his direction.
He took it greedily and wrapped it around his shoulders. It was big enough to go around him twice, but he held out the excess in her direction—a silent offer to share. For a moment, he thought she would refuse. Her eyes darted to his face and back away. Then she shimmied an inch closer and wrapped her side of the blanket around her arms.
Eric cleared his throat. Did she see the tweet just now? He couldn’t quite summon the nerve to ask. He had a million different things he wanted to say to her, but he didn’t dare speak. He knew that one wrong word could send her scurrying into the house for good.
Tessa broke the silence, and Eric choked at her chosen topic of conversation. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Now that’s an understatement,” he said with a dry laugh. “Trust me, I wasn’t expecting you to.”
She looked down at her lap. “I just wanted to make that completely clear.”
“Message received.” He knew he should leave it at that, but he couldn’t quite manage to bite his tongue. “To be fair, Tessa, I did just spend the past five months texting with a girl who wouldn’t even send me a selfie.”
“So what?” Her head snapped up, and her eyes flashed with defiance. “That means I’m obligated to sleep with you?”
“No! I’m just saying, if I wanted to get laid, I can think of easier ways.”
Tessa pressed her lips together. Her gaze lingered, and Eric turned his head to give her a better view. Even in the darkened car, he could see the way new color stained her cheeks when he looked her full in the face. Was she thawing toward him? Just a little? He rocked his body toward her and knocked his shoulder lightly against hers. “Hey, look at you, outside your house again. Twice in one day!”
She slid down farther in her seat, pulling her shoulder out of range. “It’s not like I feel safe in there anymore,” she said. “Not after he was in my house.”
Eric scratched his nose, unsure how to respond. “Do you want me to take you somewhere else?”
“No.” She shrugged. “Nowhere else to go, really.” She sounded matter-of-fact, but Eric couldn’t quite read the expression on her face.
He paused, waiting for her to say more.
She let out a noisy breath. “Shouldn’t I be better now?” Her mouth scrunched sideways, and her voice tightened with frustration as she spoke. “I mean, logically, I was afraid to leave my house because I could feel him out here. Somewhere. Somehow. I could sense that he was still watching me. Now that he’s locked up, I should feel safe. That seems only fair, right?”
Eric raised an eyebrow. He had a feeling it didn’t work that way. A phobia was an irrational fear. It didn’t respond to logic. It had no sense of fairness. And he could tell from her expression that Tessa knew it too. He longed to reach out and squeeze her hand, but he didn’t want to spook her. He ventured a hesitant smile instead. “So I guess that means you can come to my show tomorrow in Santa Fe?”
“If you think that’s happening, then you’re the one with mental problems.”
She met his eyes, striving for a withering glare, but she couldn’t quite manage it. He broke into a grin, and he saw her cheeks flood with color once again. She turned away, but not fast enough to hide the involuntary smile that popped onto her own face in response.
“So that was really you?” she asked. She kept her eyes averted, plucking stray feathers through the comforter’s outer shell. “All that time? That was actually you texting? Not some publicist or something?”
“Nope. All me.”
“I’m just trying to process it.”
“Take your time.”
She stole another look, and he forced his face into serious lines. No more cocky grin. Her forehead crinkled as she studied him. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “How many other fans did you have this going on with?”
“None. Tessa, I’m telling you, it wasn’t like that. It was only you.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Why would you even talk to me in the first place?”
Eric thought back to that morning when he first became aware of her account. He’d been a total mess that day, driven by unchecked anger and the thinly veiled anxiety that lay beneath. He hadn’t yet learned how to control it. Only her calming influence had taught him how to cope.
He shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. He turned away from her and looked straight out through the windshield. “Talking to you helped me. You helped me through a lot of things.”
“But why?” she asked, incredulous. “You’re Eric Thorn. Why would you need help from someone like me?”
“You already know all this, Tessa. It’s nothing we haven’t talked about before.”
“When? In the police station?”
“No! Tessa, you know me.” He leaned toward her, his eyes growing more intent. “I’m not a stranger. We’ve been talking every night.” She opened her mouth to respond, but he continued before she could speak. “You know all those times we were talking about Eric Thorn, and I said some theory about him, and you accused me of projecting? Remember? Well, it turns out I wasn’t projecting, Tessa. I was telling you things about myself. Real things. Stuff I couldn’t tell anyone else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Hating what I do? Feeling trapped? Getting locked into a bad record deal and forced to act like a male stripper? Does any of this ring a bell?”
She nodded slowly but didn’t answer. For a moment, her eyes went far away, and he thought he might be getting through to her. Then she returned her attention to the comforter’s frayed seams. “But what about all the other stuff?” she asked. “Like you told me how some coworker got stalked. What was that? Just some story to make me feel like we had something in common?”
“No!” He reached for her arm, but he let his hand drop without making contact. “Tessa, I didn’t even know about Blair. That was true. All of it.”
She looked up, blinking rapidly.
“Dorian Cromwell,” he explained. “I was a total wreck last summer after Dorian got killed.”
“Did you know him?”
“No, that’s not the point!” Eric’s voice rose, and he took a deep breath to control it. “I just felt like a sitting duck. It only takes one copycat, you know? It’s only a matter of time before the same thing happens again.”
Her eyes went wide, but her expression softened as she scrutinized his face. “That fangirl in Seattle,” she said. “You said you didn’t sleep a wink after it happened. That was true?”
He nodded, holding his breath. It took every ounce of self-control not to reach out and touch her face. He could sense her presence beside him now—the sensitive girl he’d fallen in love with over Twitter, not the ice princess from the car ride home tonight. She was still in there, just beneath the surface. He just needed her to thaw a little more…
Maybe he should show her the tweet he sent before. She clearly hadn’t seen it. Eric reached for the phone in his lap, but his attention was distracted by a flutter of movement in front of him. He sat up in his seat and pointed toward the windshield. “Look!”