What If You & Me by Roni Loren

 

Chapter One

Andi Lockley was halfway convinced her new neighbor was a werewolf.

She’d never seen him outside since she’d moved into the duplex, and she’d only heard him moving around at night. The nocturnal wanderings might’ve made her lean toward vampire, but this guy made too much noise to be a vampire. Thump. Thump. Thump. His heavy steps paced back and forth as if he couldn’t wait for the full moon and an opportunity to terrorize the villagers.

The old floorboards creaked again as neighbor dude made another round, and Andi tried to concentrate on the unfinished sentence on her laptop in front of her.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

That blinking cursor was a judgmental sonofabitch. She narrowed her eyes, trying to zero in on the words she’d written. The scent of wet fur and death filled the small cabin, Collette’s breath making clouds in the frosty air as she…

As she what? Contemplated running? Took a nap? Knit a sweater? Ugh. Andi leaned back in her desk chair and rubbed the spot between her eyes where a headache was forming. How had the band-camp slasher story she was supposed to be writing morphed into some werewolf tale?

Thump, thump, bang!

She startled and turned her head, eyeing the pale-green wall that separated her from her neighbor. Her shelf of horror Funko Pops rattled with another bang, almost sending little Hannibal Lecter over the edge. She reached over and righted the doll.

This wasn’t going to work. Maybe she needed to try writing while wearing her headphones, even though being unable to hear the noises around her tended to put her on edge. She usually only used headphones when she was editing the podcast. How many horror-movie scenes had she watched where some unsuspecting victim had headphones on or was listening to music too loudly while the deranged killer stalked around their house?

But she was running out of options. Nine to midnight was her magic writing time. She’d moved into this place because…well, mainly because the 1920s double-shotgun house was cheaper than her old apartment, but also because the cute office off the kitchen at the back of the house had seemed perfect for a horror writer. Creaky and cozy with a view of a tangled, overgrown garden in the back. She had loved it on sight, even though her parents would be horrified by the place and probably see it as one step up from living in a cardboard box. Anything that wasn’t their sprawling mansion overlooking the golf course in Georgia looked like the slums to them.

Andi didn’t need a mansion. This place was more than enough for now, but she hadn’t anticipated such a noisy neighbor. At her old place, she’d shared a wall with Dolores, a septuagenarian who had gone to bed by nine and who had regularly brought her Tupperware containers full of delicious slow-cooked things like shrimp and crab gumbo and white beans and rice.

This guy seemed to be a creature of the night, and he’d never brought her so much as a bag of potato chips to welcome her to the neighborhood. Andi turned back to her computer, swept her bangs away from her eyes, and deleted the line about wet fur. No werewolves. That was not in the proposal she had sent to her literary agent.

She needed to stay on track. Despite the growing audience for her What Can We Learn from This? horror and true crime podcast, her advertising income was meager. The majority of her pay-the-bills money came from the minor success she’d found with a series of horror novels. But that series had wrapped up, the money from royalties was dwindling, and her publisher had decided they wanted out of the horror business, so no new contract. Now she needed to prove to her agent and other publishers that she wasn’t a one-series-and-done author so she could get another book deal. She needed to send her agent a winner.

She focused on her screen again. Deranged killers. Deranged killers. Must write a crazed summer-camp killer with a fresh twist. Music started up next door.

She cocked her head.

“Oh sweet baby Jesus.” The werewolf listened to country music. Would the torture never end?

She wanted to bang on the wall or storm next door and demand that he have some consideration for his neighbor. What if she’d been a normal person who was sleeping at this hour? She imagined the finger-wagging lecture she could give him about the importance of being an unselfish human, about realizing the world doesn’t revolve around you and your big feet. But she knew there was no way she was going over there. She was a badass in her imagined scenario, but she’d covered enough true-crime documentaries on the podcast to know that no good would come of knocking on some stranger’s door alone in the middle of the night. Scary news stories started like that.

And the last time anyone saw Andi Lockley, horror author and podcaster, was…

The music switched off. Small mercies.

She stared at the laptop screen again and then, with a huff, snapped her computer shut. The words weren’t going to happen tonight. She might as well get something watched for the podcast instead and at least be able to check one item off her list. She pushed her chair back, the wheels rolling over the worn floorboards and making them creak. She stood and stretched, grabbed her cooling green tea, and headed toward the living room at the front of the house.

She’d left a lamp on, giving the room a warm glow, and she checked all the locks and windows before turning on the TV and shutting off the lights. Proper horror-movie watching required the dark. She grabbed the colorful afghan her former neighbor had made her when she’d moved. She’d told Andi, “This is for all those movies you watch. You can cover your eyes with it but still see the movie a little. And it’s big enough to share with a date.”

Andi smiled at the memory. Dolores had been very interested in Andi’s love life—or lack thereof. She’d not so subtly work into their conversations things like Have you met that nice blond boy down at the coffee shop? So tall and never charges me for extra whipped cream. Or, You know Mrs. Benoit’s boy just graduated with a master’s degree in English. I’ve always thought men who read are so much more interesting, don’t you? And she’d even tested the waters with Mercy’s granddaughter, Jess, just broke up with her lady friend. I think she’s a movie buff like you.

Andi appreciated her neighbor’s effort and the sentiment behind it. Dolores would make a killer wingwoman, but Andi hadn’t had the heart to tell her that the afghan didn’t need to be big enough for two. She didn’t bring guys home. Dates were reserved for public places only. Not that she dated much anyway. The minute she would imagine taking the next step with a guy, she would be seized by all the what-ifs, get that queasy feeling in her gut, and shut the whole thing down. Post-traumatic stress was hell on a love life. Her former therapist had assured her that it wouldn’t always be this way, but Andi was beginning to wonder if the “post” part of post-traumatic would ever really arrive.

She curled under the blanket and scanned her streaming playlist, looking for something that would make for interesting fodder on the podcast. On What Can We Learn from This? she featured true-crime documentaries and horror films because much could be learned from both. Tonight, she needed a movie that could feed the creative part of her brain to help with her story, so she went through the slasher options, settling on one of her comfort watches. Scream.

She wouldn’t have to take notes on this one or pause and analyze anything. She knew it mostly by heart, and she could use it on the podcast to talk about things like the overlap of comedy and horror, and how using the biggest name in the movie at the time—Drew Barrymore—in the opening scene was both a risk and a brilliant move. And for the “what can we learn from this” portion, there was a lot to talk about, including the ill-advised design of houses with walls of windows.

Andi sipped her tea and turned up the volume—because if her neighbor could blare country music, she could blast horror. She tensed as the portable phone rang on-screen again and again, a blond-bobbed Drew picking it up each time, her mood changing from flirty to terrified with each call. Lesson one, Never engage with a prank phone call. Lesson two, Never leave a door unlocked. Or in this case, every damn door in the house. Damn, Drew.

Andi didn’t victim blame. That was her rule on the podcast and in life, but she shuddered at the thought of all those doors sitting unlocked at night. She quickly glanced at her front door, making sure the lock was in the horizontal position even though she never left it any other way.

Despite Andi knowing everything that would happen in the movie, her heartbeat picked up speed as Drew’s character began screaming and crying. How many times could she watch a movie and hope that this time the person would escape and not get killed? It was one of the beauties of horror movies. There was often such a strong undercurrent of hope. Sometimes it was rewarded—the final girl escapes, the monster is defeated. Sometimes it wasn’t. But the very presence of that beating heart of hope got her every time.

Drew upped her screaming game on-screen, and Andi’s speakers vibrated with the shrillness of it. She reached for the remote, planning to turn it down a little. She didn’t want to be a total dick. But before she could get her finger on the button, a thunderous boom echoed through the room.

She startled, a yelp escaping her, and nearly knocked over her tea. The loud sound repeated, and it took a second for her to realize it was coming from the door she’d just checked. Boom! Boom! Boom!

The afghan was clutched tight in her fist, and the movie still blasted, screams filling the living room. Her heartbeat thumped in her ears, and she stared at the door like it was going to splinter and the movie’s Ghostface was going to walk right in and disembowel her with his knife.

Andi’s logical brain registered this probably wasn’t the case, but that part was a distant whisper at the moment. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn off the TV. She was frozen in place.

The thunderous knocking started again. “Fire department. Open up!”

The words fire department penetrated her fear fog. Fire. Fire? That didn’t make any sense. Why the hell would the fire department be banging on her door in the middle of the night? Maybe something had happened in the neighborhood. Or maybe they had the wrong house.

Thinking it through helped a little. Finally, she was able to unfurl her fingers from the afghan and grab the remote to hit Pause. The silence that followed was almost as unsettling as the banging. The pounding on the door started again with an added threat to break down the door if no one responded. That got her moving. She hurried to her feet, headed to the door, and peered through the peephole. All she could see was a T-shirt clad shoulder as the man apparently leaned over to try to see through her front window.

A T-shirt, not a firefighter’s uniform. She cleared her throat and called out, “How do I know you’re a firefighter?”

Whoever it was stepped back and pointed to an NOFD insignia on his T-shirt, just visible in the peephole’s view. “Hill Dawson,” the man called out. “Your neighbor. Everything okay in there?”

Her neighbor? She reached for the pepper spray she kept in the drawer of her small entryway table, turned the latch on the lock, and opened the door, ready to spray if needed. Underneath the porch light, the outline of a man came into view. A very tall, broad-shouldered man. The werewolf. Complete with dark messy hair, a trimmed beard, and a scowl. He was equal parts gorgeous and intimidating—not unlike a real wolf—and her body tensed as though it couldn’t decide whether she should run like hell or rush forward and volunteer to play villager.

His brown eyes met hers, his searching look sending hot awareness through her, but then his gaze scanned downward. Only then did she remember she was standing there braless in a thin tank top and a pair of Wonder Woman pajama pants with a very formidable stranger on her doorstep. That snapped her out of her ridiculous staring. Who cared that he was attractive? He could still be there to hurt her. She crossed her arms over her chest and tipped up her chin, trying to look tough. “What’s going on?”

“So, you’re okay?” he asked, brows knit, his voice a deep rumble. His gaze flicked to the pink canister of mace still clutched in her fist. “I heard screaming. A lot of it.”

“Screaming?” She frowned.

He shifted, and her attention jumped to his right hand, the one hanging loosely at his side. The one holding a baseball bat. She stiffened, her mouth going dry and her mind racing past suspicion and into worst-case-scenario territory. What if he wasn’t a firefighter? What if he wasn’t her neighbor? What if he was there to rob/rape/murder/dismember her and wear her head as a hat?

She uncrossed her arms, her finger poised on the trigger of the pepper spray. She was suddenly much less concerned about her lack of bra and much more concerned that she’d be caught off guard and attacked.

The man frowned, his gaze tracking her weapon before looking at her again. “There was yelling and screaming. I could hear it through the wall. I thought you were in trouble.”

She narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re really a firefighter? Anybody could get a T-shirt.”

He tried to peek past her into the house and then lowered his voice. “Ma’am, if you’re in trouble, if there’s someone in there you’re scared of, just step outside and I can help.”

“Someone inside?” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m alone. It was a movie.”

Her brain screamed at her as the words slipped out. I’m alone?

Have you learnednothing? Don’t tell the stranger you’re alone in the house! She should fire herself from her own podcast.

“I mean,” she went on. “I’m not in trouble. The screaming was a movie. I was watching a horror movie.”

The stiff hold of his shoulders relaxed, and his gaze met hers again, disbelief there. “A movie? It sounded like you were getting murdered over here.”

“Just Drew Barrymore. Not me.” She shifted on her feet. “Maybe I had it a little too loud.”

He made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and she realized her imagination hadn’t been far off earlier. This guy could be cast in a movie as lead werewolf. Scruffy and muscular in his navy-blue T-shirt and gray sweats. He was one full moon away from howling and ripping off that well-fitting shirt.

“A little too loud?” he asked, repeating her words. “It’s midnight. The screams were damn near vibrating my walls.”

That made her spine straighten and a flash of indignation rush through her. “Yes, it is midnight. And someone thought blaring songs about tractors was appropriate at this hour. I had to turn up my TV to drown you out.” She nodded at his weapon. “Do you make it a habit to scare the shit out of new neighbors by brandishing a baseball bat on their doorstep?”

He glanced down at his bat as if just remembering he had it, like it was a normal extension of his arm. He leaned over and set it against a planter out of her reach, then lifted a brow her way. “Says the lady with the pink pepper spray.”

“Hey, you’re at my door, man. I didn’t bang on yours.” She wasn’t going to put down her weapon. No, thank you.

He sighed, a long-suffering sound, and rubbed his forehead. “Okay, so you’re not getting murdered or the hell beat out of you.”

“I am not.”

“That’s good.” He nodded, almost to himself, and ran a hand over the back of his head.

“Agreed. I consider it a good day if I haven’t been murdered.”

He stared at her for a moment as if at a loss for what to say to that, and she was momentarily struck by how well his beard suited his tense jawline, by how long his eyelashes were, how his brown eyes had flecks of green in them.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said finally. “But maybe not so loud on the movies. I’m trained to respond to screams.”

Somehow the words trained to respond to screams sounded dirty to her ear, and heat bloomed in her cheeks. God. What was with her tonight? She cleared her throat. “Right. And maybe not so loud with the tractor music?”

His mouth hitched up at one corner, a lazy tilt of a smile. “I played no songs about tractors. There was no farm equipment referenced at all.”

She crossed her arms again and gave him a knowing look. “What about mommas, trains, trucks, prison, or gettin’ drunk?”

A low chuckle escaped him, and he coughed, as if trying to cover it. “Touché. No promises there.”

“Fair enough. So, you’re the neighbor,” she said, trying to disregard the warm honey sound of his laugh. There was no way she needed to entertain any Hey, how you doin’ feelings about the dude who lived next door. She couldn’t even think of the box of nightmares that would open up.

He straightened a little, and his serious face returned. “Yeah. Hill Dawson. Sorry I haven’t introduced myself before this. I’ve been…busy with things.”

“I’m Andrea—Andi,” she said, keeping one arm crossed over her chest and putting out her other to shake his hand. “Writer. Podcaster. Watcher of loud horror movies.”

He took her hand, his grip big and warm around hers, and gave her a businesslike shake. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yes, at midnight. In our pajamas. Exactly how I planned it.” Well, her pajamas. He had tennis shoes on, so he probably hadn’t been in bed.

She almost missed it, the quick flick of his gaze back to her outfit, but he seemed to catch himself and not let the look linger. He dropped the handshake. “It won’t happen again.”

She let out a breath and dropped the prickly attitude. This wasn’t who she was. Being scared and caught off guard had brought out her sharp edges. “Look, I appreciate you coming over to make sure everything’s okay. I guess we both need to be aware of how thin the walls are.”

“Yeah, I didn’t realize that until tonight either. Your side has been pretty quiet since you moved in. I’m glad you weren’t being murdered.”

She smiled. “Me too.”

He nodded. “Well, good night, Andi.”

“’Night, neighbor.”

He grabbed the bat, setting it against his shoulder with the practiced ease of someone who’d played the game, and then tipped his head toward the pepper spray clutched in her left hand. “Also, that’s decent if you’re trying to deter a dog from attacking you, but you should look into the pepper gel for real protection. That’s what my cop friends suggest. It won’t blow back on you and is stronger.”

“Oh.” She looked down at the pink tube.

“And sorry to use the fire department thing. I didn’t mean to scare you. I figured that’d be the quickest way to get you to open the door.”

She sniffed. “It worked.”

He shrugged. “It usually does.”

“Next time, you can just say it’s Hill, so I don’t think I’m about to die of a gas leak.”

His lips curved slightly, but there was a glimmer of sadness there—or wistfulness—before he turned back toward his side of the porch. “G’night.”

“’Night.”

Andi leaned against her doorway, maybe enjoying the view of his backside in a pair of sweats more than she should. He walked a little stiffly, like he had a knee bothering him or something, and headed back into his house without a backward glance.

She slipped back inside, locked her door, and leaned against it, her heart still beating fast—from the earlier scare, but also maybe from something else. She didn’t want to examine that too closely. In her darkened living room, the paused movie was the only light. Drew Barrymore was frozen in place, lying on the ground with Ghostface above her. Andi scanned the room—the single indentation on the couch, the afghan for two, the cold cup of tea. All were waiting for her to return.

But a weird urge to go back outside and knock on Hill’s door, invite him to watch the movie with her, came over her. Maybe he had trouble sleeping like she did. Maybe he liked scary movies, too.

The line from Scream drifted through her head. “Do you like scary movies?”

She could ask him. To be neighborly. To be friendly. To finally have a guy over.

But as quickly as the thought hit her, she tamped it down. He was a stranger. Yes, he seemed nice and was supposedly a firefighter with good intentions. But she’d learned not to trust her gut on things like that. Her instincts in that area were notoriously untrustworthy. Lots of people were good at appearing to be nice. Some people knew how to wield “nice” as the ultimate weapon.

Old memories leached into her brain. Whispered compliments from a boy she’d yearned for, one she thought she could trust. Gentle kisses. Locked doors. Fingers sliding a strap down a shoulder. Promise you won’t tell anyone. You’re the only one I trust.

She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. No. Stop.

She took a few deep breaths, pushing the images back into the vault she tried to keep them locked in. After a moment, she rubbed the goose bumps from her arms and swallowed past the sick feeling that welled up anytime she let thoughts of Evan Henry Longdale sneak into her mind.

No way was she inviting the new neighbor over. Hello, mental trigger, how are you?

As she plopped back down on the couch, she tried to shake off the memories her run-in with Hill had stirred, but after a few more minutes of the movie, she realized she wasn’t paying attention to the screen. Movie night was officially a wash.

She clicked off the television, knowing the only way to get her mind off the old looping track it was now on was to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and focused on her nightly routine to block out her anxious thoughts. But as she was finishing up, she heard the shower turn on next door. The bad memories that were pushing at the walls of her mind were suddenly replaced by images of the man who’d been standing on her doorstep. Hill was on the other side of the wall, right there. She glanced at the wall separating them, listening to the sounds and imagining what was on the other side. Hill taking off his T-shirt, revealing what she suspected was a very well-built body. Hill sliding those loose sweats down his hips, revealing…

Not cool. Stop. No mentally undressing the guy. Nope.

But her inner protests were no use. She could hear him groan with appreciation, like the hot water had been a relief. Hill was taking a shower. On the other side of that thin wall, only a few feet away, he was naked and wet. Water droplets on bare skin were involved.

Thinking of anything else was suddenly impossible. Her starved libido was now fully in charge, popping popcorn for this new dirty movie.

She quickly finished up in the bathroom, trying to get away from the source of the images, but by the time she’d slipped under the covers of her bed, her skin was hot all over. The mental movie of Hill was there and not going away. And though fantasizing about the neighbor was a terrible idea, visions of him in the shower were a helluva lot better than the horrid memories that had taken over earlier. Maybe there was no harm in her little fantasy reel after all. There was nothing safer than fantasy. It was what had gotten her through all these years without a physical relationship.

It’s not like her new neighbor would ever know.

The dirty thoughts were safely locked in her brain, and whenever she ran into him again, she would just have to employ her poker face. She had a good one. No, of course I’ve never pictured you naked.

She closed her eyes and listened to the water run, letting her imagination take over from there.

She forgot to take that sleeping pill.