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“Not now but keep my number handy. If there’s any fallout to deal with, I’ll let you know.”

I watch until Demi drives away and move to wait near Francesca’s class for the bell. Even though I can track her physical location by phone, I prefer the excuse to observe her in person. After shadowing her between classes, I’m satisfied she’s here for the day and bail, driving to her home address.

The place looks abandoned. I cautiously approach the front door, knocking to see if anyone responds. When they don’t, I pull out a lockpicking kit and set to work.

It takes less than five minutes to pick the door open, and when I push—expecting a feeble chain or slide bolt orsomethingextra—it swings inwards. The biggest barrier is when the door snags on a threadbare rug.

I quickly check through the house, but my first impression proves correct. There’s no one home.

The flimsy lock also makes more sense. You don’t need impenetrable doors when you have nothing worth stealing.

The furniture in the small two-bedroom dwelling looks like it was abandoned on the curb after someone rotted to death on it. The sole bathroom is cramped. A large tub steals most of the space and the shower cubicle is small enough to make me claustrophobic. Francesca’s bedroom is more of a cupboard, only large enough to fit her single bed, a tiny bedside cabinet, and a wooden chair.

The garage doesn’t hold a car, just an old chest freezer with offcuts of plywood panels, a pile of red bricks, and four half-empty paint cans stacked on top. The layer of undisturbed dust on the bare concrete floor shows Francesca doesn’t park her vehicle inside even when she’s home.

I return to the house and enter her room again.

My pulse quickens as I turn in a slow circle. There’s no wardrobe. Her clothes are thrown haphazardly on the chair. Aside from her school uniform, there’s a pair of worn jeans, an oversized woollen sweater, and half a dozen cheap T-shirts.

In the bedside cabinet is an underwear drawer with three-for-ten-dollar white cotton panties, sexy only because of who’s worn them. I pinch the cheap fabric, rubbing it between my fingers, stashing one in my pocket before sliding it closed.

A comb sits on top, long strands of her fiery hair caught in its teeth. I pull one free, wrapping it around the tip of my finger, marvelling at the depth of its colour.

There’s a shampoo bottle in the shower cubicle and I snap off the lid, inhaling the scent of feijoas and a tang of citrus. I squirt some of her body wash on my palm, lathering my hands in the sink, growing hard as I picture her spreading the same suds across her wet, naked skin, rinsing clean underneath the spray.

I leave the bathroom behind and walk into the kitchen, finding boxes of dry food in the cabinets, the best-before dates long expired. The fridge has a bottle of milk down to the dregs, and on the bench is a shrivelled brown houseplant.

The only thing blossoming around here is black mould.

Pieces of mail on the kitchen counter are stamped with red ink. Final notice. Overdue. Expired.

I love it.

There isn’t a single piece of this grindingly hard existence I can’t use.

Someone was living with her, that’s obvious when I check the larger bedroom. Odds and ends point to a woman, presumably her mother. I pick up a half-empty tube to check for a prescription label, wrinkling my nose and tossing it back when I see it’s an over-the-counter fungal cream.

Perhaps she decamped of her own accord when her daughter turned eighteen, her duty done. Or she found seasonal work in another city. Either way, she’s been absent a few months. Francesca has kept every piece of furniture clean, but dust on the bedspread gives away the timing.

With a frown, I move back into the kitchen, checking everything again. Every drawer. Every cupboard. Every shelf. Every envelope.

I take out the overdue notices and study them with far more care. The payments for the last few months are sporadic. The sign of a casual contract where wages fluctuate each week. Only the electricity bill is fully paid.

Francesca lives here alone. Utterly vulnerable.

No parental figure in sight, no siblings. Not even the money to ward off trouble.

God knows where the five grand went because it wasn’t spent in this place. Perhaps she used it to repay a loan to a dodgy lender or get a dealer off her back.

I could make her do anything. Mould her into anything I want her to be.

She doesn’t have the defences to resist.

A glow of satisfaction builds as I walk through the house again, placing a supermarket order on my phone for everything she needs. With that done, I lie on her bed, sniffing the pillow that smells like her hair, staring at the water stains on the ceiling and wondering if her eyes search it for patterns at night and, if so, what she sees there.

The panties I fished from the hamper are in my hand, stroking my dick, hard as rock while I think of poor, defenceless Francesca.

A girl who had the misfortune to attract my attention.