Page 6 of Now You See Him

Chapter

Five

T ina vaguely recalled gathering her clothes and phone, stumbling upstairs, and running into the bathroom, where she immediately jumped in the shower.

She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and let the hot water wash away the physical remnants of her infidelity.

She didn’t know how long she stood there under the hot spray.

The shower stall and bathroom had filled with steam, and she could barely see two inches in front of her face.

That’s when the tears came hot and fast. Then the sobs.

Her body ached, deliciously sore and also fatigued with the heavy weight of guilt.

She grabbed her soap and began scrubbing every inch of skin, from her fingertips to her toes.

She washed her hair, too. Her arms ached from scrubbing her thick black curls twice until they were squeaky-clean.

She knew it was pointless to go through the scrubbing ritual.

Nothing could erase what she’d done, nor how good it felt.

And she hated herself, absolutely detested the fact that if she were in the same position again, she’d probably make the same choice. Minus the part where she was terrified of the supernatural now when she’d never had that fear before.

Twenty minutes later, she was finally ready to step outside of the shower stall with two very clear realizations: The first was that she’d had sex with Derrick, and both of them had been…

consumed with something that was out of their control.

She had consented to his touch, felt like she would’ve died without it.

The second was that there’d been another person in that basement with them.

However, when the lights flicked on, there’d been no sign of anyone else in the room.

But there’d been cum. Two loads. One on her face and chest, the second on her abdomen.

She strode back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her midsection and saw that her robe had been draped over the side of the bed. It had been hanging in her closet that morning.

Her throat tightened, and she felt the soreness from where she’d choked on a thick cock. Her hand rested over the front of her neck, and she closed her eyes for just a moment as she remembered the quick thrusts filling her mouth. Who’d left her robe out for her? Was it…no.

She walked over to the bedside table where she’d left her phone before her shower. Just as she unlocked the device, a new message popped up.

SUTTER CONSTRUCTION:

Hi Tina, this is Derrick. I got your message about coming by to look at your hot water heater, and your door. I’m tied up this week, but I can come next Tuesday if that works for you.

“What the hell?” Tina typed back a quick response.

TINA:

Wait, are you joking

SUTTER CONSTRUCTION:

Excuse me?

TINA:

Derrick, you were just here. You checked the door, and we went down into the basement before you ran out of here.

Her phone started ringing, and sutter construction appeared on her screen. Her stomach twisted in knots, but she answered the call immediately. “Derrick?” she said, hating that her voice trembled.

“Tina? Are you…are you okay?” He sounded like he was driving, which meant that there was very much a possibility he was lying to her to try to save face. He had to be gaslighting her, right? There was no way that she made up the whole visit. He entered through her front door, for god’s sake.

“Derrick, please tell me you remember being here in my house.”

There was a long pause. “I had a construction site visit this morning. I didn’t even get your text to come by until I responded to you thirty minutes ago.”

“Oh god.” Her voice cracked, and she pressed a hand over her face.

He had to be lying. There was no way she made up the entire basement encounter.

She had bruises on her thighs from where he held her legs apart.

She still felt sore, painfully so, and deliciously used from her orgasm. And Derrick hadn’t caused any of it.

“Let me see what I can do to move things around,” he said slowly. “I can come by in an hour if?—”

“No,” Tina said quickly. “No, just…forget it. Things have been a bit weird here lately, and I thought—you know what? It doesn’t matter. I have to go.”

She hung up as quickly as she’d called. Before she could process a word of what Derrick had told her, Logan called out from the hallway.

“Honey?”

Tina tossed her phone aside, dropped the towel, and wrapped the robe around her, tying the belt as quickly as possible. Her fiancé walked in a moment later. His hair looked tousled. Windblown. His clothes were impeccable.

“Hey, I came in earlier and saw steam from the shower through the crack in the door. I’m assuming someone fixed it?” Logan said from the doorway.

“Ah, yeah. I think so.”

“Good.” He turned to go. Tina felt the need to say something, to blurt out everything that had happened, but even she couldn’t believe it.

“Logan?”

He turned to look over his shoulder. “Yeah?”

“How was your visit? To your mom’s?”

He looked startled. Then he rubbed the back of his neck. “It was fine. Dad was the only one home, so I spent time with him instead. We’re invited for dinner on Sunday night. I said that I’d run it by you first.”

Even though it was the tiniest thing in a whole universe of fuckery that was now her life, she hated how Logan’s parents hadn’t come over to her house yet. They made one excuse after another, but they expected her to come and visit them.

Some of the jitteriness, her unraveling over the last hour, settled as she focused on something very real, something tangible. Tina forced a smile. “Sure. That’s fine.”

Logan nodded. “Great. I’m going to get some work done.”

“Okay. Oh, and thanks for leaving my robe out.”

He cocked his head at her. “What are you talking about?”

When she didn’t answer, he shrugged and walked out, leaving her shivering and alone in her bedroom.

That night, when she crawled under the covers and kept a good foot of space between herself and Logan, she prayed that her sleep was dreamless. She was mentally exhausted after trying to process what had happened to her. All she had were questions, and she desperately needed answers.

Tina was standing in the kitchen of her home.

Or what could’ve been her home. The countertops were Formica, the cabinets dated yellow oak, and the floor was a gray tile that had seen better days.

“What the hell?” she mused. She scanned the surroundings, saw the sink filled with dishes and the small table shoved into a corner, stacked with mail. When she moved towards the table, she felt like she was walking through a fog.

She reached the table and bent to pick up one of the envelopes, except her fingers passed right through the paper.

Her heart began to thud at an erratic rate.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she chanted to herself as she spun in a circle, her surroundings blurring at the quick movement. When she noticed the calendar hanging on the back of the basement door, she crossed to it and tried to make sense of the messy handwriting and the blue ink squeezed in tiny boxes.

October 21. The date was from a year ago. Damien’s dentist appointment.

Damien.

Tina scrubbed her hands over her face. This couldn’t be happening. This was just a terrible dream that was bizarrely realistic. A dream where she knew she was in a dream.

There was a thud from upstairs, and she jolted.

A moan. A hard thud. Then another. A shriek of laughter. The thudding became insistent. Persistent. “Oh yes, baby. I love you. I love you so much.” It was a woman’s voice. Someone was…having sex? Vigorous sex, from the sound of the headboard banging against the wall.

Tina didn’t know what to do. Whether she should continue to explore the house in this fucked-up dream of hers or just wait until the show was over.

Just as she was about to enter the hallway to head upstairs, because, hey, she might as well find out who was fucking in her dream, the front door opened.

“Honey!”

That voice. That was the voice from the basement. It was Derrick’s, yet different. She quickly exited the kitchen and rushed down the hallway towards the entrance. There were so many more walls, so many more sectioned-off rooms. One had wood paneling, another had a fish tank and two armchairs.

She reached the entryway in time to see the back of a very tall, broad-shouldered man halfway up the stairs. His hair was dark and long, curling over the collar of his shirt. He filled the hallway in such an eerily familiar way.

“Honey?” he called again.

Tina watched him from the bottom of the stairs as he turned a corner.

There was a shriek, and Tina’s stomach dropped. The man started yelling.

There was another male voice. Was this one familiar, too, or was she imagining things?

“You fucking bitch!” the man yelled.

The woman shrieked again. “No! No, Damien, please no, don’t! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Glass breaking. There was the sound of a struggle. Of a punch. All of the voices and noise were muffled. It was as if Tina were underwater, unable to breach the surface and listen to each and every word that was being hurled like a knife.

She watched in terror as two bodies rolled into the hallway. One naked, and one fully clothed. A woman clutching a sheet to her chest stood behind them. Her face was obscured. Tina couldn’t make out any of her features from a distance, but one thing was certain. She was still screaming.

Then Damien got to his feet and grabbed her wrist. He dragged her down the hallway, ignoring her cries for forgiveness.

Tina was desperate to get a good look at his face, to see the man who had been with her so intimately in his afterlife.

She wanted to understand whether or not he was someone that she would ever want to know if he were alive, as twisted and fucked-up as that sounded.

“Get out of my house, you bitch. Whore!” His words were clipped and quick, barely audible in the fuzzy, dreamlike vision.

“No, Damien, stop, stop, stop. I’m sorry, please!”

He pressed the woman up against the hallway wall, and Tina could almost make out his profile from the angle he stood and her position at the base of the stairs.

“Do I not fuck you good enough? You have to go to that fuckwit pretty boy? You want me to fuck you good? Is that what you need? Let’s show him how I fuck you. ”

Tina pressed a hand against her mouth when she saw him reach between them and unbuckle his belt. The woman struggled as he held her immobile with a hand against her throat. She was still obscured. A mirage.

“No!” the woman screamed.

That’s when the naked man, who was still faceless, blurry, and unrecognizable to her, charged Damien. There was a struggle, the two of them at the top of the stairs. Then Damien got to his feet, and before Tina could scream out a warning, the naked man and woman shoved him.

He fell backwards down the stairs, the sound of a sickening crunch of bone. Another shriek from the woman.

Tina watched in horror as he flipped like a pancake, his neck cracking and bending at an unnatural angle. She scrambled back until she hit a wall, then sunk to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest. Her heart was in her throat.

The body landed at the base of the stairs, and for the first time, she was able to see the man’s face.

Damien Sutter’s lifeless eyes stared back at her.

Derrick’s twin was murdered.

This time she was the one who screamed.