Sooner or later, I’m going to have to get Amber out of here. Away from prying eyes.
Kicking off her running shoes, she tiptoes over to the closet in the hallway and then she rummages through it for a good while, until she finally pulls out a shoebox.
It’s wrapped with floral paper, looking like the kind of thing a young girl would keep her diary in. That’s what she wants to show me?
“In the kitchen,” she murmurs and I follow and she puts the box on the table. Taking a deep breath and watching me with wary eyes, she opens the box and I freeze.
There they are. What I’ve been looking for. The thing I’ve searched her whole house after.
Letters.
All the letters that I wrote to her. She read them, she even kept them.
The notion makes me so hard, my legs go numb, my muscles straining and my mouth goes dry. But I hide my reaction to her, pretending to be aloof.
“This is what I wanted you to see,” she says, picking up the letters and she spreads them over the table. Her eyes are a little feverish, her hands trembling. “I started getting them a couple of months of ago and they’re pretty...” she bites her lip, “intense.”
My eyes go to hers, her own ones not revealing how she feels about the intensity. “Is that good or bad?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she whispers, her fingers sliding over one of the envelopes. “The tone in them is so extreme. There’s been times when I’ve read them that I’ve started trembling and then I can’t stop for hours.”
I immediately start imagining her doing that. Reading those letters, then climbing up into her bed, wearing only underwear and riding the waves that my words give her.
“I have no idea who’s writing them, he signs them of sayingThe Admirerand that’s it.”
The one who’s writing them is standing in her kitchen. And he was allowed in freely. He was welcomed.
“He sends me roses too. Two dozen, red ones after every concert.”
“And you think it was The Admirer who chased after you in the forest?” I say in a soft voice.
She looks at me helplessly. “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you think that’s farfetched?”
I clear my throat. “I don’t think that whoever wrote those letters would want to scare you.”
“Really?” she shrugs, rubbing her arms, picking up a letter. “But listen to what some of them say.”
Amber reads me a couple of lines and I remember writing them, my need for her putting me in a trance , destroying me and nourishing me at the same time.
When she finishes reading, she looks at me with glassy eyes. “That’s not normal, right? Normal people don’t think like that. They don’t feel those things, The Admirer feels.”
“Maybe not,” is all I reply, my voice strained and she shudders, her lower lip trembling.
“I don’t know why I kept them. I shouldn’t have.”
My fists clench. “Why did you? Why didn’t you throw them away?”
Her shoulders shrug frailly. “When I feel bad, I read them. They pull me up. His words nourish me.”
Her eyes fill with tears. “But it feels like they could destroy me too.”
Never! I heatedly yank her to my chest and she bursts out into tears. Never destroy. Only keep. And love and cherish in the only way that I can. Her whole body is on edge, her tears sipping through my clothes and a roaring wave of self-hate that I’ve never felt before, cuts in me.
How the fuck could I have written her those words? I should have taken more care, should have known they were going to be too much for her.
“I will burn those letters for you,” I murmur against her hair, “Rip them in pieces one by one.”
“N...no,” she stutters, sounding a little alarmed, “that’s not why I’m crying.”