CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He pulled up outside his best friend’s house and carefully parked the van, rolling to a gentle stop and applying the handbrake. No squeal of tires or brakes, no drama. He didn’t want any of the neighbors to notice him, after all.
Not that they likely would even if he held a one-man parade down the middle of the street.
Well, it was always nice to visit, anyway. That was the great thing about having a best friend. Sometimes you didn’t even have to talk or do anything together. You could just sit together in silence, and that was enough.
It was that way with all kinds of relationships, really, once you got close enough to someone. That was how you knew that you really had a great relationship. Just being able to be together, not even having to acknowledge it.
He glanced into the back of the van, using the light from the streetlights positioned a few cars away in either direction to guide him. There was no point in putting on the interior light – no, that could be disruptive for his friend, and he didn’t want that. He wasn’t the type to be intrusive. He liked it best when everyone could do their own thing, without someone getting in their way. It was more comfortable like that, wasn’t it?
He checked everything was where it should be in the back of the van. Yes, everything was present and correct. Nothing had moved while he was driving, which was because he was a very careful driver. You had to take good care of your things. Keep them clean and tidy, keep everything in its place, make sure that you didn’t ruin or damage anything. Unless you had to. Unless that was the only way to keep it safe in the long run, in the ways that really mattered.
He reached out a gloved hand and ran it over the arm of the mannequin tenderly, lovingly. It was all ready. That was going to be the best possible gift for his best friend. He’d prepared it so well. All he had to do now was wait for an opportunity to present it to him. It wasn’t the kind of gift you could just give on the fly, after all. It had to be the right moment. The kind of moment that would make it all the more special.
He looked up through the window, right into the house opposite. The house where his best friend was. Ah, and there he was! Sitting on the sofa, just waiting for him! He allowed himself to relax in his seat, shifting his legs and laying his hand down on the side of the seat to adopt the same pose. That was what people did when they felt a deep mental connection – they moved in the same ways.
His best friend laughed, soundlessly through this distance, his eyes fixed on the screen.
He sat up straighter in his seat in the van, frowning. He was laughing at something on the television. He hadn’t started the movie without his best friend, had he?
It looked like he had.
He wound down his window and frowned, pausing, straining his ears. The front window of the house was open just a tiny amount, letting in some fresh air. And…
Yes! He was watching the movie already! He’d started before his best friend arrived!
Wasn’t that rude?
But best friends should forgive each other – right?
He wrestled with the dilemma, unsure what to do, with no one to guide him.
***
Xavier Perez reached over for his beer and took a sip, still shaking his head and chuckling about the last scene. Man, what a doozie. This was a great film. He’d made a good choice.
It was nice to really take the weight off – not just his feet, but his mind. It had been another long day at work in a string of long days at work, and coming home to an empty house with no hope of a visitor really sucked. He was used to it, but it still sucked. The key was just distracting yourself with enough entertainment that you stopped noticing how alone you were.
He put the beer down and chuckled again, appreciating another of the jokes. Yeah, there was nothing like a good comedy to put you at ease, help you relax from all the tension of the day. You could forget about that stupid, entitled customer, or that coworker who just wouldn’t let anything go, no matter how petty. And Xavi had a stinker of a day to forget. It was good to kick back with a beer.
He thought briefly about dinner. What was he going to make? But, no, he was too tired to cook. And it was always a drag, cooking for one. It felt like way too much effort. What was he going to do except eat it and leave no trace or evidence it had ever existed, no matter how delicious or well-plated it was? A waste of time. He could just grab one of those TV dinners out of the freezer and heat it up and have done with. Maybe they didn’t taste as good as the real thing, but at least they were easy.
He reached for the volume control and turned it up a little more, making it more comfortable for his ears. He could swear he was starting to go deaf. It seemed like every month he needed to turn the TV speakers up a little louder. Or maybe it was just the kind of content. He’d read something at some time about how a lot of movies were produced with optimization for the theater, not the home, and that could make the sound kind of muddy. Maybe it was just producers not doing their jobs properly, not making it easy for people like him who didn’t have anybody to go to the theater with.
Ah, whatever. He took another drink of his beer. There was a sound somewhere in the house, but he’d lived on his own for long enough to know that houses made weird noises sometimes. You just had to ignore it. He hit the volume control on the TV one more time – if he was still hearing house creaks, then maybe he hadn’t turned it up as high as he thought.
“Ah, man!” he exclaimed out loud, grinning at one of the scenes. What an awkward moment. Oh, he could feel the cringe. How awful it would be to be in that kind of situation! He found himself chuckling out loud again, focused on the screen and the action, ignoring the annoying pull of a creak of the floorboards right behind where he was sitting, the kind of noise that the house always made and there was never anyone there when he turned to –
An explosion of pain hit the back of his head, so unexpected and fast that he had no idea what was happening, only that his head hurt and it hadn’t hurt a second ago, that he wasn’t looking at the movie anymore. Hadn’t there been a movie? But now there was no movie, and he didn’t understand how someone could have moved the screen of his TV so fast without him noticing – and then he realized, no, no, it wasn’t the TV that moved, it was him.
He was on the floor. Yeah, the floor – he could feel the carpet under his hand, and the ceiling was up above him. He had moved somehow – his brain started to connect – the pain in the back of his head must have moved him – some kind of force – some kind of hit…
Something hit him over the back of the head.
Xavi blinked his eyes, the only thing he could figure out how to move, slowly starting to gain some consciousness about what was happening around him. A blow to the back of the head. The creaking. There must be someone else in the house. Someone –
Someone who wanted to hurt him again?