Intense

“I need some help.”

I grabbed a pen and asked exactly what we could do. Meanwhile, Easton disappeared back into his back room slash apartment, probably to take a nap.

The woman sounded young and angry. She said she thought her husband was cheating on her, probably with someone from work. We made an appointment for her to stop by and finalize the price, and then I hung up.

“Got a client,” I called out.

“Cheating husband?” he grunted from the other room.

“How’d you know?”

“It’s always a cheating husband.” I looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, his shirt off.

I gaped. His tattoos covered his muscular body, all ripped and perfect.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going to take a shower.”

“Okay. Can you keep some clothes on while I’m here at least?”

“No.” He walked over to the door, carrying shower supplies and a towel. “Do me a favor. Clean up that filing cabinet while I’m gone.”

I frowned at him. “I thought you told me not to do that.”

“I had some things you weren’t supposed to see in there. It’s fine now.”

Some things I wasn’t supposed to see? That was a bit mysterious.

“What, are they like classified FBI files?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay. Have a good shower, boss.”

“I’ll be thinking of you.” He smirked as he opened the door and was gone.

What a frustrating asshole. Suddenly he wanted me to reorganize for him when earlier he had freaked out about it?

And of course he was walking around without a shirt even though it was completely wrong. Sure, I wasn’t exactly dressing conservatively to see him, but still. It was part of my job to be a distraction, at least for the other people around us. That’s what he said, anyway.

I got up from the desk and walked over to the cabinet, sliding it open. As I got to work, I couldn’t help but dwell on that last comment he had made. I imagined his hand wrapped around his thick cock, stroking himself slowly as the water covered his ripped body. He’d grunt my name as he came, thick spools of cum dropping onto the shower floor.

I shook my head, my heart racing. What was wrong with me? I was having dirty thoughts about my stepbrother.

Instead, I lost myself in the job of reorganizing his absolutely chaotic files.

I kicked my feet up on the desk and read the paper.

We’d been in his office for hours. Nobody had called; nobody had come in. He’d come back from the shower and had gone straight back into his living space, leaving me to finish filing on my own.

I got through the whole cabinet before lunch. After that, I was bored as hell. I could look at Facebook for only so long before I wanted to literally tear my eyes out. I mean, how many selfies was I supposed to like? I was super into baby pics and cute dogs—bonus points if the babies were with the cute dogs—but I couldn’t do that all day.

So I decided to enrich myself with the newspaper. I flipped through the flimsy pages, skimming the typical bad stuff.

But one headline caught my eyes. “Handless Hooker Found in Ditch,” it said, and it was the sort of salacious thing you rarely read about in a place like Mishawaka.

I skimmed the article. The body was found not too far away, closer to Chicago than to our town, but still out in the country. Apparently the body was only a few days old. The girl was young and pretty, and probably a prostitute, though they hadn’t identified her yet.

Then came the gruesome details. I almost couldn’t read about it. Apparently she had been sexually assaulted and beaten. But the weirdest thing was, her fingers had all been chopped off. She was missing some toes, but not all of them, and her tongue was cut out as well.

The police said they had no leads yet. It was all pretty messed up. How could someone do that to someone else? I knew evil existed in the world, but it was always at a remove. Always through the news. But for some reason, it was really hitting me hard, that somebody would do something so horrible to another human being.

“What’s up?”

I looked up, startled. “Nothing,” I said.

“Your face looks white.”

“It’s just this article.”

He reached out his hand. “Let me see.”

I gave him the paper and he began to read. “It’s pretty messed up. I was just thinking that it’s hard to imagine another person could do something like this. I don’t know, for some reason it was just hitting me hard, you know?” I paused, noticing the look on Easton’s face. “Are you okay?”

He glanced up at me, and I’d never forget the look in his eyes. It was haunted, dark and deep, like he was seeing something he never expected to see, something more terrible than I could understand.