I knew how much she loved that bakery, and I also knew which items she liked the most… and I’d taken the last three of them. What made it worse was that she hadn’t retaliated at all. Normally I’d have woken up to some flowers planted in my front garden, or a couple of bright pink fairy houses at least, sometimes some cat shit from the litter box - litter still attached - but not today.
Along with the guilt was a sense of panic, worry that I’d finally pushed her too far and she’d given up on me. See, what DB had said the day before wasn’t far from the truth. We were opposites in everything, and she took great pleasure in tormenting the hell out of me, but she made every day better for me. Even if it was a glare, my day went from shit to awesome, and the fantasies I’d had of the two of us had gotten me through the last year living opposite her and not being able to touch her.
Yeah, I wanted my classy princess of a neighbor badly, and had done from the day I’d met her. I wasn’t a native to Piersville, I’d moved here a couple of years ago from Oregon to become one of the deputies in Piersville Police Department. Six months later, Rose had moved home and had started working at the hospital as a nurse, moving in with her brother until she found the house opposite me and bought it.
I was good friends with her brother, thanks to my boss who’d introduced us, but like I’ve already mentioned – I had big issues with needles, so initially I’d been wary of the guy. It just didn’t seem normal to me to work with needles in a non-medical way. I mean, it was normal, but I couldn’t fathom working with needles in a non-medical way every day. All it had taken, though, was some shots and the story of what happened when I’d gotten my tattoo, and we became close friends. Yes, I had a tattoo, a necessary one, but I rarely told people the real story of how I got it.
My needle phobia had quickly made its way back to Rose after she’d moved here, and when the war began she started using it to her advantage. I’d lost count of the amount of times she’d dropped packages of the damn things on the floor in front of me, in my car, leaving them on my desk, and I’d even found some under my pillow. When I’d retaliated, she’d put up large signs about blood donation drives on her lawn – the ones with the syringe, needle, and bags of blood on them – and it had just gotten worse from there.
Throughout every second of that torment, though, she’d been the first thought I’d had every morning, the last one at night, and every second of her attention fed the burn inside me. Which was why waking up to nothing had everything inside of me turning to stone at that moment, scared that I’d finally pushed her too far.
Looking at the clock, I smiled when I noticed she’d be leaving for work in two minutes, and ran to get the garbage out of my kitchen to take it down to the trash can. She was too polite to ignore me completely, so all I’d have to do would be to get her attention for a second, smile at her, offer some mea culpas, and then I’d ask her out.
In the middle of the night, while I’d been mulling it all over, I’d kicked myself for being such a dick and not just doing what I really wanted to do. After enough tossing and turning, I’d decided that now was the time, and that I was done pussy footing around her. Things were going to change between us.
That’s why I was whistling as I walked down my drive to where the trash can was, dangling a bag with ten items at most in it, with my eyes fixed on her house the whole way. I didn’t even look down as I opened the lid… until the smell hit me that was, and then I looked into the garbage can and almost gagged.
On top of the two bags already in there were four shitty diapers, open and sunny side up. They could only have come from one baby, which was a shock in itself. How could something that smelled so bad, that looked so vile, have come from that precious baby girl? I wasn’t sure what unicorn shit looked like, probably like a rainbow with glitter coming out of it, but that’s what hers should have looked like. This? This was… I couldn’t even begin to describe it. And the smell, Jesus Christ, it was like a rotting body – a thought which made me gag again, and then throw the bag in my hand on top of it to hide the sight and try to minimize the stench. All it did was poof some more of it up into the air, and I only just slammed the lid on top of it before I turned and puked in my lovely old neighbor called Mrs. Potterson’s bright purple flowers that bordered my drive.