EllieMy books just laid there, on the floor, not in any order. I had shelves without organization, leaving gaps where I should have figured something else out. I didn’t want to tell Mom we couldn’t leave because I had to sort out my crazy person brain, so I’d walked away. I left, with my mind focused on the fact that my books could have been tipping over. If they tipped over, then it could have caused a massive crash. The weight would press down and everything could come falling over. My things would break, damaging the floor. Then people would come in and have to fix it, being in my space, getting their scent on things, looking around. They would be there, and I would have to watch them. What if they moved something else? What if something got broken so bad that I would have to move rooms while it got fixed? I grew up in that room. I couldn’t just live in another fucking room. I would wake up and it wouldn’t be the same, if I could even get to sleep. If I left that room, then I woul

EllieI woke up with my face against a pillow that didn’t smell like me. My head ached, but only barely. Something I could ignore with ease. I couldn’t ignore the sense that I didn’t belong where I slept.The curtains shut the light out and the door had been closed. Even so, I knew I hadn’t slept at home. Every bit of the bed just felt like Mordechai. I couldn’t really explain it. The apartment felt like him too. The exposed brick, the empty bedroom and the decorated living room. The details got to me. The things I saw in the paintings that he had hung up. Everything had water. Every single picture had some body of water in it. It gave me about a million questions to ask. First, I wanted to know I ended up this bed.I pushed the blankets off me and went to the window. One pull on the cord had the room lit up in seconds. I didn’t like looking at it, feeling like something was missing. No pictures of family. No books. No signs of things that might have brought him joy or passed the time

Ellie“Please don’t hate me, but I need to go away for a little while. I promise I’ll take you for a thousand walks when I get home.”Dandelion stared at me, doubtful even as he got pet behind the ears like he enjoyed best. I knew I would pay for abandoning him later. Probably in the form of him refusing to sleep with me for a week or so. At least Dad would spoil him rotten the whole time I was away.I had a new bag packed with a week of clothes, desperate that I wouldn’t need them all. Dad gave no indication of when this would end, which left me less than hopeful. We had no threat here. I couldn’t see why he would go this far.I spent more time than I should have fixing my books, putting back every single one of them. Even the ones I didn’t want. It needed to look the same as it had before. When I came home, I wanted everything preserved.Mordechai watched me fix the books and pack up more clothes. He kept looking at the closed door like he thought someone would try and come in. As i

EllieJerk. If he hadn’t lied to me, then I could have confided in him all the awful, twisty things in my guts that threatened to tear me apart. I couldn’t very well do that with him lying to me. It probably would have made me stupid. For all I knew, he had that phone for innocent reasons. Or, as innocent as a secret phone could be. He might have gotten the fake one when he got hired on by us, intent on keeping his private life in secret. I could understand that. Either I had no justification for the anger, or I needed to be afraid. I stared at the phone in my hand, sitting in the darkness of the living room. I’d been in my jammies for hours, and Mordechai had been sleeping since ten. The phone had a lock and needed a thumbprint to unlock it. When I peeked into his room, I saw that his hand hung over the edge of the bed. I could trust him, and assume he had the phone to keep us out of his life. A reasonable desire. But my instincts told me something different. I’d noticed things abo

EllieThe lightbulb burned out on my third flip of the switch. I cursed under my breath, knowing I would have to either tell Mordechai, or let it go. If I left it for him, he might have had some questions and it would have led to more talking. We could only talk so much before I finally snapped. I had enough wrong with me that I could have a whole conversation with a man about how he might have to kill me later on, so clearly, I didn’t know how the hell to behave. Also, there was the bit about him holding me against a wall and dry humping the fuck out of me. But I had to deal with a broken light.“Mordechai?” I called before I took a sip of my very Irish coffee. “A bulb in the bathroom is out.” It only took seconds before he showed up from his bedroom. Without saying a word, he grabbed a bulb from the hallway closet, changed the old one, and then walked out again. Ah, okay. He could press his dick against me for five very pleasant minutes, but he drew the line at looking me in the ey