I fell backwards onto the couch, opening the magazine in my hand to a random page as I did so. My eyes scanned over some article about keeping your man happy or something along the lines of that. I could hear Zach jumping on and off his bed upstairs, the thuds echoing through the whole house.
“Zach! Knock it off! You’re going to hurt yourself!” I rolled my eyes as the noise stopped for a second and then started up again. My cell phone vibrated next to me and I quickly picked it up, almost dropping it in the process. I flipped it open and smiled at the text from Casey saying that her and Kristi were on their way.
It wasn’t long before I heard a knock on the front door. I stumbled off the couch and out into the entry way. I pressed my face to the door, peeking out the eye-hole in the door just to make sure that it wasn’t a solicitor. I couldn’t see anything and a smile spread across my mouth.
I pulled the door open just in time to see Kristi moving her hand away from the eye-hole. She grinned up at me and smacked my arm.
“What took ya so long?” The two of them walked into my house and I let the door swing shut behind them. Kristi immediately made her way towards the kitchen. “Please tell me you have something to snack on. I am starving.”
* * *
We had holed ourselves up in my room when my mom finally came home. She yelled up the stairs for us to come down and help with dinner. Casey and Kristi followed me downstairs, chattering on about something that we had seen on TV earlier. I slid into the kitchen and leaned on the island in the middle of the room.
“What are we having for dinner?” Just as I asked, I heard the front door open and close again. My eyebrows pushed together and my mind jumped straight to Carson. He was probably helping my mom carry in the groceries. I rolled my eyes a little as my mom looked over my shoulder and smiled. I was about to make a snide remark when I felt someone behind me and then a tanned arm brushed up against me as he put a bag on the counter.
My face flushed with colour, sending my temperature through the roof. I turned a little only to find myself face to face with Vincent. He smiled at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he moved away and went to go talk to my mom. Kristi and Casey quickly found their places at my side and started nudging me and whispering in my ears.
“Who is that?” Casey giggled a little when Vincent looked over in our direction and I felt my face heat up even more. Kristi said something else to me, but I wasn’t listening at that point.
* * *
Vincent stayed to help out with making dinner. Which made things awkward. Kristi kept wiggling her eyebrows at me whenever he turned away from us to do something, and Casey wouldn’t stop giggling like a little girl. I could barely mumble out responses when he asked me something. There was more than one moment when he went to hand me something and his fingers would linger on mine for a moment too long, or he would reach over me and I could feel his body heat on my back. I just about lost my mind.
My mom didn’t even seem to notice that all of this was going on in the same room as her. She had always been a little oblivious to things like this though, so I wasn’t surprised. Vincent didn’t stay for dinner, he said that he had made plans already. When my mom left the room to walk him to the door, my friends practically cornered me.
“Okay, spill it. Who’s the hottie?” Kristi grinned at me as I glanced around the room to keep from making eye contact with either of them.
“He is quite,” Casey paused for a moment to let out another giggle, “attractive.” Kristi started poking fun at Casey for agreeing with her and the two seemed to forget that they were trying to interrogate me. I sighed and slumped against the counter behind me. “Seriously though,” Casey swatted Kristi’s hands away from her, “who is he? Is he like your mom’s boyfriend or something?”
“Kudos to your mom if she can snag a hottie—tottie like that. I mean, damn.” Kristi dragged the word out longer than she needed to.
“He’s not her boyfriend.” I scrunched my nose up at the idea of my mom dating someone as young as Vincent. “He’s our neighbor.” They were quiet for a moment, and then Kristi grabbed my face—squishing my cheeks between her hands.
“You’ve been holding out on us! When were you planning on telling us that you had the epitome of sex living next door to you? Geez, Molly.”
“I just told you.” My voice was distorted because Kristi had begun to push my cheeks towards each other. I pulled on her wrists to get her to let go of my face. “Why does it matter if he’s hot or not though? He’s still too old for any of us.” Casey flicked one of her eyebrows up and folded her arms over her chest.
“Like that’s stopped you before.” I felt my ears start to burn with blood and I looked away from her.
“Ooh, yeah. What was that guy’s name again? Like James or something?” Kristi wiggled her eyebrows at me. “He was cute too. What was the age gap between you two back then? Like five years or something?” My gaze shot over to Kristi and I frowned.
“That was a one time thing.” I heard the front door click shut and I glanced out of the kitchen to see my mom coming back. “It doesn’t matter though, because nothing is going on with Vincent and I. Now shush, my mom is coming back.”
* * *
Dinner passed uneventfully, with just the usual conversation. My mom caught herself up on what was going on with Kristi and Casey’s families, talked about school, boring topics like those. After everyone finished eating, we quickly retreated to my room again. I half dreaded being alone with those two though, I knew that they were going to want to talk about Vincent. Somehow, I knew that they would manage to get it out of me that we had kissed the other night.
I shut my door with a sigh and looked up to find Casey smiling at me and Kristi staring at me with a rather creepy grin on her face.
“Oh god, what now?”
“Something is going on between you two.” Casey nodded in agreement to Kristi’s statement. My cheeks burned a little and I shook my head.
“There isn’t. I don’t know what would even give you that idea.”
“Don’t deny it, Molly. You’re face says it all. You’ve practically turned into a tomato at this point. And then the whole time we were in the kitchen, Vincent kept touching you.” Kristi came up behind me and ran her fingers along my arm. I shuddered and smacked her hand away. Casey laughed a little, but stopped when I looked over at her.
“What? It’s true, he was going out of his way to be around you. It’s so obvious that something is going on with you two.” Casey suppressed a smile as I shook my head.
“Look, I’m telling you the truth, nothing is going on. Can we just drop this? Please?” They both thought for a moment as they made themselves comfortable on my floor.
“Which house does he live in? Is it the one across the street?” Kristi raised her eyebrows and folded her hands under her chin. I let out an exaggerated sigh and sat down on the floor with them, leaning back against my bed.
“The old Victorian next door.” I gestured towards the window that overlooked the house. They looked over at the window and then at each other, before returning their gazes to me.
“No way.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I raised an eyebrow and shook my head. “He really lives in that house?”
“That is what I said.” They just stared at me in disbelief. I assumed that their reaction had something to do with the house’s reputation. I had heard something about it when I first moved here, but it really didn’t sound all that bad.
“I can’t believe someone actually moved in there. That house has been empty for like twenty years or something.” Casey glanced between Kristi and I. “I’m surprised that they managed to sell it despite it’s history.”
“Are you talking about how they found a couple of kidnapped girls in there a while back?” I pushed my eyebrows together. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like something that would make it hard to sell a house.”
“Seriously?” Kristi gaped at me for a moment before leaning forward a little, “Are you seriously sitting here and telling us that you have lived next door to this house for like a year now and you don’t even know the story behind it?”
“That’s not the story behind it? But that’s what I heard.”
“That’s only part of it. Some really terrible things went on in that house, Molly.” Casey pushed her eyebrows together and stared out the window before turning back to me. “They did find a few girls that had gone missing, but they weren’t alive when the cops searched the house. They were supposedly in pretty bad shape too, like they had been tortured while they were being kept in that house.”
“Yeah,” Kristi interrupted, “there was this huge ordeal about it. People wanted to tear the house down, but the cops wouldn’t allow it. There was one girl’s body that they still hadn’t found. And the guy who lived there had vanished too. They searched the house for days but still couldn’t find anything.
A few months later, the same thing started happening again. Girls were going missing. Obviously the first place they looked was the house. And guess what? They found them. Thankfully, they were alive this time, but they were still pretty beat up. The guy who owned the house was found a while later. Someone reported hearing some weird noises from the house and when the cops showed up, he fell out of the top floor window.”
“There’s more to the story that just that though,” Casey looked over at Kristi for a moment, “when the cops went back and looked through all the old records, there were a lot of cases that involved that house, whether it was just the resident being involved somehow or the bodies turned up in the house. And then there was that one girl who they never found. They think that the guy took her somewhere out of town when the cops found those dead girls, and they really never found her.”
“Wait,” I furrowed my brow, a little confused, “how did all of this stuff just keep happening? I mean, why not just tear the house down if it was the center of all these problems?”
“After the cops cleared the house, they had planned to tear it down. Someone sent in a lot of money to the city, anonymously, to keep the house up though.”
“And they just took the money and kept the house? That’s so stupid.” I looked over at the window. “Why would Vincent move into a house that has a history like that?”
“That’s what I want to know.” Kristi rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “He seems more like the fancy condo kinda guy, not a creepy ass old house guy.” The room fell silent for a while. I let all this new information sink in. At least now I felt like my feelings about the house could be justified. It had a bad past, and that would totally explain why it gave me the creeps. You didn’t even have to know about what went on in there to be able to tell something was off about it.
“So,” Casey spoke and I let my gaze flicker over to her, “how amazing is Vincent at kissing?” She raised her eyebrows as Kristi rolled over and backed the question up by making stupid faces at me.
“Oh my god.” I grabbed a pillow off my bed and threw it at them.
