Finding Alice (Alice Clark Series) by Andrea DiGiglio Page A

temporary time frame. We no longer had to be in the same room to feel each other’s presence. If I focused hard enough, I could hear his heart beating when he pulled into the driveway; feel his breath on my skin when he was gone; hear his voice, no matter how much space was between us, clear as if he was right there whispering directly into my ear.
    After the first kiss, it was like our souls began to intertwine; and when it became more than that, our souls fully intertwined and it felt as if we each took a piece of each other. I had never felt so connected to him, to anyone, as I did now. When he was gone, I always felt such a longing for his return. When he was there with me, we lay silently with his arms wrapped strongly around me in the still of the night; nothing could be greater than that. With all the good we had a chance to grasp, we both knew in the back of our minds that something was coming. I felt his concern like a fog, seeping into my lungs and weighing me down. Still, being with each other made us believe that somehow, we could survive whatever darkness was coming for us, together.
    We sat there at my rickety table working on our final papers for class, playing footsie like children. Sometimes I would switch and work on my final for my Art Medium class while he pretended to work on his paper, as if I couldn’t feel his eyes all over me.
    We lived off of coffee for the most part, though he seemed to be partial to breakfast. He would say, “Not eating breakfast is like wearing jeans to bed: wrong on so many levels.” When I woke up, my nostrils would flare with confusion over the new scents mixing in with the aroma of coffee beans and his own delicious smell. I’d found a new appreciation for breakfast and companionship. Just that morning, I’d had eggs Benedict for the first time and I had to say it came in a close second to his lips. All those times I felt I truly was meant to be alone, that it was safer for not only myself but for others, still taunted at me; but it was no more than a faint whisper of warning. I glanced over at him; he was lost in his train of thought, burying his pencil almost through his paper. I knew he felt my gaze the same as I did his. There was a laptop directly in front of him but he always said he liked the way it feels to write free-hand.
    “How is that coming along?” he finally asked.
    “I don’t even know. She has such high expectations from my previous work, but that was before…”
    “Before us?” I nodded, followed by a sigh of frustration. His forehead wrinkled and I knew he was thinking carefully about his next statement. “Too bad you can’t chop that wall down in your spare room. Maybe she would accept photographs?”
    “What are you talking about?” No sooner than the words left my lips did a flash of my drunken day of recovery scraping charcoal across my wall whiz through my mind. “Oh, I haven’t even been in there since that day. I completely forgot. Wait, you went in there?”
    “No. You asked, or should I say, told me not to. I only saw an unusual paint job through the crack of the door. Why don’t we check it out?” He grabbed my hand, bringing it up to his mouth for a gentle kiss that looked more like asking for forgiveness; or at least that’s what I thought asking for forgiveness would look like. By the time I went to say no, he already had his hand on the doorknob, opening it to a room that once felt empty but bright. My eyes widened as I gasped in shock at the giant mural coating my wall. “I thought you didn’t see his face?” his voice trembled as he asked.
    “I didn’t.” The words barely trickled off of my lips. Regardless, there he was: my attacker’s eerie, inhuman face staring back at me. The skin where the bruises once were ached as if that horrible night happened only yesterday. I turned away, hoping it would numb the pain; it didn’t. The image stayed burnt in my mind. The attacker wore a chiseled jaw line, not elegant