Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

The last part had probably been bullshit, but it had made her feel good nonetheless.

It was sometimes frustrating – and more than a little weird – to have her ex as a roommate, but they made it work, more or less. And while she wanted him to get back on his feet and leave, she knew she’d miss him when he was gone.

She sighed.

“Girl, you ought to have your head examined.”

She thought of the goat-eyed woman and the shadow thing she’d seen lurking in FoodSaver’s parking lot and regretted her choice of words.

Chapter Two

She got ready for bed, a process that normally took half an hour, but she hurried and was done in fifteen minutes. She usually slept in her panties and an oversized T-shirt, and tonight she had on a XXL red-and-gray OSU shirt so large it hung down to her knees. She’d only just gotten into bed and slid under the covers when her phone rang. She’d forgotten to turn the ringer off when she’d placed it on her nightstand, and she was tempted to ignore it, but what if it was important, maybe even an emergency?

“Fuck,” she muttered. She snatched the phone off the nightstand and answered it without checking the display to see who it was.

“Hello?”

“Hey, beautiful.”

It was Justin. She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, but now that she heard his voice, she was glad he’d called, and even more glad she’d chosen to answer.

“Hey yourself.”

“Sorry I didn’t call earlier. I just got home from work. We had a backlog of tests that needed to be done, and Arlene insisted the techs stay late tonight and get caught up. You know how she is when we get even a little bit behind.”

Arlene was Justin’s supervisor at BioChem Diagnostics, and while Lori had never met her, she’d heard Justin complain about the woman on numerous occasions.

Lori was tempted to tell Justin everything that had happened to her that night, but she was reluctant to talk about the goat-eyed woman, the shadow thing, and the old man in the Volvo. When you put all three together, they sounded outlandish, and Justin was too logical to accept the trifecta of weirdness she’d experienced tonight. And even if he were inclined to believe everything she said, she still didn’t want to talk about it, not yet. She wanted to try to forget it all, at least for now.

A few weeks after she and Larry had decided to be just friends, Lori had been ready to date again. She’d never tried a dating service before, but Reeny swore by them, since that’s how she’d met her husband, Charles, so Lori decided to give it a try. She researched which online dating services had the highest success rate in matching people, chose one, signed up to the service, and filled out a profile. When it came time to upload a photo, she couldn’t decide which one to use, so she’d ended up asking Larry to help her pick one – which was all kinds of weird. He told her to go with a picture of her that appeared on the PT practice’s website. In it, she was wearing her uniform and working with a patient. Don’t worry about privacy issues, Larry had said. We can blur the guy’s face. She was looking at the camera and smiling while she held the patient’s feet to the floor so he could do some sit-ups. It’s a good picture. You look really pretty in it, and it shows you’re a caring person.

She hadn’t been certain the photo was a good choice, but she decided to trust Larry’s opinion and uploaded it. She received her first message from a potential suitor within fifteen minutes. She received a lot of messages over the next few days, and while she’d been encouraged at first by the responses, they soon became overwhelming – and there were more than a few creepers in the mix. One guy asked if she would send him pictures of her feet, and another asked if she was into breast bondage. She hadn’t known that was a thing, and when she looked it up on the Internet she immediately regretted it. Not only did it not look like any fun, it looked like it hurt.

She was about to cancel her account and give up on the entire idea of online dating when she received a message from a man named Justin Nguyen. She almost didn’t open it, but she had a friend in middle school named Justin. His last name had been Reed, but he’d been a good kid, so she figured, what the hell. Maybe the universe was trying to tell her something. She opened the message, which was a friendly, polite one – no inquiries about which fetishes she might be into – so she checked out his profile. She liked what she saw, sent him a message, and they met for coffee several days later. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything, and she didn’t feel any immediate sexual attraction toward him. But he was nice and funny and smart, and unlike Larry, he seemed to have his shit together. She decided to go out with him a second time, then a third, and they’d been dating steadily ever since, coming up on seven months now. She still wasn’t sure she was in love with him, but she cared for him a great deal and she enjoyed his company, and that was enough for now.

“Want to have coffee tomorrow morning before work?” she asked. “My treat.”

They both worked in offices downtown, but their buildings were a couple of blocks apart. There was a Starbucks between them, and they’d often meet there around seven a.m., especially if they hadn’t seen each other the day before. They’d have coffee and breakfast – a scone for him, a piece of fruit or yogurt for her – and they’d chat about anything and everything, from work to world events.