Hauling a full laundry basket as
she passed the closed door to the guest room, Karen paused, argued with herself
briefly, then set down the basket and cracked open the door. The blinds were
pulled down, the bed was unmade and clothes lay in several piles. She inhaled
noxious cigarette fumes as she opened the door wider and stepped across the
threshold, immediately feeling in need of a shower. She glanced around and was
about to leave when her eye landed on what looked like a leather-bound journal
resting near the edge of the dresser. Picking it up and flipping through the
pages, she stopped on a page and began reading.
Alicia
May 23, 2012
Long, straight dark brown hair.
Pretty, but wore too much eye makeup. Twenty-one according to ID. Lonely and
unfulfilled like all the rest. Had to do it at her apartment, which I never
like, but there was no other choice. She was still fun.
She turned to another entry.
Megan
August 5, 2012
Shoulder length sandy blond. Petite
with nice breasts. Swore too much and had a tattoo of an old boyfriend’s name.
Thought I wanted to hear her boring life story. A screamer.
A car door slammed shut somewhere
outside. Heart fluttering, Karen put the diary back where it was and stepped
out of the room closing the door quietly behind her. She could hear the men
walking through the kitchen, and they all met at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, guys,” said Karen, trying to
keep her voice from quivering. “Have a good time?”
She caught them exchanging a subtle
glance. Ian smiled. “Yeah, it was fine.” They both had their hands in their
coat pockets.
“You’ve got a nice downtown,” added
Mike. “Clean and safe looking.”
Karen wasn’t sure how to take that
comment, so she just smiled and made her way around the men and back to the
laundry room. Ian and Mike went upstairs and into the spare bedroom.
Later that evening, as she and Ian
lay in bed reading, Karen set down her iPad. “Ian, I need to talk to you about
something.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“No. I went into the spare bedroom
to see if I needed to pick up or throw anything out and I…I came across Mike’s journal.
I know it’s uncool to check out someone’s diary, but well, I did it anyway.”
Ian looked at her. “You were
messing around in his private stuff?”
“It’s our house and it was just the
journal. That’s all. But Ian, it had page after page of women’s names, their physical
descriptions and then, ick, stuff about the sex they had. But I got the
feeling…I don’t know, there was something else going on there.”
“What are you talking about? So the
guy has a little brown book. What does that prove?”
“But he didn’t have phone numbers
or addresses or emails. Not even last names. That would have been more normal.
These seemed more like…conquests. You know?”
“No.”
“They sound more like things than
people.”
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