She sat there, huddled in her black hoodie with her nose buried in her wool scarf. Sitting on the porch steps, she shivered as police swarmed through her house. Neighboring lights were flickering on, and she could see curious faces peering through the far away windows to see why three cop cars were parked on her driveway, the red and blue lights blazing as they swirled in circles. Whatever. Fuck them. People clearly had nothing better to do in this boring, dull town than watch her shamble of a life fall further into shambles. She still wasn’t going to show them that she was rattled in any way. Sure, she was more than shaken, but they didn’t need to know that.
            In an earth shattering record, she had called on the cops twice in one week. It took a lot to impress her, but damn she’d just impressed herself.

She had a hard time sleeping that night. Every time she closed her eyes, her thoughts immediately dipped into the gutter. Or rather, of the guttural sensations that had burned through her mere hours prior.
            She’d tried to busy herself when she’d gotten home. She’d made a grocery list, went for a walk, slept, tried to figure out if she could afford Wi-Fi, and had even attempted to cook something with the minimal food she had rotting away in the fridge. Yet every single time she had a moment to herself, her stomach clenched and her throat began to moisten.

Emma busied herself in his expansive backyard so that she didn’t have to see him on his way out, appreciative of the cool air to busy her mind as she impulsively went over the past thirty minutes in her head. Hunter was definitely playing with her. There was no doubting that anymore. The causal, lazy glances up and down her body, the whispering in her ear (really, who did that?) and the devilish grins. She didn’t understand what he wanted from her but whatever it was, she wasn’t willing to participate.  

 You have one new voice message. To play your messages, press 1. To delete you messages, press 2. To hear your greeting press 3…  

Emma pressed 1 as she dropped onto the stool by the kitchen counter, feeling exhausted to the core. She was home at 4PM, feeling absolutely exhausted, after having scrubbed Hunter’s entire house, grocerying for him, and picking up his dry cleaning. She was supposed to have had dinner ready for him too, but it was 3.30PM before she knew it and she wasn’t getting paid for overtime. She was sure she’d hear about it tomorrow. Whatever. She’d left before he had come home and had slipped his key under his doormat. Pretty basic protocol for a police officer.
The voicemail played; it was of a man who was clearly about the hit the bucket. He spoke slowly, and carefully.

Emma spent most of the night cleaning up broken glass from the floor with a broom and dustpan that she found in a cabinet under the sink, lamenting all the mistakes and regrets that she’d had in life as she did so. She couldn’t even begin to deal with the congestion of emotions that were churning inside of her, so she chose to focus on cleaning and regretting basically every wrong turn she’d taken in life to bring her to this moment here today.

She waited at the foot of her door for a good ten minutes, hugging her knees to her chest as she sat in paralyzed silence. She didn’t hear any other noises, but that might have been because her heart was pounding so hard that all she could hear was the slamming of each heartbeat against her blood stream. Her cellphone had died mere moments after she had called the station, so she wasn’t even sure if anybody was on her way. She took a steady breath, and tried to calm her nerves. She’d wait another ten minutes to make sure that whoever had been in here was gone, before finding some sort of weapon to brandish and go downstairs with.

Emma found the station easily enough. It was a gated two-story building at the end of Peddington’s Crossing, with two cop cars parked on the driveway outside. A chilly breeze circled her ankles, brushing away the orange and red leaves that loitered on the ground.
            She stood at the fence, surveying the entrance and the one daughter and mom loitering outside, deciding whether or not they should go in. At the sight of her; they paused, stared for a moment, and then quickly ushered into the building.
            With every passing minute in this God forsaken town, she was beginning to feel more and more out of place. She took a deep breath, and tried to release the pent up tension in her shoulders, reminding herself that she only had to stay here until she had her shit together. Then she could leave. It didn’t matter that she was clearly an outsider – she was going to be gone soon enough anyway.

The house was cozy, in an extremely ‘welcome to my man-cave’ sort of way.  The floors were planked with hardwood, with a dark rug spread in front of the fireplace in the living room - which was where he led her directly. There was a grey sofa, a mahogany rocking chair and minimalistic décor furnishing the area. A few frames of what she supposed were family lined the fireplace mantle, cabinets with old dining sets catching dust beside a curtained window. The door towards the far-end was left ajar, giving a peek of the kitchen and the backyard that lay beneath. The staircase to the upper floors was perched towards her far left. The place sort of said a lot about him while saying nothing at all. He kept things simple, uncomplicated and uncluttered, which sort of put him directly at odds with her as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d properly organized her room back home, before she’d been evicted that was.