Along Came a Spider Ch. 04

So she walked a few feet to the right and swallowed hard before knocking on the door of 201B.

She could hear soft footsteps approaching from within the apartment, and she straightened up jerkily as she heard the latch click. Then the door was open, and a dark figure was standing in the doorway.

"Hey, neighbor," James said cheerfully, leaning with one arm against the frame. Although his smile was wide, there was contempt in his stare.

Tabitha glared at him. "Stop it."

"Well, isn't that what we are? Neighbors?"

"I don't care what we are. Luke is a good person, and it was awful of you to bully him like that," Tabitha snapped. His eyes narrowed, and she watched him with more than a little worry.

"Come inside," he finally bit out, his expression softening, and she jerked back. "Please," he added gently.

"I don't think that's a good idea..."

"I missed you." Tabitha gave him a helpless sort of look, and he rolled his eyes. "Come talk to me, Tabitha," he sighed. After several moments of hesitation, she finally bowed her head in acceptance. He stood to the side to allow her passage, and she crossed the threshold in slow steps, her shoulders jerking as he shut the door behind them. "Want a tour?"

"Sure," she muttered as she deposited her backpack onto the floor, making sure it stayed as close to the door as possible. She was in his apartment. Still, over to her right was a tidy little kitchen that was dripping with a mixed assortment of dish towels, and a couple of squashy-looking maroon sofas loomed in the living room in front of them. Normal-looking couches. Normal-looking taupe carpet. Normal-looking music posters in the living room: Rolling Stones, The Ramones, Nine Inch Nails. She moved a little further forward, and an enormous set of shelves came into view. "Are those all movies?" she asked, squinting at the rows upon rows of thin little boxes, and she heard him laugh behind her.

"I have a few."

"Have you watched them all?"

"Every single one. Like I said: I don't go out much. I always have to donate a few boxfuls before I move, but I try to keep my favorites." He moved in front of her, paused, then jerked his head towards the kitchen. "Come on in," he said, and she hunched her shoulders and padded forward behind him. "Do you want a drink? I don't have anything fancy, but there's water---oh, and I might have a couple beers left," he added, pausing in front of the fridge and prying the door open, but Tabitha quickly shook her head.

"I'm not thirsty. Really." Being alone with him was enough. The last thing she needed was any alcohol in her system. "But thanks."

"Suit yourself." His knees creaked when he rose back into a standing position. "Well. This is the kitchen," he continued, splaying out his fingers and gesturing to the room with a flourish, much in the way that women in tight-fitting ball gowns might introduce a new car on daytime TV.

"It's a very nice kitchen," Tabitha said with what was probably a rather unconvincing smile. "Look, I really think we should talk---"

"I promised you a tour first," he said, stalking back to her with his hands in his pockets. "Then we can talk."

Tabitha's jaw set. "I'm pretty sure all the apartments here look exactly the same."

"Then it'll be a quick tour." She gave him a glum look, but he rewarded her with an inviting smile. "We'll do the living room next." He moved next to her and put his hand on her shoulder to steer her onward, then gave her an odd look when she flinched. "You don't have to be so skittish," he told her, looking a little wounded. "If I was going to try to eat you, I would have done it on Sunday."

Tabitha jerked her head up at that, feeling horrified, but quickly composed herself when she saw the teasing smile on his lips. Still, she couldn't help but wonder if he was being...honest. "You did promise that you wouldn't," she said, playing along. Her voice came out a little hoarse.

James let out a little breath of a laugh. "That's right. I did." He gave her shoulder a gentle pull. "Right this way," he said, urging her forward with him. Tabitha followed his lead, trying to beat down her apprehension as they treaded onto the living room carpet. "TV. Couches. Movie rack. X Box," he said, pointing to each object accordingly as he spoke. Despite her anxiety, Tabitha frowned when he got to the X Box.

"I don't see any games," she said slowly.

"Ah. Well, I just got it," he explained, reaching up and scratching the back of his neck as he spoke. He seemed almost embarrassed. "I went looking for a DVD player, but I saw this on sale and bought it instead. I guess I just haven't gotten around to buying any." When Tabitha only stared at him, he lifted his shoulders in an awkward shrug. "Do you know any I should try?"

"...No. I don't really play."

"I don't, either. I just thought I would try it out. See what all the fuss was about."

"Alright."

James cleared his throat. "Anyway. The bathroom is right over here," he continued, pacing into the hallway behind the living room. Tabitha followed him reluctantly, her body tense as she entered the dark space. He didn't have his hall light on, and being alone with him in such a gloomy place made her nervous. Still, he seemed to keep his distance, and she glanced at the dimly-lit bathroom obediently when he gestured to it. "And..." They paused at the end of the hallway, and Tabitha waited nervously as he reached around the doorway and clicked on a lightswitch. "...bedroom."

A little room came into view with the new light---exactly the same layout at Tabitha's. There was a perfectly-made bed in the middle of the room, the deep brown headboard pressed up against the far wall. It had a navy blue comforter set on it, patterned with thick beige and white blocking on the pillowcases. It wouldn't have looked out of place in a college dormitory. His dresser and his nightstand were mismatched, but ordinary-looking enough. She was momentarily stunned by how little there was in the room. James could have put Buddhist monks to shame. But when she looked to the wall to the left, she saw a tall, dark bookcase, and on the shelves were---

"Oh my God," Tabitha said blankly, walking towards it with rigid, zombie-like steps, like she wasn't the one controlling her feet. She drew out one of the books from its place on the shelf, her hands caressing the crimson cover. The cardboard was showing through near the spine, and the edges of the cover were weathered down. The title was embossed on the spine in a gold, round typeface that might have been trendy during the early twentieth century, right around the rise of art nouveau. "The Scarlet Letter? This copy...I mean, it must be a hundred years old..."

"Family heirloom," she heard James offer from the doorway. "There's a few in there."

Tabitha gingerly pried the cover open. "Do you mind if I---"

She only had time to catch a glimpse of a couple looping lines of handwriting on the first page before a set of pale fingers descended to pluck the tome from her hands. She looked up just in time to see James close it with a prim snap. Her eyes went wide. It really was terrifying, the soundlessness of his footsteps. "You said you would lend me those books," he said wryly. The playfulness had faded from his expression, just a little. "Maybe we can swap sometime."

"...Sure," Tabitha murmured. The two of them stood with their eyes fixed on one another for several seconds, and then Tabitha cringed back as he reached over her to place the book back in its designated spot. Once it was back in place, he retreated slowly back to the foot of the bed, where he stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes cast towards the carpet. Tabitha clasped her fingers nervously in front of her. She knew what was coming next.

"Did I do something wrong?" Tabitha closed her eyes. There it was.

"What do you mean?" she said around her tongue, which had suddenly become very dry. God, that wasn't what she had wanted to say. She was supposed to deliver their sentence in a couple short, harsh lines and then be on her way. But now this was happening, and short of dashing out of his apartment, there didn't seem to be any way to stop it.

"You don't answer your door, I haven't seen you in the laundry room. I practically had to ambush you to get two words in tonight." He was fiddling slowly with the sleeve of an old black hoodie that was draped over his bedpost, but his eyes stayed fixed on her.

"It's only been three days."

"You live five feet away from me. Going three days without seeing each other in some way or another seems nearly impossible, unless it's intentional."

Tabitha set her jaw. "What do you want?" she blurted out. James's dark eyebrows rose up high into his hairline.

"That's an odd question," he said after a moment. He leaned one arm against the footboard, never taking his eyes from her. "Do you think I want something from you?"

"I can't tell," she said softly. "I can't figure you out."

"I suppose you were trying to, when you went with me to dinner," James muttered. Tabitha could hear the bitterness in his quiet voice. "What changed your mind?"

With the remaining dregs of her courage, Tabitha pried her eyes off of him and looked at his bookshelf instead. Letting him lurk outside of her peripheral vision was terrifying, but it was so much easier to lie to him when she was examining the embossed patterns on the old, fabric spines. "It's just...I don't think I'm ready for something like this," she tried, and the normality of those words seemed absurd. Her situation was starting to feel less like a horror movie and more like some bizarre after school special.

"But it meant something, didn't it? That kiss?" he asked, and when she turned to face him, he was a few steps closer.

"...Of course it did," she said.

"Then why have you been avoiding me? Was it a mistake?"

Tabitha studied the carpet before she looked back up at him. "I'm not sure," she said. And then, after a pause, "I don't think it was."

His lips were thinned with frustration, but she could hear the pain in his words. "You don't think it was."

"I don't know," she said suddenly. "Was it?" He watched her levelly for a few moments, and she regarded him with more than a little trepidation as he began to tread towards her.

"Don't make me a stranger," he murmured. Tabitha watched him with a glazed expression as he drew even closer. "I don't want to be a stranger."

"I barely even know you," Tabitha said weakly. A weird, weightless sensation had overtaken her, all the way from the tips of her toes to her fingers. Judging from the slack expression on James's face, he was just as unbalanced.

"But I want you to," he said.

And then he leaned in to kiss her. And she let him.

The moment his mouth skimmed over hers, her legs turned to jelly. She should have been prepared for this, she told herself sternly, even as she found herself leaning forward on her tiptoes to deepen the kiss. Her resolution was waning with every slow stroke of his lips, and when his hands encircled her waist to tug her closer, she was forced to acknowledge that she liked kissing James. Really liked kissing James.

"We should really talk about this," she gasped, but her fingers were clutching his shoulders, digging into the fabric of his shirt.

"Then talk about it," he slurred pleasantly against her mouth, and she opened her eyes to give him a pleading look. His gaze was drowsy and intense all at once, and she was so hopelessly transfixed by it that for several moments she found herself staring right back at him as he kissed her. But then her eyelids were sliding slowly shut, her muscles were oozing back into a compliant sort of putty, and his cool fingertips were flirting with the bottom hem of her sweater. When they slid beneath it, searching for her skin, her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Beneath all of the sweet, warm languor, however, there was a pang of panic reverberating in her chest. Lily wasn't waiting for her behind a door this time---wasn't capable of ending the moment with a single, convenient turn of a knob.

"This is just...it's happening so fast," she said, but she felt herself ache when he pulled away. His hands were still holding her waist, and she shuddered as the pads of his thumbs dragged over her stomach.

His mouth was open, flushed, inviting. She watched him with a growing feeling of helplessness as he spoke. "Do you want to stop?"

"...No, actually, I don't think I do," she explained breathlessly. He made a short sound of acknowledgement and dipped down to catch her lips again. Her sweater was bunching up around his wrists and sliding upwards with the ascent of his hands, higher and higher until she could feel the cool air wafting from his ceiling fan skimming her belly.

This didn't feel an awful lot like being seduced by a vampire. It felt almost precisely like that one time during her sophomore year, when she and Brennan from third period chemistry sneaked off to the area behind the football bleachers and explored each other in a daze all throughout their lunch hour.

She lifted her hands from his shoulders and let him slip her sweater over her head. It went fluttering to the floor, baring her torso to his touch, and he let out a hungry sort of noise before lowering his hands to examine the new expanse of skin. Even though she was shirtless in the dregs of autumn, somehow Tabitha felt too hot all of the sudden. She was trying to convince herself that this was all wrong---that being exposed to him like this should be making her feel frightened or at least a bit shy---but as the pads of his fingers ascended to skim the silky material of her bra, she was only wondering why her clothes couldn't come off faster so he could just touch her everywhere. After a moment of uncertainty, she let her fingers tease against the hem of his shirt, too. He didn't need nearly as much convincing. He drew away from her for just a bit; just long enough to hunch over and shrug his way out of his blue t-shirt. Tabitha tried not to gawk when he tossed it to the floor next to her sweater. The baggy layers of clothing he had perpetually draped over his figure had given her a preconceived visual of his body. She thought he would have been bonier, almost peaky, and some parts of him certainly were, (his collarbones, for instance, jutted out from his breast like the edges of a smooth blade), but the rest of him was all lean, pale muscle and winding sinew.

His broad shoulders hunched and his back stooped as he leaned back towards her. She watched him dizzily as he wound her back in his arms and pulled her back up against his hard torso. His skin was still a little cool. She could feel her own flesh burning against him, not unpleasantly. Her heart leapt a little in her chest when his hands slid down over the back of her jeans, filling her with breathless, reckless, silly jitters when each of them grabbed a handful of her ass and squeezed. A smile jerked its way onto her lips, and she saw the flash of teeth in his grin before he knelt back down to kiss her again, again, again. She was absentmindedly exploring the hills and valleys of sinew in his hips with her fingers, her thumbs tracing that clever 'v' that plunged beneath his jeans.

Suddenly, his fingers were between her shoulder blades, struggling with the hooks of her bra. Tabitha's eyes opened wide. He seemed to sense her trepidation, because he slowly severed his lips from hers and pressed his mouth against her jaw, just a fraction of an inch away from her right ear. She shivered. Spurred on, he trailed insubstantial little kisses all the way over to her earlobe.

"Please," he said softly, right into her ear. An army of goosebumps marched its way up her arms in response. With a flick of his fingers, the hooks came undone, and then he was unwinding the straps from her chest and tugging them away from her. He let her bra tumble to the floor and gazed down at her. His eyes burned as they drank her in. Instinctively, Tabitha turned pink and crossed her arms over her chest.

He moved his hands down to her hips, slipped his thumbs through her belt loops. Then, with a little jerk, he pulled her back up against him. One of his arms wound itself around her waist, and the other touched her cheek, stroking it in a comforting caress. His lips touched hers, once, twice, three times, and she felt her shoulders loosen reluctantly. Finally, with a feeling of abandon, she uncrossed her arms and entwined them around his neck. When she did, the hand on her cheek trailed down slowly, almost tentatively, to explore her breasts. His fingers squeezed the soft flesh, lifted and lowered it, eliciting some thick, wonderful, hot squirming sensation in the depths of her stomach. When he caught a nipple between two of his fingers and tugged, a surprised moan left her lips. She could only cling to his neck as he played with her, gingerly but shamelessly, relishing each of her shivers and every soft little sound that he drew from her lips.

Then his hands were travelling back down to her waist, and Tabitha's limbs shook as his fingers worked deftly at the fastening of her jeans. He slipped the button loose and jerked down her zipper, and a pleased little smile crept onto his lips as his fingers hooked back into the belt loops. With a tug, he slid them down to her thighs, and she shivered as his gaze crawled over her exposed hips. He plucked curiously at her crimson panties.

"Red suits you," he said.

"You think so?" she murmured. He kissed her, hard, and she wobbled dizzily in place.

"You're always so shy," he sighed against her mouth. "The red is sharp, like you really want me to see you. I like it." His hands guided her backwards, and excitement stole the breath from her lips as the back of her thighs hit the edge of the bed. She scooted up onto the mattress, shifting her legs until her jeans fell to the floor, and he inhaled shakily at the sight of her bared in front of him. He slipped his hand slowly down the front of her panties, and his lips parted in delight as his fingers glided against her wetness.

He toyed a little with her clit, sliding his slick fingers over and over it, and she clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle the cry that was building up in the back of her throat. Then, to her disappointment, he slipped them back down to trace the wet slit between her thighs. Heat stung fiercely at her flesh, and when she looked up at him, the wild expression on his face made her heart stop.

"I want you," he implored, softer than a whisper. That sentence sent a jolt coursing through her veins, and for several seconds, she was utterly paralyzed.

"I...ahh," she gasped as he pushed two fingers inside of her. He knelt over her and pressed his hand against her chest, and she obediently sank backwards onto the mattress. His fingers began to work slowly in and out of her, each thrust an eager promise. "James," she cried out softly. Her voice was pixie-small in the silence of his bedroom.

Her begging only seemed to stoke his fervor, and he let out a raspy sort of moan before dipping down to skim her torso with his lips. He reached her breasts, their rosy tips flushed and peaked from his attention, and she bit her lip hard as he kissed one, then drew it into his warm mouth. His fingers were still plunging slowly in and out of her, wracking her body with shudders, and her back arched in ecstasy as his teeth nibbled gently at the tender, plump tips of her nipples. Every inch of her flesh was feverish and over-sensitized. His fingers traced the line of her jaw and slowly tilted her chin to the side, and then his mouth was grazing the skin of her neck and trailing whispers of kisses up to her ear. His body was heavy on top of hers, pinning her to the bed.