On Tenterhooks by Greever Williams

hand closed over hers , as she picked up the handset . His ha n d felt like ice. On any other day, Sharon w ould have been grateful for the lunch hour in the office, alone to eat her lunch and peruse confidential student files or play online poker . But now, in this moment, she felt alone and vulnerable.
     
    “No, child,” he said, smiling, “t hat will not be necessary.” He placed his Bible on the counter and tapped a long curved finger on the plate of his oversized digital wristwatch. “I’ve got all the time in the world. Do you?” He flashed her a toothy smile and flicked his tongue across his thin upper lip.
     
    He pushed the phone down , and softly squeezed her plump hand before letting it go . She felt the gooseflesh gallop up her arm to the shoulder , seemingly giving birth to a pain in the joints of her elbow and shoulder. S he suppressed an involuntary shudder , as he picked his Bible up, backed away and opened the door to the hallway.
     
    W ithout another word, he was gone . Sharon began crying suddenly , as she tried to rub the warmth back into her hand and arm . She peered through the glass and watched him walk purposefully toward the main entrance . She moved to the front do or of the school to see him continue across the school grounds , making sure to stay until he was out of sight.
     
    She could feel her heart tight in her chest , and tried to slow it down by taking deep breaths. As she walked back across the hall, she stopp ed at the bathroom to splash her face with cool water. She had a sudden urge to scrub her hand , hard .

Chapter 1 5
     
    Steve rolled over and looked at the clock on the nightstand: 2:37 a.m. . Kicking the covers off with a sigh , he grabbed his glasses from the nightstand and sat up . Only the alarm clock and the low pulsing red light of his phone on the pillow beside his lit the darkness : Julie’s pillow . Her side of the bed had become his desk of sorts at night . Magazines, mail, the TV remote and his laptop covered the comforter . Shortly after her death , he had put her pillows up on a shelf in the closet. He tried to make the king-sized bed with just his pillows, placed in the middle of the bed, when he bothered to make it at all . It looked ridiculous , out of balance . Eventually , he had returned her pillows to the bed. Even if she would never rest her head on them again, putting them back on the bed made for a good appearance, at least until it was time to turn out the lights and crawl into bed alone.
     
    When he grabbed t he remote to flip through the stations , Steve found nothing that could hold his interest , so h e tossed the remote back on to her pillow and grabbed the stack of work mail spilling out of his rucksack. He had decided the day before that he needed to get the pile off his desk at work, yet he had refused to throw the journals and magazines away before he’d had a chance to give them a good read.
     
    Steve had always been a traditionalist when it came to magazines . He respected the blogs and online versions , and agreed they made for easy searching and insight, but he still appreciated the feel and satisfaction of the printed page .
     
    Julie had often teased him about it.
     
    “You’re a techie guru who won’t give up the paper . You’re like a walking oxymoron. Or maybe we should scratch that ‘oxy’ part.”
     
    T hen she’d laugh so hard that she’d end up snorting , which would lead Steve to laugh right along with her.
     
    As he leafed through the magazines now, he saw right through the pages into the past, thinking back on the many times and many ways in which she had made fun of his book-wormish traits .
     
    He shuffled the stack looking for a cover with some appealing headlines to draw him in . The small lavender envelope slid out of the stack and landed on his lap . He didn’t remember loading it into his pack, but there it was.
     
    He put the stack of magazines aside, opened the envelope and read the brief message