What If You & Me

by Roni Loren

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Roni Loren

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Kerri Resnick

  Cover images © Vectorig/Getty Images; Natali Snailcat; Marta Lebek/Stocksy

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Loren, Roni, author.

  Title: What if you & me / Roni Loren.

  Other titles: What if you and me

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Casablanca, [2021] |

  Series: Say everything; 2 | Summary: “Horror author and true-crime podcaster Andi Lockley has spent so long researching real-life horror stories, she’s practically forgotten what dating is. But when a detective moves next door and provides new fodder for her podcast-and a sense of safety she hasn’t felt in a long time-she starts to wonder if it’s time to retire her trust-no-man mentality.”-- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021010442 (print) | LCCN 2021010443 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.O764 W48 2021 (print) | LCC PS3612.O764 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010442

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To my mom, Kathy, my first and favorite horror movie buddy

  Chapter One

  Andi Lockley was halfway convinced her new neighbor was a werewolf.

  She’d never seen him outside since she’d moved into the duplex, and she’d only heard him moving around at night. The nocturnal wanderings might’ve made her lean toward vampire, but this guy made too much noise to be a vampire. Thump. Thump. Thump. His heavy steps paced back and forth as if he couldn’t wait for the full moon and an opportunity to terrorize the villagers.

  The old floorboards creaked again as neighbor dude made another round, and Andi tried to concentrate on the unfinished sentence on her laptop in front of her.

  Blink. Blink. Blink.

  That blinking cursor was a judgmental sonofabitch. She narrowed her eyes, trying to zero in on the words she’d written. The scent of wet fur and death filled the small cabin, Collette’s breath making clouds in the frosty air as she…

  As she what? Contemplated running? Took a nap? Knit a sweater? Ugh. Andi leaned back in her desk chair and rubbed the spot between her eyes where a headache was forming. How had the band-camp slasher story she was supposed to be writing morphed into some werewolf tale?

  Thump, thump, bang!

  She startled and turned her head, eyeing the pale-green wall that separated her from her neighbor. Her shelf of horror Funko Pops rattled with another bang, almost sending little Hannibal Lecter over the edge. She reached over and righted the doll.

  This wasn’t going to work. Maybe she needed to try writing while wearing her headphones, even though being unable to hear the noises around her tended to put her on edge. She usually only used headphones when she was editing the podcast. How many horror-movie scenes had she watched where some unsuspecting victim had headphones on or was listening to music too loudly while the deranged killer stalked around their house?

  But she was running out of options. Nine to midnight was her magic writing time. She’d moved into this place because…well, mainly because the 1920s double-shotgun house was cheaper than her old apartment, but also because the cute office off the kitchen at the back of the house had seemed perfect for a horror writer. Creaky and cozy with a view of a tangled, overgrown garden in the back. She had loved it on sight, even though her parents would be horrified by the place and probably see it as one step up from living in a cardboard box. Anything that wasn’t their sprawling mansion overlooking the golf course in Georgia looked like the slums to them.

  Andi didn’t need a mansion. This place was more than enough for now, but she hadn’t anticipated such a noisy neighbor. At her old place, she’d shared a wall with Dolores, a septuagenarian who had gone to bed by nine and who had regularly brought her Tupperware containers full of delicious slow-cooked things like shrimp and crab gumbo and white beans and rice.

  This guy seemed to be a creature of the night, and he’d never brought her so much as a bag of potato chips to welcome her to the neighborhood. Andi turned back to her computer, swept her bangs away from her eyes, and deleted the line about wet fur. No werewolves. That was not in the proposal she had sent to her literary agent.

  She needed to stay on track. Despite the growing audience for her What Can We Learn from This? horror and true crime podcast, her advertising income was meager. The majority of her pay-the-bills money came from the minor success she’d found with a series of horror novels. But that series had wrapped up, the money from royalties was dwindling, and her publisher had decided they wanted out of the horror business, so no new contract. Now she needed to prove to her agent and other publishers that she wasn’t a one-series-and-done author so she could get another book deal. She needed to send her agent a winner.

  She focused on her screen again. Deranged killers. Deranged killers. Must write a crazed summer-camp killer with a fresh twist. Music started up nex
t door.

  She cocked her head.

  “Oh sweet baby Jesus.” The werewolf listened to country music. Would the torture never end?

  She wanted to bang on the wall or storm next door and demand that he have some consideration for his neighbor. What if she’d been a normal person who was sleeping at this hour? She imagined the finger-wagging lecture she could give him about the importance of being an unselfish human, about realizing the world doesn’t revolve around you and your big feet. But she knew there was no way she was going over there. She was a badass in her imagined scenario, but she’d covered enough true-crime documentaries on the podcast to know that no good would come of knocking on some stranger’s door alone in the middle of the night. Scary news stories started like that.

  And the last time anyone saw Andi Lockley, horror author and podcaster, was…

  The music switched off. Small mercies.

  She stared at the laptop screen again and then, with a huff, snapped her computer shut. The words weren’t going to happen tonight. She might as well get something watched for the podcast instead and at least be able to check one item off her list. She pushed her chair back, the wheels rolling over the worn floorboards and making them creak. She stood and stretched, grabbed her cooling green tea, and headed toward the living room at the front of the house.

  She’d left a lamp on, giving the room a warm glow, and she checked all the locks and windows before turning on the TV and shutting off the lights. Proper horror-movie watching required the dark. She grabbed the colorful afghan her former neighbor had made her when she’d moved. She’d told Andi, “This is for all those movies you watch. You can cover your eyes with it but still see the movie a little. And it’s big enough to share with a date.”

  Andi smiled at the memory. Dolores had been very interested in Andi’s love life—or lack thereof. She’d not so subtly work into their conversations things like Have you met that nice blond boy down at the coffee shop? So tall and never charges me for extra whipped cream. Or, You know Mrs. Benoit’s boy just graduated with a master’s degree in English. I’ve always thought men who read are so much more interesting, don’t you? And she’d even tested the waters with Mercy’s granddaughter, Jess, just broke up with her lady friend. I think she’s a movie buff like you.

  Andi appreciated her neighbor’s effort and the sentiment behind it. Dolores would make a killer wingwoman, but Andi hadn’t had the heart to tell her that the afghan didn’t need to be big enough for two. She didn’t bring guys home. Dates were reserved for public places only. Not that she dated much anyway. The minute she would imagine taking the next step with a guy, she would be seized by all the what-ifs, get that queasy feeling in her gut, and shut the whole thing down. Post-traumatic stress was hell on a love life. Her former therapist had assured her that it wouldn’t always be this way, but Andi was beginning to wonder if the “post” part of post-traumatic would ever really arrive.

  She curled under the blanket and scanned her streaming playlist, looking for something that would make for interesting fodder on the podcast. On What Can We Learn from This? she featured true-crime documentaries and horror films because much could be learned from both. Tonight, she needed a movie that could feed the creative part of her brain to help with her story, so she went through the slasher options, settling on one of her comfort watches. Scream.

  She wouldn’t have to take notes on this one or pause and analyze anything. She knew it mostly by heart, and she could use it on the podcast to talk about things like the overlap of comedy and horror, and how using the biggest name in the movie at the time—Drew Barrymore—in the opening scene was both a risk and a brilliant move. And for the “what can we learn from this” portion, there was a lot to talk about, including the ill-advised design of houses with walls of windows.

  Andi sipped her tea and turned up the volume—because if her neighbor could blare country music, she could blast horror. She tensed as the portable phone rang on-screen again and again, a blond-bobbed Drew picking it up each time, her mood changing from flirty to terrified with each call. Lesson one, Never engage with a prank phone call. Lesson two, Never leave a door unlocked. Or in this case, every damn door in the house. Damn, Drew.

  Andi didn’t victim blame. That was her rule on the podcast and in life, but she shuddered at the thought of all those doors sitting unlocked at night. She quickly glanced at her front door, making sure the lock was in the horizontal position even though she never left it any other way.

  Despite Andi knowing everything that would happen in the movie, her heartbeat picked up speed as Drew’s character began screaming and crying. How many times could she watch a movie and hope that this time the person would escape and not get killed? It was one of the beauties of horror movies. There was often such a strong undercurrent of hope. Sometimes it was rewarded—the final girl escapes, the monster is defeated. Sometimes it wasn’t. But the very presence of that beating heart of hope got her every time.

  Drew upped her screaming game on-screen, and Andi’s speakers vibrated with the shrillness of it. She reached for the remote, planning to turn it down a little. She didn’t want to be a total dick. But before she could get her finger on the button, a thunderous boom echoed through the room.

  She startled, a yelp escaping her, and nearly knocked over her tea. The loud sound repeated, and it took a second for her to realize it was coming from the door she’d just checked. Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The afghan was clutched tight in her fist, and the movie still blasted, screams filling the living room. Her heartbeat thumped in her ears, and she stared at the door like it was going to splinter and the movie’s Ghostface was going to walk right in and disembowel her with his knife.

  Andi’s logical brain registered this probably wasn’t the case, but that part was a distant whisper at the moment. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn off the TV. She was frozen in place.

  The thunderous knocking started again. “Fire department. Open up!”

  The words fire department penetrated her fear fog. Fire. Fire? That didn’t make any sense. Why the hell would the fire department be banging on her door in the middle of the night? Maybe something had happened in the neighborhood. Or maybe they had the wrong house.

  Thinking it through helped a little. Finally, she was able to unfurl her fingers from the afghan and grab the remote to hit Pause. The silence that followed was almost as unsettling as the banging. The pounding on the door started again with an added threat to break down the door if no one responded. That got her moving. She hurried to her feet, headed to the door, and peered through the peephole. All she could see was a T-shirt clad shoulder as the man apparently leaned over to try to see through her front window.

  A T-shirt, not a firefighter’s uniform. She cleared her throat and called out, “How do I know you’re a firefighter?”

  Whoever it was stepped back and pointed to an NOFD insignia on his T-shirt, just visible in the peephole’s view. “Hill Dawson,” the man called out. “Your neighbor. Everything okay in there?”

  Her neighbor? She reached for the pepper spray she kept in the drawer of her small entryway table, turned the latch on the lock, and opened the door, ready to spray if needed. Underneath the porch light, the outline of a man came into view. A very tall, broad-shouldered man. The werewolf. Complete with dark messy hair, a trimmed beard, and a scowl. He was equal parts gorgeous and intimidating—not unlike a real wolf—and her body tensed as though it couldn’t decide whether she should run like hell or rush forward and volunteer to play villager.

  His brown eyes met hers, his searching look sending hot awareness through her, but then his gaze scanned downward. Only then did she remember she was standing there braless in a thin tank top and a pair of Wonder Woman pajama pants with a very formidable stranger on her doorstep. That snapped her out of her ridiculous staring. Who cared that he was attractive? He could still be there to hurt her. She cross
ed her arms over her chest and tipped up her chin, trying to look tough. “What’s going on?”

  “So, you’re okay?” he asked, brows knit, his voice a deep rumble. His gaze flicked to the pink canister of mace still clutched in her fist. “I heard screaming. A lot of it.”

  “Screaming?” She frowned.

  He shifted, and her attention jumped to his right hand, the one hanging loosely at his side. The one holding a baseball bat. She stiffened, her mouth going dry and her mind racing past suspicion and into worst-case-scenario territory. What if he wasn’t a firefighter? What if he wasn’t her neighbor? What if he was there to rob/rape/murder/dismember her and wear her head as a hat?

  She uncrossed her arms, her finger poised on the trigger of the pepper spray. She was suddenly much less concerned about her lack of bra and much more concerned that she’d be caught off guard and attacked.

  The man frowned, his gaze tracking her weapon before looking at her again. “There was yelling and screaming. I could hear it through the wall. I thought you were in trouble.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re really a firefighter? Anybody could get a T-shirt.”

  He tried to peek past her into the house and then lowered his voice. “Ma’am, if you’re in trouble, if there’s someone in there you’re scared of, just step outside and I can help.”

  “Someone inside?” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m alone. It was a movie.”

  Her brain screamed at her as the words slipped out. I’m alone?

  Have you learned nothing? Don’t tell the stranger you’re alone in the house! She should fire herself from her own podcast.

  “I mean,” she went on. “I’m not in trouble. The screaming was a movie. I was watching a horror movie.”

  The stiff hold of his shoulders relaxed, and his gaze met hers again, disbelief there. “A movie? It sounded like you were getting murdered over here.”

  “Just Drew Barrymore. Not me.” She shifted on her feet. “Maybe I had it a little too loud.”

  He made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and she realized her imagination hadn’t been far off earlier. This guy could be cast in a movie as lead werewolf. Scruffy and muscular in his navy-blue T-shirt and gray sweats. He was one full moon away from howling and ripping off that well-fitting shirt.