Creep - Jennifer Hillier [36]
He was gone for exactly eighteen minutes. It felt more like eighteen years. When he finally came back into the room, she hadn’t moved from her chair. She saw the amused look on his face.
“Hey, I can’t believe how big Mercury is!” Morris said, chuckling. He was referring to the goldfish that lived in an oversize bowl on her desk. “I gave him some food because he’s looking a little skinny. You might want to get him a bigger bowl, because he’s—”
Sheila couldn’t hold back any longer. “Morris, I’m a sex addict.” The words, once unleashed, came out in a rabbity rush she couldn’t control. “I’ve been in therapy to deal with it. And for the most part, I was doing okay. But then I messed up. I had an affair with one of my students. I’m so sorry. I love you.”
Morris stood in stunned silence, his phone still in his hand. The grin faded from his face, so slowly it was almost comical. He reached out, placing a beefy hand on the counter to steady himself.
“Hoo-ah.” Morris’s voice was heavy in the silence of the kitchen. “Well now. That’s a big problem.”
As if to punctuate his words, the doorbell chimed. The food had arrived.
CHAPTER : 11
The documentary chronicling Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figures was at the halfway point. The video was part of Sheila’s undergraduate social psych course, and she always found it interesting to observe her students’ faces in the dim lights of the lecture hall as they watched it. A handful of kids snoozed; nothing could be done about that. But most were fascinated by the evidence that so many normal, morally conscious people could be coerced into severely electroshocking another human being simply because a person in authority told them to.
It was endlessly fascinating what people would do under pressure.
Ethan was in his usual seat in the first row, his face calm as he watched the giant screen above Sheila’s head. The son of a bitch looked well rested, as if he’d slept twelve hours the night before without a single disturbing dream. If only Sheila could say the same. She was horrified to see the bags under her eyes when she woke up that morning. She knew she looked like hell, because it was exactly how she felt.
She hated Ethan Wolfe. If she could hook him up to a machine and electroshock him with a thousand volts, she would. She had no doubt that he was a sociopath, a classic antisocial personality just as Marianne Chang had suggested. His superficial charm and extreme sense of entitlement mirrored Ted Bundy’s. Looking at him now, the comparison to the infamous serial killer didn’t seem at all absurd.
The student with the long, blond ponytail sitting next to Ethan murmured something in his ear, and he favored her with a smile. Even in the darkened room, Sheila could make out the faint blush that spread across the girl’s apple cheeks. Her resemblance to the late Diana St. Clair was striking.
Sheila was struck by a creepy sense of déjà vu. As she thought back on it now, hadn’t Ethan had a thing with the swimmer? He’d never mentioned it, and Sheila had never asked him, but hadn’t she picked up on something back then? Overheard something, maybe? With a familiar pang the memory flitted out of her consciousness as quickly as it had entered.
Not that Sheila thought Ethan was capable of murder. Or did she? Did the police even talk to him? He’d been Diana’s TA, after all. They’d spent a lot of time alone together. He’d proctored at least two of her early writes and had provided extra tutoring at the swimmer’s request. . . .
Sheila shook the thought out of her head. The last thing she needed was to become paranoid on top of everything else.
Checking her watch, Sheila walked over to the blackboard and jotted down the chapters to be read for next week’s class. Drowsy heads popped up immediately at the sounds of her chalk squeaking, and a few of the faces showed panic. Sheila smiled