Free The Monsters in Your Neighborhood by Jesse Petersen Page A

and gone to live the high life in Europe without so much as a thought for her.
    And to cap it all off, the entire time she waited she was forced to endure Igor sitting next to her, watching the clock with her, pressing her with questions about her “relationship.” He even patted her hand and clucked his sympathy at her like she was the Widow Frankenstein.
    Which was exactly what he was doing when there was a jangle of keys and her apartment door opened to reveal Alec.
    She pushed to her feet and stared at him. His hair was disheveled and he was wearing the same clothes he had been in when she’d last seen him, so they were wrinkled and there were a couple of stains on them.
    He glanced up as he dropped his keys and wallet on the little plate she had put on her console table just for that purpose.
    “Hey,” he said, wrinkling his brow as if her staring at him wasn’t to be expected.
    “Hey?” she repeated, her mouth dropping open with shock she couldn’t mask. The relief, that she was able to cover up just fine—because she was going to kill him. “ Hey? ”
    He reached back and shut the door behind him, his brow furrowed. “Um, yeah. Hey.”
    “Igor, can you leave us alone for a moment?” she asked, without sparing a glance for the staring lab assistant.
    She could feel him eating this up and was not about to give him the satisfaction of watching them come unglued.
    “Oh, sure, I’ll just go to my room,” he said with a quick glance first at Alec, then at her.
    She pivoted on him. “No,” she ground out past clenched teeth. “Go somewhere else. Take a walk around the block or something. Now.”
    Igor’s eyes widened and he nodded. “Okay, okay. I’ll go somewhere else. Plenty to see here in New York, even at eight o’clock in the morning. No problem.”
    Alec stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head. “What is up with you?”
    Igor grabbed his jacket and slipped past Alec with one final, rather disappointed glance, and left the apartment. The moment he was gone, Natalie charged Alec.
    “ Where the fuck have you been? ” she asked, grabbing his collar and spinning him around to shove him at full force into the living room.
    With most people, that push would have put them into the table all the way across the room and through the door in the kitchen, but her monster strength was pretty evenly matched with Alec’s, so he only staggered a little.
    “What are you talking about?” he asked, but she saw his eyes glint with his own monster defensive anger. So this was how it would end, with them destroying each other in her living room.
    So totally typical. This was why monsters didn’t date.
    “What am I talking about, suck fucker?” she repeated. “What the fuckity fuck am I talking about?”
    “Yes, what the fuckity fuck are you talking about, Natalie?” he asked, hands up in a defense stance. “And why are you saying fuck so much?”
    “I figured you would lie,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. “I figured you’d be all like, ‘Oh, hey, babe, lost track of time in the library, slept at a friend’s, my cell battery died so I couldn’t call, I had to do a late-night favor for a stripper . . . ’ something , Alec.” She shook her head and swallowed hard past the sudden lump in her throat. “Something other than pretending that there’s nothing wrong.”
    He swallowed. “Natalie, what is wrong?”
    She wanted to punch him so bad, her fists were actually twitching. “Really? Really, you want me to say it? Okay, asshole. You’ve been gone for a day and a half.”
    Alec stared at her with a blank, disbelieving expression.
    “Nooooo,” he said slowly, drawing out the word. “I—I wasn’t. Babe, I’ve only been gone for fifteen minutes.”

    Natalie hadn’t looked at him or spoken to him in at least five full minutes. All she did was pace around the apartment, slamming her hand against furniture and muttering things about what a lying, scheming, cheating