Chapter 9 #2
“No, no, you can’t be here,” Jude said, flying to his feet and moving to intercept Quentin as he charged straight for Nally.
Someone shouted, “Get security!”
Someone else asked, “How did he even get in here? This is a closed session.”
Quentin kept moving forward, and when he attempted to shove Jude out of the way, Nally surged forward with, “Don’t touch him!”
“Nally,” Quentin gasped, ignoring everything but Nally, even though Jude still blocked his way. “I have to speak to you. We can’t go on like this any longer.”
“Do you know this man?” a burly man in black trousers and a t-shirt with the word “Security” on the back asked, rushing to join Jude’s efforts to keep Quentin from Nally.
“No. Not really,” Nally answered, panic rising up in him and making him feel sick.
“Of course you know me,” Quentin insisted. “We’re in love,” he told the security guard.
The orchestra members had all risen from their seats and now looked on in confusion.
Too many of them stared at Nally. It was exactly the sort of attention that he didn’t want and all the reasons why fame had felt like too much.
“Go away,” he told Quentin, sounding and feeling like he was half his age. None of this could be happening.
“Nally, I love you,” Quentin insisted, struggling against the men who held him. “Why did you stop answering my messages? What do you mean that we should keep things professional?”
“I…I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nally said, edging to the side, like he could maybe put the piano between him and Quentin.
“You do know, you do!” Quentin insisted. He told the security guard, “Nally and I write to each other all the time. He knows who I am. We were meant to be together.”
“I’ve never written anything to you,” Nally insisted.
He glanced to Jude, who had stepped back when a second security guard moved in to handle Quentin. Instead of sending Nally a look of reassurance, Jude looked as guilty as hell.
“Sir, we’re going to escort you off the premises now,” one of the security guards said, pushing Quentin back. “You can go quietly, or we can call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”
“Nally, you have to stop them,” Quentin insisted.
Nally shook his head and moved quickly to Jude’s side. “Take him away,” he told the guards in a hoarse voice.
The guards did their job effectively. Quentin continued to fight and protest, but they pushed and even lifted him off his feet at one point to get him out of the recording hall.
From there, Nally didn’t care what they did with him.
He was too shaken to do anything other than lean heavily against Jude.
“I’m so sorry,” Jude said, his voice heavy as he slung an arm around Nally to hold him up. “This is all my fault.”
Those words hit Nally hard as suspicion rolled through him. He straightened to look at his friend, but before he could ask what was going on, the lead tech marched into the scene and said, “We need to take a break.”
Nally nodded and somehow managed to walk to the side of the space with Jude. Sir Antonio and the rest of the orchestra disbursed as well.
Only when they got to the side of the room, sat down, and had one of the assistants bring them bottles of water did Nally’s fear subside enough for him to start to put the pieces together.
“What was that all about?” he asked Jude, his voice still slightly shaky. “What was Quentin talking about when he said we’d been corresponding?”
Jude lowered his head, just as upset as Nally, but for different reasons.
“I’m sorry,” he said before forcing himself to meet Nally’s eyes again.
“Quentin has been sending you all sorts of messages on all your socials. Some of them were a little…intense. I didn’t want to bother you with any of it because I know you’re already stressed out with everything. ”
“Quentin has been messaging me and you didn’t tell me?” A whole new emotion welled up in Nally where Jude was concerned, anger. “How could you keep the fact that I have a stalker trying to contact me from me?”
“You would have freaked out,” Jude insisted.
“Of course I would have freaked out!” Nally shouted. He was so unused to being angry with Jude that he didn’t know how to handle his overload of emotions. “Quentin is dangerous. He thinks he loves me. There’s no telling what someone like that might do.”
“You’re always surrounded in safety,” Jude insisted. “Your family and everyone at Hawthorne House protect you all the time. I protect you, too. That’s all I want to do, protect you.”
“By not letting me know there’s a madman who thinks he’s in love with me and who keeps showing up uninvited wherever I am?” Nally demanded. “What’s going to happen when he catches me alone in a dark alley somewhere?”
“That’s never going to happen,” Jude said, reaching for Nally’s hand.
“It already did happen,” Nally snapped. For the first time ever, he pulled away from Jude, not wanting to feel his touch.
“Nally—”
“You can’t keep things like this from me,” he said, standing and taking a few steps away.
The emotional overload was too much. Worse still, there were shades of the pain of betrayal he’d felt when things fell apart with Timothy.
That sinking sense of losing something precious tugged at Nally’s gut.
“This above all else is something you absolutely should have told me.”
“I know, I see that now,” Jude said, rising and stepping closer to Nally. “I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never been in a situation like this personally. They don’t teach you how to deal with stalkers in boarding school.”
His comment was an attempt to lighten the mood, but Nally didn’t feel any lighter. His anger started to subside, but fear and deep anxiety rushed in to take its place. “You should have told me,” he repeated in a quiet voice. “I thought we meant more to each other than silence.”
“What?” Jude said, his eyes going wide and his face flushing. “Of course we mean more to each other than that. Don’t you ever doubt that you don’t mean the world to me. You mean everything to me, Nally.”
He stepped even closer, grabbing Nally’s hand. Nally knew that something would have happened, Jude would have said or done something that meant they could never go back again, but before he could, the security guards returned with a uniformed police officer.
“Mr. Hawthorne?” the officer asked.
Nally jumped back from Jude, stepping toward the man. “Yes? That’s me.”
“PC Bryant,” the officer introduced himself. He shook Nally’s hand, then said, “Unfortunately, Mr. Quentin ran off just before I arrived. I understand he tried to interact with you against your will?”
“He’s been stalking Nally online,” Jude answered for him. As unsettled as things were between the two of them, Nally was grateful for Jude handling things.
“Is this true?” Bryant asked.
Nally nodded. “It is. He first approached me at the premiere of To Serve Him. He’s tried to interact with me at a few other unexpected places, too.”
“I think you should tell me everything,” Bryant said.
They all moved back to the side and sat down again to tell the whole story.
There was much more to Quentin’s obsession than Nally knew about.
Jude did most of the talking, and as he did, Nally’s emotions ran the gamut from fear to fury.
Jude had kept everything from him, and now Nally felt completely exposed and in danger retroactively.
“We’ll do what we can,” Bryant said once all the information was out in the open, “but it’s difficult to do much more than issue an injunction against the man contacting you until he has committed actual, physical assault.”
“That’s it?” Jude demanded incredulously. “You can’t arrest him or do more to keep him away from Nally?”
Bryant shrugged. “According to what you’ve reported and the texts you’ve shown me, he hasn’t made any threats against Mr. Hawthorne’s life or person. He hasn’t mentioned violence at all, just eager intent.”
“The man terrifies me,” Nally said, peeking at Jude to show him just how much.
“If you believe his attention could escalate into violence,” Bryant said, “I suggest you lay low or take yourself out of harm’s way.”
“That’s all?” Jude asked. “We should stay indoors and hide under blankets until Quentin gets bored and goes away?”
Nally’s skin prickled. Quentin was after him, not Jude, but Jude had lumped the two of them together. Nally had no idea whether he liked that or hated it.
“Like I said,” Bryant said, “Unless there has been an explicit threat of violence or some kind of action, we don’t have grounds for arrest. If the LSO chooses to go after him for trespassing, that’s one thing, but since you don’t own this property, Mr. Hawthorne, the issue would be between Mr. Quentin and the LSO. ”
“Unbelievable,” Jude hissed, throwing himself back in his seat.
Nally felt a deeper doom. “I guess if that’s all you can do,” he said quietly.
“For now, it is,” Bryant said. “If things escalate, you can call us and make a full report. But like I said, if it was me, I would use this opportunity to go on a long vacation abroad until it all blows over.”
Bryant stood, and there was another round of hand-shaking.
Sir Antonio and the rest of the orchestra was impatient to finish the recording session, so instead of confronting Jude and figuring out what they needed to do next, Nally was dragged back into the world of music.
His head wasn’t in the game, though. In fact, he didn’t even know which way was up anymore.