11. Isla
ISLA
I’m being followed.
I notice it on Monday. Or I think I notice it.
It’s hard to say for sure because the person I think is following me is very large and not exactly built for stealth.
But every time I turn around, he’s there.
Leaning against a wall. Or he’s suddenly very interested in his phone.
Like a six-foot-two shadow that keeps ducking behind things that are not wide enough to hide him.
By Tuesday, I’m sure.
He’s in the parking lot when I get out of my car in the morning.
He’s outside the humanities building when I leave my ten a.m. lecture.
He’s sitting on a bench near the library with a textbook open on his lap, except the textbook is upside down.
That’s either a bold artistic choice or a dead giveaway he’s not actually reading.
By Wednesday—today—I’ve had enough.
I spot him on my way to the science building, leaning against a brick wall with his arms crossed and a coffee in his hand.
He looks exactly like somebody who’s trying very hard to seem casual and completely failing.
When I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at him, he takes a sip of coffee like he just happens to be here.
Like this is where he always drinks his coffee.
Outside a building where he doesn’t have a single class.
“Okay,” I mutter, walking over to where Everett stands. “We need to talk about this.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that you’ve been following me for three days.”
He takes another sip but doesn’t deny it, I notice. “Following is a strong word.”
“What word would you use?”
“Keeping an eye on things.”
“That’s five words, and when you put them all together, it means stalking.” I hitch my backpack higher on my shoulder and look up at him, which requires actual neck effort because of the height difference. “You’re not subtle. Your textbook was upside down yesterday.”
“I noticed that after.”
“After what? After I walked past you three times, and you pretended to be reading a chapter on organic chemistry that was literally facing the wrong direction?” When he gives me something close to a smile, I throw my hands into the air. “Why are you doing this?”
He’s quiet for a second. He takes another sip from his coffee, then lowers the cup and says, “You told me you needed time to think.”
“I did.”
“Okay. So you’re thinking. That’s fine. Take all the time you need.” He shrugs. “I don’t need time.”
I don’t need time. Like he’s already thought about everything—the fight, the blood, the concrete floor—and come out on the other side with his answer. Like the answer was never in question.
I don’t have the first clue what to think about it. “So you’ve just been... what? Hovering?”
“Making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“You haven’t texted me since Sunday.”
“Because I’m thinking, like I told you.”
“And I’m letting you think. From a reasonable distance.”
I’m going to kill him. I swear to God. Doesn’t he understand? “There is nothing reasonable about this distance. You were ten feet away from me outside the dining hall this morning.”
He almost smiles again, and I hate that it does something to me, because I’ve spent the last three days very deliberately not thinking about his almost-smiles or his hands or the way his voice sounds when he says my name or any of the other things I told myself I was going to sort through rationally, like an adult, like a person with a working brain.
Instead, I’ve been lying in bed every night replaying the fight in my head. The sound of his fist connecting. The way the other guy crumpled. The blood and the crowd screaming for more.
And then I’ve immediately replayed everything else. His hands in my hair. His mouth on my neck.
It’s very confusing to be simultaneously horrified by someone and unable to stop thinking about them. I don’t recommend it.
“I don’t hate you,” I tell him, because I realize I haven’t said that.
Based on the way he’s watching me right now, it’s possible he’s spent days wondering.
“I want you to know that. I don’t hate you, and I’m not afraid of you, and I’m not trying to...
” I gesture vaguely between us. “End anything. I just needed to process.”
“I know.”
“You don’t seem like you know. You seem like you’ve been standing outside my buildings for three days making sure I don’t disappear.”
“Both things can be true.”
I stare at him. He stares back. The campus moves around us—students walking to class, someone on a skateboard, a girl arguing loudly into her phone about a group project. But we just stand here, locked in whatever this is.
He’s intense. Everything about him is. The way he looks at me, the way he fights, the way he shows up outside my buildings without being asked because he decided on his own that keeping an eye on me was more important than whatever else he had going on.
It should probably scare me... but it doesn’t.
It just makes me feel like I matter in a way I’m not used to mattering, and that’s the part I don’t know what to do with.
“Christine Jones is supposed to meet with you tomorrow.” He’s so helpful when he remembers things.
Just like that, the real world comes crashing back.
Tomorrow. Christine Jones and whoever she’s dragging along to make my life miserable.
This is her way of applying last-minute pressure, making sure we know she’s serious and the board is serious and all of that.
I’ve been so wrapped up that I almost forgot about the reason Everett and I found each other in the first place.
“I know,” I murmur in a voice much smaller than I planned on.
“What time do you need me to be there?”
“I... don’t.”
His mouth falls open before he catches himself. “What? What do you mean?”
This is the part I’ve been dreading. The part that crystallized for me somewhere around three a.m. on Monday while I stared at my ceiling, and Starlight was making soft sounds in the coop outside my window.
I can still see it all these days later. The circle of bodies in the warehouse. The fluorescent lights. The way Everett moved—fast, precise, brutal in a way that didn’t look angry. Mechanical, like his body was a machine built for one specific purpose, and everything else was just waiting.
Then the other guy dropped. He made a sound when he hit the concrete that still chills my blood.
Now I imagine what happens if Christine pushes too hard or says the wrong thing, or threatens my chickens in a way that crosses some line I can’t see. I imagine the same hands that held Marjorie so carefully in my backyard doing what they did in that warehouse.
He wouldn’t. I know he wouldn’t. Probably. But “probably” isn’t good enough when the stakes are my girls and my grandmother’s house, and the only stability I have ever known.
“I think...” I start, but then I stop because his face is already changing. He can read me too well. “I think I should handle tomorrow on my own.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll figure something out. I’ll talk to them. I’ll—”
“You know damn well you already tried talking to them, and they didn’t fucking listen.”
“I know, but—”
“But what?” He pushes off the wall, and even though he doesn’t step toward me, the shift in his posture makes the space between us feel smaller. “What changed?”
I look down at his hands. The knuckles are still bruised. The cut on the third one has healed into a thin pink line. These are hands that have hurt people. Recently. On purpose. For money.
“This isn’t a problem violence can solve,” I quietly reply.
And I watch as the words hit him. His jaw tightens, and something moves behind his eyes like a door closing, and I hate myself a little for putting that look on his face because I know what he’s hearing. That he’s too much, too rough, too dangerous to be near anything that matters.
That’s not what I mean. But I don’t know how to explain what I do mean in a way that won’t make things worse.
“I have to get to class,” I murmur, filled with regret. “I’m sorry.”
“Isla,” he growls.
“Please don’t follow me.”
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t argue. He just stands there with his coffee, looking at me with an expression I’ll remember for a long time. Hurt wrapped in something hard, the way he wraps his knuckles before a fight. Like he’s protecting himself from the impact.
“Okay,” he mutters.
My eyes are stinging when I turn and walk toward the science building, which is stupid, because nothing happened. It was the quietest fight I’ve ever had, and somehow that makes it worse.
I make it about halfway across the quad before I start second-guessing everything.
Maybe I should turn around. Maybe I should tell him I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.
Maybe I should just let him come tomorrow and stand in my living room and growl at Christine until she leaves, because honestly, it worked last time, and what’s my plan without him?
I don’t have a plan. That’s the problem. I don’t have a plan, and I just sent away the closest thing I ever had to one.
There’s a buzzing in my pocket. I reach for my phone, expecting Everett, hoping it’s Everett, already composing a text in my head that says something like I’m sorry, I’m being weird, please come tomorrow and just try not to punch anybody.
But it’s not him. It’s Grandma. There’s a photo of Brad Pitt sitting on the kitchen counter, which he’s not supposed to do, with the caption: Your son is misbehaving.
I smile, but it doesn’t hold. Not today.
The sidewalk narrows between the science building and the parking garage.
It’s one of those campus dead zones with no windows, no foot traffic, just concrete walls and a dumpster, and the kind of lighting that makes you walk faster without thinking about why.
I always cut through here on my way to Bio because it shaves two minutes off the walk, and I’m always running late because I can’t stop talking to my chickens before I leave the house.
I’m not thinking about shortcuts now. I’m thinking about Everett’s face when I said “please don’t follow me.” Did I just ruin the one good thing that’s happened to me since I started college?
I don’t hear the footsteps, in other words.
That’s the part that’ll probably bother me later, when I have time to be bothered. I should’ve heard them. The alley is quiet. There’s no music playing. There’s nothing in my ears but my own thoughts, and the distant hum of campus, and I still don’t hear them until it’s too late.
A hand clamps over my mouth from behind.
My scream dies before it starts, smothered against a palm that tastes like latex.
Another arm wraps around my waist and lifts me off the ground like I’m nothing.
My backpack slides off my shoulder and hits the concrete, and my feet are kicking but they’re not connecting with anything.
The world tilts sideways and then my back slams against something hard.
A trunk. They put me in a trunk.
The realization hits me the same second the lid slams shut, and now there’s nothing but darkness and the smell of motor oil, and the muffled sound of an engine starting. Above it all is the sound of my heartbeat, loud enough that it fills the entire space.
I can’t move. My hands are pinned under me, and my glasses are crooked; there’s something pressing against my hip, and I’m shaking so hard my teeth are clicking together, and I can’t think, I can’t… Only one thought is coming through.
Who’s going to feed the chickens?