1. Stella #2
The iciness of my hands has nothing to do with the milk.
The carton gets very hard to hold. I hear my breathing change, going thin and fast, and I know that a mullet is only a haircut.
There’s no evolutionary basis for this. Cavemen were not haunted by business in the front, party in the back.
But knowing all of this does absolutely nothing because my body has already decided, and my body doesn’t take notes from my brain.
I drop the milk in my basket and turn down the next aisle. Baking supplies. I pretend to be fascinated by baking powder while counting to five before peeking around the endcap.
He’s at the end of this aisle now. Same mullet, hair curling against his neck in a way that makes my skin crawl. I don’t care anymore whether what I’m afraid of is the haircut or the man under it, because the difference has stopped mattering to my circulatory system.
So I walk. Fast. I absolutely do not run, though. There’s a dignity issue here, even if the dignity is mostly imagined. But I definitely move fast with the basket banging my thigh, and I hit the self-checkout at a speed that would get me a citation if I was on a highway.
Of course, the machine is determined to fight me, because why not give me every possible reason to regret stepping foot in public today?
Unexpected item in bagging area. “It’s bread,” I whisper fiercely, as if the machine can understand me.
Somehow, I make it through before tapping my card to pay and grabbing my bag.
I’m out through the automatic doors into the warm air in no time, hustling down the sidewalk.
Then I make the mistake of looking over my shoulder.
It’s Mullet. He’s coming out of the store. Still watching me. I am not making this up—I’m absolutely sure of it.
I turn right, fast, around the corner of the building into the side street, where the dumpsters sit and the light doesn’t quite reach. It smells like old produce baking in the last of the sun, sweet and sour. I’ll loop the block. I’ll cut through and get ahead.
At least, that’s what I’m planning on doing before I run into someone’s chest. Hard.
Full speed. My face hits cotton and warmth and a body that doesn’t move at all when I collide with it.
My bag swings out. My hands come up and grab fistfuls of shirt.
The first thing that registers before sight and logic and anything is smell.
Clean. Soapy. Beneath that, there’s something warm and human.
Skin and cotton, and heat. My nervous system does something it has never done before.
It goes quiet.
Not calm. Not relaxed. Quiet. Like someone walked into a room full of screaming people and turned the volume down.
The tightness in my neck loosens. My hands stop shaking.
My breathing slows without me telling it to, which has literally never happened.
I have never in my life calmed down by accident.
Then I look up.
And up.
He’s enormous. Tall enough that I have to actually tilt my head back to get the full picture.
Shaved head. A tattoo curling from behind his ear down the side of his neck in sharp, dark lines.
A jaw that could cut glass. His eyes are deep, dark brown.
The kind that could just as easily glow warm as they could go flat and black.
They’re not on me, either. They’re already past me, scanning the alley behind my head.
Everything about him should set off every alarm I have.
He’s much bigger than Mullet Guy. He’s covered in ink.
His face has clearly been through some things faces don’t generally survive, including a broken nose that healed slightly crooked.
By any reasonable metric, he is the most dangerous thing in this alley, and that includes the dumpsters and whatever is growing behind them.
But I feel nothing. No cold hands or thin breathing. No neck prickle. Just quiet, like stepping behind a wall on a windy day and realizing you can hear yourself think again.
“Please,” I whisper, all breathless and rushed and not at all how I want to sound.
“Okay, this is insane. I’m aware this is insane, but there’s a guy following me, and he’s about to come around the corner, and I need you to just—can you pretend to be my boyfriend?
” I blurt out before I can think about it.
“For just, like, thirty seconds? I swear I’ll leave you alone after. I just need—”
He looks down at me. There’s no flinching.
No confused head tilt. No questions either.
Just a pair of stormy eyes that settle on my face.
The silence stretches, and I think he’s going to say no, he’s going to peel my hands off his shirt and step back and give me the same look everybody gives me.
Like I’m crazy. And then I’ll be alone with the mullet and the dumpsters and the—
The mullet comes around the corner.
The man I’m holding onto doesn’t hesitate.
One arm comes around my shoulders and pulls me into his side.
Not rough or tentative. Just certain; the way you close a book you’ve finished.
All of a sudden, I’m pressed against him with his arm heavy and warm across my back and his chest a wall between me and everything else.
I’m close enough that I feel his heartbeat—slow, steady, totally unbothered.
Meanwhile, my own heart is going so fast I can feel it in my teeth.
He stares over my head. “You following my girl?” he asks. There’s no anger in it. Somehow, it’s the absence of anger that is the scariest sound I’ve ever heard.
Mullet Man opens his mouth.
“Don’t,” my savior grunts. “Turn around. Walk away. Don’t look at her again.”
He pauses. The arm around me tightens, barely, just enough that I feel it everywhere. “Because if I catch you looking at her just once, I’ll gouge your eyes out, and you won’t see me coming. We clear?”
The mullet nods—fast, hands up as he backs off.
Once he reaches the end of the alley, he spins on his heel and pretty much runs away, feet slapping the pavement.
The sound gets fainter until it fades away completely, and there’s nothing left but the distant sound of traffic, and my blood in my ears.
I should step back, right? It’s all over, and I did give my word.
But his arm is still around me, and I’m still pressed into the warm, solid side of him.
The quiet is still there, too—the impossible, total quiet in my skull.
And I don’t want to go back to the noise.
I don’t want the wind and the mullets and the cold hands.
I want to stand right here and never leave.
I tip my head back to look up at him again.
He’s looking down at me. There’s something in his face I wasn’t expecting, something underneath the flatness. Something almost careful, like he’s holding something important, something he doesn’t want to break.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
And why is everything so quiet when he’s here?