Chapter 22
Clara
The espresso machine hisses like it’s tired of me, spitting scalding droplets that leave angry red constellations across my wrists.
Steam clings to my skin like a second layer, my hairline damp under the café’s fluorescent lights that buzz like trapped insects.
My forearms throb, muscles quivering from tamping shot after shot.
The smell is thick enough to chew: a miasma of burnt beans, cloying caramel rot, and the buttery sweat of day-old croissants.
The stink crawls into the seams, something that won’t wash out.
I’m halfway through wiping down the marble counter, scrubbing at a stubborn mocha stain with my thumbnail, when the door jingles.
The bell’s last ring hangs like a warning.
It’s Zoe, but she’s not alone. Talia is with her, looking just as out of place in the café as I feel.
She offers me a small, sympathetic smile as Zoe plants herself at the counter.
“Clara Harrington,” she announces, her voice bouncing off the exposed brick. “You are criminally boring.”
I arch a brow, feeling the sticky residue of syrup on my temple. “Thanks?”
She grins. “Popcorn night. Genny’s picking the movie, which means we’ll suffer through something in French with subtitles too small to read. Save us. Come.”
Talia speaks up, her voice a quiet contrast to Zoe’s volume. “What she means is, we’re having a movie night, and we’d like you to come, if you’re not too busy.”
“I close in half an hour,” I say, gesturing to the industrial mop leaning against the back counter like a patient sentinel.
“Half an hour’s nothing.” Zoe's gaze narrows, cat-like, catching something in my face I don’t mean to show. “Ohhh. You’re thinking about him, aren’t you? The ice prince with the daddy issues?”
I drop the rag a little too hard on the counter, splattering sanitizer across my apron. “I’m thinking about not getting third-degree steam burns on my hands.”
Zoe’s grin sharpens, her dimple deepening like a thumbprint in clay.
She knows she’s right, even if I’ll never say it.
She pushes off the counter, her rings clinking against the marble.
“Fine. Be mysterious. But if you turn into one of those girls who journals about hockey players and doodles Mrs. Clara Hale in her notebooks, I’ll stage an intervention with tequila and a bonfire.
” She hooks her arm through Talia’s. “Come on, T. Let’s leave the working girl to her duties. We’ll text you later, Clara.”
Talia gives me one last look—a quiet mix of understanding and concern—before Zoe pulls her out the door. The café door clicks shut, the sound slicing like a guillotine, and silence folds back over the room like a heavy blanket.
I finish closing alone. Chairs stacked, counters wiped, register counted. By the time I lock the heavy glass door, the air is sharp, colder than I expect. My breath fogs in a white plume.
The walk toward my dorm is familiar, but tonight it feels different.
The campus is quiet, the pathways lit in pools of lonely gold under old-fashioned lamps.
Every crunch of gravel under my boots sounds too loud.
My exhaustion is a heavy cloak on my shoulders—not just from the job, but from the constant, low-grade hum of anxiety.
The pressure of midterms, of my scholarship, of him.
I’m so focused on the worn patch of sidewalk in front of me that I don’t see it at first.
A figure. A man-shaped absence where the light won’t go.
My heart seizes, a frantic, sickening lurch.
A man is leaning against the lamppost just outside the pool of light, a shadow waiting in the dark.
My hand flies to my keys, fingers closing around the longest one, my thumb pressing its jagged edge to my skin.
Permission to bleed if I have to. My breath catches.
My muscles tense. Every nerve ending screams a single, primal command: Run.
The figure pushes off the lamppost and steps into the light. Water beads on his hoodie, a cold halo clinging to the fabric. It’s him. Adrian Hale.
The terror doesn’t vanish; it just changes shape.
The undefined threat of a stranger coalesces into the very specific, known threat of him.
He stands there as if he belongs, his long body draped in a black hoodie, backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder.
The light pools over his hair, damp enough that it curls at the edges.
He doesn’t look up right away. He doesn’t have to.
I feel the gravity of his attention before his eyes even lift.
When they do, they find me without hesitation. Steady. Calculated.
“You left this,” he says, his voice low, holding up a folded sheet of paper. My notes, tucked with neat edges I know I didn’t leave behind.
I stop short, my feet frozen to the pavement. He went through my things. “I didn’t—”
He closes the space between us by half a step, the movement unhurried but sharp enough to make my heart hammer against my ribs. “Guess you did.”
He lifts the flap of my bag without asking and slides the page inside—an intrusion disguised as courtesy. The paper is warm from his hand, a shocking, intimate heat that lingers on my skin like static. My pulse kicks up, a frantic hummingbird against my throat.
“Thanks,” I say, my voice tighter than I mean it.
He doesn’t leave. He falls into step beside me before I’ve even chosen a direction, his stride longer than mine.
The gravel crunches under our shoes in an uneven duet until he adjusts, syncing his rhythm to mine.
Then he casually shifts around a puddle, forcing me to follow his chosen path.
One half of me registers it as a simple courtesy.
The other half screams until my blood runs cold: He’s matching your pace. He’s following you.
“You don’t usually work this late,” he says finally, his voice dragging low, like it belongs in darker places than a well-lit campus path.
My step falters. He says it like a fact, not a guess. He’s been watching me. A different kind of alarm, hot and confusing, creeps into my chest.
“How would you know what I usually do?” I ask, my tone sharper than I want, the words a necessary shield.
He doesn’t answer right away, just walks beside me, the scrape of his sneakers a steady, relentless rhythm on the gravel. When he finally speaks, his voice is quiet enough that I almost miss it. “I notice things.”
The simple statement lands like a threat. My mind races. What things? How often? The fear returns, cold and sharp. “You don’t usually lurk outside cafés.”
That earns a low sound from his chest—half amusement, half something else. “Maybe I wanted coffee.”
“You didn’t go inside.”
His gaze slides sideways, his eyes catching mine under the lamplight, sharp and unblinking. “Didn’t need to.”
The cold light cuts shadows into his face, carving his jaw hard, his cheekbones sharp enough to slice.
His hoodie clings damp at the collar, the faint salt of sweat mixing with the rink air that still lingers on him.
I straighten my spine, fighting for air that doesn’t taste of him, fighting to remember I’m the one in charge of our interactions. I am the tutor. He is the student.
But my body is a liar. Every nerve angles toward the space he takes up. My traumatized brain screams. He’s crowding you. He’s too close. This is how it starts.
“You’re crowding me,” the words tear out, sharp and necessary.
“I’m walking.” His voice is low, threaded with something that brushes too close to smug. He shifts deliberately closer as a group of students spills onto the path, their laughter cutting the cold air. His shoulder presses into mine for a second—hot, solid, inevitable. I hold my line.
My mind fractures. One part screams, a primal, terrified response that has nothing to do with Adrian Hale and everything to do with a shadow in a hallway a decade ago.
It’s the feeling of being trapped, of a larger body imposing its will on my space, and the urge to shove him away, to claw free, is so strong it makes my muscles lock.
But another, deeper, treacherous part registers the contact as something else entirely.
Not just a threat, but a brand. A solid wall of heat that I lean into for a split second before I catch myself—a traitorous, involuntary shift of my own weight.
The dual signals of ice-cold panic and white-hot awareness are a dizzying, sickening combination.
The students are gone, but he hasn’t moved back. He’s still a solid wall of warmth against my side. My chest is too tight. My voice scrapes, thin and dry. “You’re the one crowding.”
We pass under a stone archway. A few legacy kids nod at Adrian. He doesn’t acknowledge them. His eyes stay on me, steady and testing, measuring my reaction. I see a phone lift, a camera catching us as we pass.
The heat of my shame and fear crawls higher until the words slip out sharper than I mean. “You test people.” It tastes like a confession of my own weakness.
He doesn’t deny it. His mouth tilts, half curve, half blade. “And you don’t break.”
The words land too close, like his thumb pressing a bruise I don’t admit is there. My stomach knots. I stop at the base of my dorm steps, needing the solid boundary of the building at my back. My fingers tighten on my bag strap until it bites into my palm. “Goodnight, Hale.”
“Goodnight, Harrington.” His reply is soft, but it stamps me with ownership.
I climb fast, my shoes hitting the stone too loud, a desperate retreat.
I don’t look back. Not until the dorm door shuts, heavy and final, the lock clicking home like a vault.
I lean against the solid wood, eyes squeezed shut, breath coming in ragged gasps.
The notes are still warm in my hand, creased from his grip.
My hands shake where his heat branded me through my sleeve.
Fear and want snarled tight in the same wire.
A small, physical proof he isn’t just in my head. He is a real, physical threat.
And tomorrow, I pick the ground.