Chapter 11 Talia
Talia
I’m tired.
Not the jittery, wired kind of tired I’m used to. Not the kind where my pulse lives in my throat and every sound has teeth.
This is bone-deep. A heavy, worn-out exhaustion that settles in my muscles and hangs off my shoulders.
It’s been two days since the parking lot, since the truck, since the almost that didn’t happen. Two days since the doorframe and his breath in the cold air and the way my body leaned toward Declan before my brain caught up.
And still, last night, I stared at my ceiling half the night, replaying the same loop: the parking lot, the cold air burning my lungs, his truck sitting there like it had been waiting. The way he stepped out of the shadows, tape on his hands, eyes on me.
The way he drove me home.
The way the cab of that truck shrank to the space between his mouth and mine when he leaned in and didn’t quite kiss me.
The old noise is still there in my head—memories, slammed doors, locker metal—but it’s… muffled. Like someone laid a thick layer of ice over everything. My heartbeat feels slower under it, muted, like I’m moving through a quieter world.
I walk across campus with my backpack dragging at one shoulder. The morning crowd is its usual mess—skateboards rattle, someone shouts across the quad, a girl laughs too loud into her phone—but it doesn’t feel like an assault. It just feels… like college.
My fingers curl and uncurl around the strap in a steady rhythm. Left, right. Left, right. My boots beat time on the pavement. A new ritual.
I pass a group of guys loitering near the library steps, voices carrying in the cold.
“—Coach put him back in net for Saturday, you hear?”
“Yeah, man. Guess they worked it out. Still saw the dent, though. Savage.”
“Reid’s a freak. I’d watch my throat around him.”
The last line lands like a small, mean stone.
A week ago, it would’ve sent me straight back to my dorm. I would’ve heard freak and psycho and believed them because it would’ve confirmed everything I already fear about men who hit things when they’re angry.
Now my jaw clenches, but my feet don’t stop.
No one in the audience has a clue what Rylan said. They totally missed his expression at the bar. Nobody heard him verbally abuse me without ever touching me. They didn’t see Declan’s hand slam into steel instead of bone. All anyone saw was the dent.
He is dangerous. The locker didn’t hit itself. My father benched him. The administration wanted his head on a platter. None of that is nothing.
But the version of him in their voices doesn’t match the one in my truck Monday night, knuckles wrapped in white, jaw rigid with control.
The man who kept his hands light on the steering wheel and his eyes on the road.
The man who watched me walk into my dorm and didn’t move until the door shut between us.
The man who asked, quietly, “Lock it?”
Dad’s voice slides in under the memory, low and certain: Give him space. Live wire. Don’t get pulled into the blast radius.
I tug my hood lower and keep walking. The anger in my chest burns low and steady. They can call him a freak in the abstract. They have no idea he’s the reason I walked across this campus this morning at all.
I cut around the science building toward the main lecture hall. My Stats class is in ten minutes. I’m half on autopilot, half replaying that night in humiliating high-definition.
When I got back to my room that night, I almost texted him. The wanting sat in my palms like an electric itch.
Turning the corner toward the wide stone steps, I stop.
Declan’s there.
Leaning against the low brick railing just outside the flow of students, hood up, bag slung over one shoulder.
Stillness radiates off him in a way that warps the space.
People unconsciously arc around him, giving him a berth they don’t give each other.
A solid, quiet obstacle the stream of bodies bends around.
Declan Reid in daylight looks exactly like he did last night in my head and not at all like he did in my head all week. Black hoodie. Dark jeans. Tape peeking under his sleeve, white against tanned skin.
His head is tilted down like he’s watching his boots. But before I can think turn around, turn around, turn around, his head lifts.
Our eyes lock.
It hits like walking into a pane of glass.
He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look away. He reaches up with one hand and slides his headset down around his neck, slow and unhurried, as if he was always planning to.
We’ve had this lecture all semester. For three months, we’ve sat in the same room—him in the back corner, me in the middle—pretending the other doesn’t exist. I’ve tracked him in my peripheral vision since August. I know he’s tracked me.
We’ve spent twelve weeks actively avoiding this collision.
Dad’s warning flashes again—live wire, blast radius, space—and for a second my body tries to obey, every instinct screaming to loop around the building, take the long way, keep his orbit from touching mine.
My body doesn’t buy that. My heart takes off like it’s on the power play. A colder, steadier thought cuts through the panic—I’m allowed to choose my direction, not reroute myself around someone else’s gravity.
The old instinct surges up—duck, divert, disappear.
No.
The word comes from somewhere deeper than fear. A low, stubborn grind of refusal.
He doesn’t get to own this hallway. Rylan doesn’t. The man who locked the door behind me doesn’t.
I do.
I keep walking.
My feet stay steady even though my pulse is a mess. Each step is its own argument.
I’m not running. I’m not.
I don’t slow down when I reach him. Don’t speed up, either. I stop a few feet away, the air between us stretched thin and tight, strung with the memory of cold air and almost-kisses.
“You don’t talk much,” I say.
It’s the first thing my brain offers and it’s objectively terrible, but if I don’t say something, the quiet will swallow me whole.
His eyes skim my face, taking inventory the way he does on the ice. There’s exhaustion there, and something sharper. A tiny tug at the corner of his mouth. “Neither do you.”
A small, unexpected half-smile tugs at my lips. It feels rusty, like I’m trying out a muscle I haven’t used in a while. He mirrors it—barely, fleetingly—and then it’s gone. But I saw it.
“Lecture,” he says. Not a question.
“Stats,” I answer.
He nods like he already knew.
Then he pushes off the railing and falls into step beside me.
Not asking. Not hesitating. Just… joining.
Our strides adjust without talking about it. There’s a few inches of space between our arms, three, maybe four. It feels microscopic.
The silence that drops over us is huge but full. The same heavy quiet from the parking lot, now walking through daylight with us.
My shoulders, which usually ride around my ears by this point in the day, drop a fraction. I hate that his proximity is the thing that lets them. I hate that the crowd feels less sharp with him slicing a line through it.
My fingers rest on the pepper spray in my hoodie pocket. They don’t curl around it.
Two girls coming down the steps clock him, eyes widening. One nudges the other, whispers something I can’t hear, and they both look from him to me and back again before pretending they weren’t staring.
Of course people notice. Of course they do.
We reach the lecture hall doors. The hallway bottlenecks, students shuffling through in uneven bursts. I aim instinctively for the back row; he angles the same way. No negotiation, just parallel instinct.
We take the last two seats beside the exit. Two escape routes at our backs. Two lines of sight to the door. The unspoken agreement is so strong it almost makes me laugh.
He drops his bag, pulls his notebook out, sets his pen on the tiny flippy desk. His thigh brushes mine as he adjusts. Just a glancing touch, denim against denim, but every nerve in my leg lights up.
He goes still.
He doesn’t move away.
The professor starts talking. Numbers. Variance. Something about confidence intervals. White equations crawl across the projector. None of it sticks.
All my focus is on the fact that Declan is a solid line of heat at my right and my body is reacting like it just found a wall to lean against after standing for hours.
I tell myself it’s because he sits between me and the rest of the room. That it’s just angles. Coverage. That if anyone wanted to get to me, they’d have to go through him first.
I don’t look at him. I look at my notebook instead. My hand is shaky as I uncap my pen. The first line of notes is an ugly, jagged mess. I try again.
A loud bang cracks from three rows up as some guy drops his backpack.
The sound detonates down my spine.
My shoulders jerk. My pen skids, gouging a line across the page, and my breath snags. For a split second, the lecture hall telescopes down to that sound and my body lurches toward the old reflex—duck, cover your head, get small.
Something warm and heavy closes around my forearm.
His hand. His fingers wrap just above my wrist, firm and careful, anchoring. That white tape bites into my sleeve instead of a throat.
Dad warned me about live wires. About staying out of the blast radius. About not getting close enough to feel the heat.
“You’re good,” he murmurs, just loud enough for me to hear over the professor’s voice. “Just a bag. You’re good.”
His thumb presses once, the smallest squeeze. Not rubbing. Not stroking. Just… here.
The logical part of my brain ticks through it. He’s right. Door at the front. Emergency exit to the left. The dropped backpack is already being kicked out of the aisle. No one’s shouting. No one’s slammed anything shut and turned it into a weapon.
I breathe in.
Coffee. It’s on his breath, faint and bitter. It blends with the normal smells of a packed classroom—old carpet, dry marker, too many bodies—but my brain tags his scent and holds onto it, drowning out the panic.