5. Miles
Five
Miles
For three hours I’ve been sitting with my laptop, trying another piece of software. This one seems to be working, but it's a waiting game now. For three hours, Mason has been telling me to get off the laptop and go get some fresh air.
Mason lasted three hours and one minute before he physically closed my laptop.
"Party. Move you fucking idiot.” It looks like Mason wants to be an asshole tonight. He only thinks about his dick.
"I'm working." I snap at him.
"You're always working. Let’s party." He takes the laptop from my lap and throws it to the other side of my bed. “Come on, there are new girls who need to know how good I am in bed.”
I roll my eyes, get up, grab a pair of jeans and a plain black t-shirt, and follow my annoying brother out.
I had plans for the evening that involved a very sexy gymnast. I mean, I don’t think she even knows who I am, but I saw her look my way the other day.
She saw me, and I’m planning on making sure I’m the only person she looks at.
“You know one day I’m going to post a picture of you naked with a small penis just to piss you off.” I turn to face him, laughing at me.
“And I’m sure all the girls who’ve been lucky enough to see will be happy to prove it's a lie.” Idiot.
”So, how many girl numbers are you working for tonight?” I ask Mason.
“First night, let's start small. Ten,” I chuckle to myself at his answer. I don’t think anyone thinks ten is a small number, but knowing my brother, there’ll be no trouble in getting them.
Fuck if I try, I could get them too. “Are you going to talk to Sadie?” I turn to face him, and now he’s laughing.
“You can hack and hide shit, but I can still side glance at your laptop. Anyway, are you going to talk to her or are you planning on just having crazy fun with her?”
“Crazy fun is always so much better,” I tell him as we walk to the party house. I know Declan is inside the house somewhere.
The house belongs to someone on the lacrosse team whose parents made the catastrophic decision to go to Portugal for the week.
The music hits before we're through the gate. Mason is already moving ahead of me, already absorbed, and already someone else's problem. I don’t mind having a no Mason night. If he drinks too much, I’m sure someone will call me.
I’ve had a few nights where he’s had a little too much, and I’ve had a call asking for help.
Let’s see how many times that will happen this year.
I find a wall. I’m not hiding, just looking around to see who’s here, and if there’s anyone I like. I know that sounds like I’m hunting for something or someone. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m hunting for her.
And there she is. She’s sexy, so fucking sexy. She’s dressed in yellow.
My eyes find her before my brain has finished looking.
She's across the room, near the makeshift bar, a fold-out table doing its best. She has one hand around a red solo cup, the other gesturing mid-story.
Juno is beside her in a green dress, Cara slightly behind.
The three of them occupy a pocket of space that the party moves around without quite knowing why.
I don't move toward her.
I stay on my wall, and I watch.
The yellow dress has a strap that keeps threatening to slide, and it’d better not, because it looks like she has no bra on under the dress. Fuck, why is she not wearing a bra? She pushes it up without interrupting the conversation, and then it slides again twenty seconds later.
She lets it go this time.
My jaw tightens at the thought of it slipping further down and every guy getting to see something which is mine.
She doesn't scan the room, most people scan the room, and the crowd, to see who's watching them. She doesn't though. Either she's never had a reason to, or she's decided she doesn't care. I’m hoping it’s because she’s never had to; she’s too sweet to have to worry about anything.
I watch as she lifts the red cup to her lips.
She takes a drink, and there’s only one thought in my head right now.
How would her lips look around my dick? At the thought my dick jolts, fuck, I’m getting a hard on from just watching her drink from a fucking red solo cup.
How hard have I fallen for a girl I’ve not even spoken to?
She says something over the rim that makes Juno throw her head back laughing, and Cara presses her hand to her mouth to contain her own laughter.
Sadie starts laughing with them, and I glance somewhere else in the room before anyone notices I’m watching her.
I can only bear to look away from her for a few seconds and then I’m watching her again.
The crowd thickens near the speakers, there’s a group moving through the room, and she moves with it, angling herself toward the far side of the bar. The trajectory brings her parallel to the wall I'm standing on. Everything in me goes very still.
She's a foot away, her strap is sliding again, and her head is turned toward Juno. Her hair is down the way it was in the dorm window, and she smells like something warm that I have no idea what it is.
She doesn't turn to look at me when she passes, but Juno smiles at me. She knows who I am. She whispers something in Sadie’s ear whilst looking at me, and I wait to see if Sadie turns. She does a small bit, but then Cara grabs her attention and the moment passes.
The yellow dress moves through my peripheral vision, and then she's past me. The warmth in the room goes with her and I'm standing, leaning against a wall, not able to move.
"You've been staring at the same corner of the room for forty minutes." Mason hands me a beer, and I take it. I need something to pull me back to the party.
"I'm thinking."
"You brought your thinking to a party? Come on Miles, a party is where you don’t think.”
I choose not to reply to him. He looks over to where I’m looking at Sadie. He turns back to me and stands in front of me with a smile.
“Go have fun, she might like it.”
Mason pulls me off the wall and pushes me to our group of friends.
“Dance?” a girl asks, and I don’t get the chance to reply before Mason pushes me toward her.
I was going to say yes, hoping it would make me stop thinking about Sadie, and how I’ve become a fucking stalker.
The girl's name is either Tasha or Tara. I know she told me, but I can’t remember.
She moves well; I'll give her that.
Outside, Sadie is losing at beer pong.
She’s losing badly, by the looks of it. Juno is covering her mouth. Cara has taken a tactical step back. Sadie herself is laughing.
Tasha-or-Tara does something with her hips. I tighten my grip on autopilot.
Sadie straightens. Picks up the ball, lines up her shot with the focused calm of someone who has been underestimated, the ball arcs and drops cleanly.
The table erupts.
She doesn't celebrate; she just reaches for her cup with the composed satisfaction I'm starting to recognize. The confidence looks good on her.
Then she looks up, across the room, through the crowd, directly at me.
Just for three seconds, maybe even four.
The girl in my arms rolls her body back against mine and I don't move, don't react, I hold Sadie's gaze across twenty feet of noise, bodies and bad decisions with the same stillness I'd bring to any other variable that needed assessing.
She looks away first, back to her teammates, back to the beer pong, as if it hadn't happened.
The party ends. It’s not all at once but in pieces, the energy leaking out gradually until the rooms are half-full, the music drops and the people who are leaving start finding their coats.
Sadie finds hers at eleven forty-two. I know because I've been watching the door.
She does the rounds finding her friends, Juno, Cara, Maya and Bree.
The yellow dress catches the hallway light when she moves.
The strap has been sliding all night, and she stopped fixing it hours ago.
I’m lucky that no guy tried it on with her tonight.
I’m not sure if I could’ve stopped myself from hurting anyone.
Mason finds me at the wall. "I’m leaving," I tell him, and look over at the blonde next to him, his arm over her shoulder. “You found some fun then?” I ask, making him laugh.
“I have, and it’s going to be wild.” I turn to walk away.
“Miles.” I stop and look back at Mason. “You’re welcome.”
I narrow my brows tight. What the fuck does that mean.
Mason continues. “No guy will go close to her if they want to walk for the year.”
“What did you do?” I’m angry. I close and open my fist.
“I might have said something to the guys. I warned them to stay away from her.”
The fucker has threatened every guy on campus to stay away from Sadie. I’m not sure if I’m pissed off or love him more than I already do.
“I’ll see you in the morning.” I walk away and look over at where Sadie disappears to.
Thirty meters. That's the distance I keep on the walk back.
Thirty meters of dark campus between me and the three of them.
Sadie, Juno and Cara. They have their heels in hand now, their bare feet on the path, and their voices carrying in the quiet.
Sadie's laugh punctuates every thirty seconds. Her yellow dress is a fixed point in the dark, and I’m grateful because it makes it easier to follow her.
They don't look back. Nobody looks back while on a campus, there has never been a safety problem here.
Alderton comes up on the left. Juno badges in. Cara follows. Sadie goes last, pausing in the doorway for a half-second, tipping her head back at the sky the way she did outside Grounds last week.
Then she's inside, and the door closes.
I stand at the edge of the car park, in the same spot as last Friday. Same darkness, same sightlines, same lit building in front of me.
I wait.
The third floor is in darkness, then I watch the corridor light come on, then, a few minutes later, the fourth-floor east window light comes on.
I wait for her to settle in for the night, waiting and waiting. Then the light goes off and the whole building is dark. The campus is quiet enough that I can hear my own heart beating.
I need to get something and then I’ll be back. The flower shop is a fifteen-minute walk from campus.
The Crawford family has always held a key, because sometimes Autumn wants some help with her orders. Cain made us all have a key to make it easier for us to help.
Inside it smells like cold water, cut stems and something fresh. I don't turn the main lights on, the streetlight through the front window is enough to move by.
I know exactly what I'm looking for.
A beautiful flower that is a vibrant purple-violet color, and long-stemmed. I take six and find the paper on the counter. I wrap them the way I've watched Autumn do enough times to not worry about getting it wrong.
Alderton is even darker when I get back, and I wait outside a while longer. I need to make sure she’s fully sleeping before I move.
I stand at the entrance to the building, looking as the badge reader blinks its slow green blink. The corridor beyond the glass is empty. I hacked into the building when I first found out Sadie lived here and got a key card made. It wasn’t hard. It took me less than half a day.
Walking up the stairs to Sadie’s floor, I stand by the door and think about what I’m about to do. I don’t dwell on that thought because I know I’m going to do it anyway.
I take my phone out, I already knew she had an alarm system, it’s a poor system.
Anyone who knows about hacking can break into it within two minutes and that’s without even trying.
I get into the system, turn it off and then scan my card on the reader.
The door gives way with a soft click that sounds louder than it should in the dead quiet of the night.
I pause on the threshold, listening. Nothing.
Just the low hum of the refrigerator and the faint tick of that ugly wall clock. My pulse steadies.
I walk past the kitchen counter and place the flowers on there, then walk to the bedroom, and there she is, sleeping beauty.
I move as if I belong here, gliding through her space the way a shadow slips under a door.
Her laptop is on the small desk in the corner of the room. The screen is dark, but I know it’s not powered off. No one ever shuts it down properly. That’s careless, she needs to do better.
I pull on thin black gloves and lift the lid. The screen glows to life, too bright. I quickly lower the brightness and look behind me to see if she’s still sleeping.
I plug in the small USB drive I brought with me.
I load a custom little backdoor access I wrote myself; it’s nothing flashy, just enough to give me persistent access.
I’ll have camera control, keystroke logging, and full file mirroring.
From now on, every search, every late-night message, every deleted draft…
I’ll see it all. I watch the progress bar fill, my heart beating steady and slow.
I look behind me at Sadie again, she’s curled on her side under that thin blue comforter, with one bare leg kicked out. I fist my hands hard to stop myself from touching her.
Moonlight cuts across her face. Her lips are parted just slightly. She looks so innocent. Vulnerable. Perfect. I watch for a moment longer, counting her breaths, and memorizing the rise and fall of her chest.
I’ve been watching her for sixty precious seconds. That’s all I allow myself tonight.
The USB finishes with a tiny click. I close the laptop lid gently, exactly as I found it, and wipe the desk with my gloves just in case. Then I slip into the kitchen.
I look around for something to put the flowers in, opening the few cupboards she has and smile when I see a vase.
I set the vase down on the counter, right where she’ll see it first thing when she wakes up.
They’re violets, a deep purple, which are almost black at the edges.
They look as delicate as a bruise. I don’t leave a note, not yet.
I stand back and admire my work. The flowers look almost alive in the pale glow of a night light I left on. A little gift for her.
Sleep well, Sadie.
I lock the door behind me the same way I came in, silently. The hardest part of that was not being able to touch her. I’m this crazy over her and I’ve not touched her, not kissed her, not fucking spoken to her, and all I want is her.
This is going to be a fun game. I smile at the thought.