Page 19 of Follows with Intent

Down the street, leaves skittered along the gutter.

Jadon unlocked the door with the fob. As soon as the car beeped, Nico opened the door and got into his seat. He slammed the door.

In the car, it wasn’t cold enough to see his breath, but Jadon felt it, the cloud of invisible heat brushing his face, like someone was stoking a furnace in his belly.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m great. I had a great meal. It was a great night.”

Jadon sat there for a moment, keys in his hand. Then he started the car and drove back to Chouteau.

When he found a parking spot at the edge of campus, he looked at Nico. The cool light from the dash gave him luminous cheekbones, taut, gleaming skin, and the dark coal-fire of his eyes.

“I feel like I did something wrong.”

Nico was already opening the door, and his words ghosted back. “You were a perfect gentleman.”

The door shut hard, and Nico strode off into the night.

Jadon reached for the shifter, watching him go, already chafing his arms. Nico disappeared into a pool of shadow. Then the blue of an emergency light glimmered in his hair. Then he was gone again. Jadon thought of Dalary Lang, going home alone one night. And calling himself every kind of stupid, he killed the engine and got out of the car.

Just making sure, he told himself. until he gets to his dorm.

He kept his distance. Nico already didn’t like him; no point in confirming his fears that Jadon was some sort of stalker. For the first thirty yards, the cold cut through the Chouteau sweats. Then it settled into him, and the pressure in Jadon’s chest eased, and the ache in his head quieted. It was better things had turned out this way, honestly. It had been a clusterfuck of a disaster, in technical terms, but this was actually better because—

Something moved in the darkness.

At first, Jadon thought it was his eyes playing tricks on him. But then a figure took shape in the darkness. The man—Jadon decided it was a man—stepped onto the path and followed Nico. A black hoodie. Dark jeans. It was a college campus, and dark, hooded clothing wasn’t exactly uncommon. But one thing you learned, if you were a detective and you took your job seriously, was that people had all sorts of tricks for disguising themselves, but they often forgot one thing: the way you walked could be as identifying as anything else. And right then, Jadon recognized the gait of the man ahead of him. Confident, almost relaxed. Sure. And moving straight after Nico.

Questions spiraled: why Nico? That one, at least, had a possible answer: now that Jadon thought about it, he could see the physical similarities between Nico and Dalary Lang. But why now?

As quickly as the questions had come, Jadon filed them away. The upper levels of his brain turned off, and what remained was dark, oiled gearwork. He picked up his pace, careful as he set his feet down so that his soles wouldn’t scuff the brick pathway, not quite breaking into a jog, but certainly passing the mark of a power walk.

Ahead, the suspect kept a comfortable distance from Nico. They passed in and out of pools of light. Nico had to be freezing in that ridiculously thin clothing; even at a distance, Jadon could see him huddling into the breeze. But if he noticed the man following him, he gave no sign of it.

Harlow Hall came into view—in the dark, feathered by security lights, shadows seemed to ripple over the buttresses. The suspect started to move faster. Then, between one heartbeat and the next, he was running.

Jadon sprinted after him. His shoes slapped the pavement, but he was past caring. He shouted, “Stop! Police!”

The suspect gave a startled glance back, his pace faltering for a moment. And then he buttonhooked right, darting down a narrow alley between two buildings. Jadon had a glimpse of Nico backlit by one of the security lights, staring. Then his vision tunneled to the alley, and the deeper darkness within it.

A knife coming out of nowhere. The heat of steel opening a path across his belly, up his chest. Hands holding him down. Ropes that wouldn’t give.

They were only memories, but they went off in his head like fireworks. He couldn’t breathe. His heart hurt like someone was squeezing it.

And then, somehow, it was over.

He stood in the alley, in the dark, alone. And the wind was like the flat of a blade.

8

Nico

Nico slept poorly, and when he woke, a distant, rational part of him realized he was what Emery would have called on one. It took him an extra fifteen minutes to get his hair right, and by the time he got dressed, he hated the rust-colored sweater. After ripping it off, he had to fix his hair again. The blazer, which had seemed playfully boxy when he’d bought it, now looked like a pool cover.

The whole time, he kept thinking about the night before. Not only the train wreck of dinner, although that had been strange enough. But the end of the evening too: Jadon sprinting out of the dark, chasing off a man in a hoodie, and then mumbling an apology before he left, white-faced and sweating in spite of the cold.

In some ways, that part actually made the most sense. Nico had learned a lot about Jadon over those midnight texts. Maybe it would have been different if their texting had taken place during the day. But Jadon’s schedule meant that his messages had always come late, when Nico was caught between the luxury of a grad student’s late nights and the harsh reality of Emery Hazard as a boss in the morning. And because the messages had come late, they had come when both men—or so Nico believed—had their guards down, their inhibitions lowered. With the world shuttered in darkness, the texting had felt confessional, a place Nico—and Jadon—could say things he never said to anyone. It had felt safe, too, if Nico were being honest, because Jadon lived a hundred miles away, and because the distance was a barrier that kept it from becoming real. And the safeness of it, the ability to say what he wanted to say and, to his surprise, discover that Jadon was both supportive and understanding, had only made it worse when one day, without explanation, Jadon had stopped answering. Because the message had been clear: something that Nico had revealed about himself, some confession or truth or secret, had been too much, and whatever Jadon had learned about him, it had made him want to end things.

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