Page 6 of Follows with Intent

“So, I’ll see you there?”

Helpless, Jadon stared at her.

“Don’t come as a cop,” she told him. “It’s tacky.”

“I don’t have time to come up with a costume.”

“You’re spending three days at a glorified sensitivity training. You’re going to be bored out of your mind. Be a real person for once and sit there and pretend to listen while you shop online.”

He opened his mouth to object to the real person comment, and then the rest of the words hit him. He glanced at the calendar. He forgot what he’d been about to say.

Three days.

Three goddamn days at a symposium he’d been ordered to attend. For LGBTQ+ law enforcement officers. Even though he’d objected. And explained how much work he had to do. And, in the end, pleaded.

“You forgot?” Cerise said.

“I can’t spend three days at a training. Shit, Cerise, I’ve got—” He gestured at the stacks of folders. “How the hell am I supposed to take three days off from this?”

“Believe it or not, Jay, people find a way.”

“We’re ten days behind on the Lang kid, and we still don’t have anything. The trail is going to be ice after three more days; what am I going to turn up then?”

“What are you going to turn up if you don’t? We worked that case the way we were supposed to. We didn’t get any hits. It’s not magic, you know. Pounding our heads against a wall isn’t going to change anything.” She softened her voice. “I’m sorry for that boy. You know I am. But Jay, you’ve got to think about yourself for change.”

“He withdrew from school. He went back to fucking Perryville!”

The woman dinosaur-singing “Ave Maria” broke off to stare at them.

Jadon mumbled, “Sorry—”

But Cerise bent over her desk and spoke in a low voice. “Jadon, listen to me. You need to get your head on straight. And you need to do it fast. Two days ago, the captain hauled me into her office and asked me if you were having personal problems. I said no, and the captain started pressing. Was everything okay with Detective Reck? Had I noticed anything unusual? The whole thing like we were one big happy family, like she was so worried about you. When I kept saying you were fine, the questions got more specific. Were you sleeping at the station? Were you sleeping in your car? How was your mental health?”

For a moment, the words didn’t make any sense. “What are you—” The headache throbbed, and it was like a noise, swallowing up everything else. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now. Ever since Barr, you’ve been a black mark for the department. I’m sorry. That’s bullshit, and it’s not fair to you, and it’s not how it should be. But it’s the truth. I’m telling you, the questions the captain was asking—and the fact that she was the one asking them, and not trying too hard to hide what she was doing—that’s a bad sign. They’re done waiting for you to self-destruct, Jay. They want you out, and if that means making a case that you’re not fit for duty, that’s what they’re going to do.” She swallowed and stood straight again. “And that’s why you’re going to go to this stupid symposium, and you’re going to use the next few days to pull your life together, and you’re going to make sure these assholes don’t have a single thing they can use against you. Understand?”

Jadon nodded, but it felt like someone else was doing it. The draft was cold on his neck.

“Please, Jay,” Cerise said. And then, with an effort at good cheer, she added, “See you on Halloween.”

3

Nico

Nico was willing to admit the glasses might have been a bit much. He checked himself in the mirror, though. Decided to keep them. Fixed a stray lock of hair. Carefully mussed another. The slim button-up. The unadorned cardigan. Plain navy trousers that even Emery would have been proud of (or, at least, satisfied with). He looked like a responsible, respectable grad student.

You look like a nerd, said a voice remarkably like Marco’s. Show them tiddies!

True, he did look a little…basic. A little…boring, maybe. The glasses swallowed up his whole face. For a moment, his hand hovered over his placket, as he considered the fourth outfit change of the day. And then Nico stopped. He would not show them tiddies, not when he was busy building a career for himself. He double-checked the buttons to be sure. He took an extra moment to pick yesterday’s clothes up from the floor (he’d been working on that, among other things), and promised himself, next time, he wouldn’t leave them on the floor at all.

By the time he got out of Harlow Hall, it was after eight, which meant he ran across campus. The morning was bright, the sky clear, ivy flaming across the old limestone walls. His breath clouded in the frosty morning air and caught the light and blazed white. Emery might have been on to something; the cardigan definitely wasn’t heavy enough for this morning.

With fall break in full swing, the campus was quieter than it ought to have been. Nico passed an old white guy bundled up in a parka, his bald head gleaming and then snuffing out as he walked a little terrier from sunlight to shadow to sunlight again. A wiry Indian grad student jogged past Nico in the opposite direction and gave him double thumbs up. A pair of thirtysomething women in business casual emerged from the student union building, one of them laughing so hard she had to hang on to the door to stay upright while the other simultaneously laughed with her and tried to shush her. Professional, Nico thought, and he adjusted his glasses as he slipped through the still-open door and into the union.

Waverley Center was warm, thank God, and like the rest of campus, it had a kind of dark-timbered, iron-fixtured gravity that made it hard to imagine undergrads filling the space. The warmth fogged his glasses for the first few seconds—that was new—and Nico wiped them on his cardigan as he did a quick scan.

“Can I help you, sir?”

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