LOGINHazelShe had left the house by nine.Not for class â class was not until the afternoon and she knew that. She left because she had sat in her room eating dry cereal and decided she was not going to spend the next four hours in a building where she might turn a corner and come face to face with Silas. Not today. Not in her current state. He could have the whole house to himself and she would take herself somewhere she could breathe without doing a threat assessment before leaving a room.Maya's house was twenty minutes on foot. Hazel showed up at the door at nine twenty-three and Maya's mother let her in without question and offered tea before she had even taken her shoes off. That was the kind of welcome that explained a lot about Maya.She was lying on Maya's bed by nine thirty, staring at the ceiling. Maya was at the desk doing absolutely nothing productive."You know," Maya said, turning in her chair, "you have been acting awfully suspicious lately."She leaned over and poked Haz
HazelShe was standing in the principal's office again.Not sitting across from the desk the way she had been in real life, arms crossed, waiting. She was standing and he was standing and there was no desk between them. He was in the same suit but his face was wrong. Too pale. Too still. His hands at his sides."It's your fault," he said. "You caused my death."She opened her mouth to say something and no sound came out. He said it again. The same words in the same order and she could not move and she could not answer and the room kept getting smaller around both of them.She woke up.The ceiling above her was the right one .her ceiling, her room, the same crack near the window she had looked at a hundred times. But her chest was tight and her shirt was damp and her hands were already moving before the rest of her had caught up with where she was.Inhaler. Nightstand.She found it by touch and got it to her mouth and breathed in slow the way the doctor had told her. Once. Pause. Agai
HazelThe lecture was about something she had covered in the reading two weeks ago. She knew this because she had done the reading two weeks ago and remembered sitting at the kitchen table with a highlighter going through it page by page. She knew the material. She should have been following along without any difficulty.She was not following along. Not even close.Her brain had something else it was working on. Something it would not let go of and would not make clear either. It sat underneath everything, pulling at her attention at random intervals like a word on the tip of a tongue that would not come forward no matter how many times she reached for it. She wrote notes she barely looked at and stared at the board and kept circling back to the same place â the party, the gap, the nothing that came after.She had woken up again that morning and checked herself in the mirror and did not know what she had been looking for. Nothing visible. Just standing there with the same face she alw
HazelSomething had happened. She was not sure what it was but she had woken up that morning with the internal discomfort of a person who has done something they cannot fully account for. Not a hangover. She had barely drunk anything. But a gap in the night that sat at the back of her mind all morning and would not move regardless of how many times she tried to approach it from a different angle.She had gotten home somehow. She remembered the party up to a point â the music, the crowd, the lemonade she had nursed while looking for Maya. Then the heat. Then gaps. Then waking up in her own bed at some point in the early hours with a dry mouth and the persistent sense that something had occurred that she could not place.She had sat at the kitchen table at eight in the morning with a glass of water and tried to reconstruct it. She got as far as the dance floor before the whole thing went unreliable and stopped giving her anything useful.She had not been able to concentrate in her first
Silas Fuck, Hazel. I whispered it low as she squirmed on my lap in the back seat. Her body twisted against mine, hips grinding without control, and my cock stiffened instantly, pressing up into her heat. The drug coursed through her, turning every shift into pure torment for me. I gripped her waist tight, fingers digging into her sides to halt the friction before I lost it right there. The car pulled into our building, driver killing the engine. No time to waste.I scooped her up, her weight light in my arms, and bolted out, rushing through the lobby doors. Elevator ride felt endless, her head lolling against my shoulder, breaths coming fast and shallow. Up to her floor, down the hall, key fumbling in the lock. Inside her room at last, door slamming shut behind us. The drug stripped her inhibitions, pushing her toward actions she'd curse herself for tomorrow. I couldn't let it go that farânot yet.Bathroom first. I set her on her feet, steadying her as she swayed. Her hands already t
SilasHe got the message at ten forty-three.The address came through two minutes after. He was already moving before he finished reading it.The drive should have taken twenty minutes. He made it in twelve. He sat in the back with his jaw set and his phone in his hand going over what he knew. She was at a party. Someone had been following her and that person had been picked up by his people. That part was handled. What was not handled was the fact that she was in the middle of a crowd somewhere in this city without knowing any of it, and whatever had been following her had not been doing it for no reason.He did not like how any of it added up.The car pulled up and he was out before it had fully stopped. The house had light coming from every window. People on the front steps. He went straight in.The front room was packed. He moved through it fast, scanning, not stopping. Not near the entrance. Not by the far wall. Not at the back near the stairs.Then he saw Maya.She was in the m
Hazel's POVMaya ran out the front door. I heard the heavy wood click shut. I heard her car engine start. The loud noise filled the quiet street. Then, the car drove away. The sound faded into nothing. She was gone. I stood in the hallway for a long time. I did not move. The house felt different ri
The room was dark. My laptop screen was black. The only light came from the street. It made long, thin shadows on my floor.The house was very quiet. Maya was next to me in bed. She was a heater. She was breathing slow. We had eaten too many chips. We had talked too much. We were both dead to the w
The movie on my laptop screen was a bright, colorful rom-com, but I was having a hard time following the plot.Maya was sitting cross-legged on my bed, her fingers perpetually in a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, laughing at the onscreen antics of a woman who couldn't choose between two equally hand
The scrape of bare feet against the hardwood floor was the only warning she got.Hazel heard him push off the kitchen island. His footsteps were quiet, unhurried, deliberate. Each step sounded like a countdown in her ears. Three. Two. One.He stopped directly behind her.He was so close that the am







