Death isn't an option

Chapter Four

After my late study group, the building empties in layers.

First the chatter goes, students peeling away in pairs and groups, voices fading down the hall. Then the hum of printers and copiers dies. By the time the librarian does a slow walk-through of the second floor, I’m the only one left at my table, surrounded by highlighters and the remains of a vending machine dinner.

“Closing in ten,” she says gently.

“Got it,” I say.

I pack up the way I always do: notes in order, pens capped, laptop in its sleeve, everything tucked into my bag. Muscle memory. It’s only when I sling the strap over my shoulder that I realize how tight my neck is, how my head throbs from cheap fluorescent lighting and too many pages of assigned reading.

Outside, the hallway is eerily quiet. My footsteps echo off the tile. Lights click off behind me in a wave as I move toward the exit, sensors deciding I’m not worth staying awake for.

By the glass doors, the air feels… thin.

I hesitate with my hand on the bar, a weird shiver running over my skin. It’s nothing, really—just that sensation of walking through a spiderweb you can’t see. My scar prickles faintly under my shirt.

“Come on,” I tell myself. “You’re tired. That’s it.”

I push the door open and step into the night.

Campus feels different this late. The chaos of the afternoon and early evening has drained away, leaving pockets of light in a sea of quiet. Pathway lamps cast yellow halos on the sidewalks. A few stragglers cross the quad, heads bowed over their phones. Somewhere distant, someone laughs, the sound thin and disembodied.

The air is cooler than it’s been all week. I breathe it in, rolling my shoulders back.

It’s not a long walk to my dorm. Fifteen minutes, tops, if I cut past the sciences and take the side street by the administration building. I’ve walked it in daylight, cataloging every route. Night just adds longer shadows.

I start down the path, my bag bumping against my hip. The campus security lights flash blue on the far side of the lawn, cycling in a steady, reassuring rhythm. A patrol golf cart hums past on another walkway, the driver nodding absently.

You’re safe here, the VP had said.

I snort under my breath. Sure.

My feet find the familiar route: past the sculpture that looks like a failed metal pretzel, left at the row of trees, straight toward the street that borders campus. It’s not really a busy road this time of night. Just a couple of lanes, a crosswalk, a traffic light.

I don’t put my headphones in. The night feels like something I should listen to.

My thoughts wander anyway.

To the way Knox looked at me over the balcony at Blackridge. The heat of his hand at my back, the low weight of his words: You’re off-limits in my bar. The way my scar had flared under his touch like someone pressed a brand there.

It’s stupid, how often he’s drifted through my head this week. I’ve tried to focus on lectures, note-taking, navigating new faces. But there’s this constant low hum at the back of my consciousness, a sense of being… observed.

“You’re being dramatic,” I mutter. “He has better things to do than lurk in your brain.”

The sidewalk ends at the corner. The street stretches left and right, empty under the sodium-orange glow of the lamps. The crosswalk lines are faded but visible. The traffic light above is red for cars, the digital little walking figure bright and inviting.

I stop at the curb out of habit. Left, right, left. No headlights either way.

The walk sign is solid. I step off the curb.

Halfway across, the world narrows.

An engine revs, loud and sudden. Headlights slice into the intersection from my left, too fast, too close. The car blows past the line where it should have stopped, where the red light still burns.

For a heartbeat my body does nothing.

My brain registers the facts: car, speed, trajectory, distance. This is the moment where normal people lunge backward, sprint, yell.

I don’t move.

It’s terrifying how familiar the paralysis is. My breath stalls in my chest. My legs feel full of cement. The asphalt under my feet might as well be glue.

This is what it was like. Seventeen, headlights, a scream I couldn’t hear over the crunch, lungs crushed under a steering wheel, the perverse quiet in the split second before impact.

An ugly thought sneaks in, slippery and cold: maybe this would be easier. Just… letting it happen. No more trying. No more pretending. Just darkness, and then nothing.

The car bears down. Horn blaring, tires screeching, too late.

Something inside me slips.

For a fraction of a second, I’m not entirely in my own body. The edges of my vision smear. The streetlights drag, leaving streaks. Sound stretches and warps, the horn a long, distorted wail. I feel myself tilting toward something—cool, dark, vast. Like a door cracked open just a sliver, a familiar presence waiting on the other side.

The scar under my sternum pulls hard, as if it’s a hook in my chest and someone is reeling me in.

I don’t see the car hit me.

Because it doesn’t.

Hands seize me, brutally fast.

One clamps around my upper arm, fingers biting through fabric. The other slams against my waist, right over the place that’s burning in my chest. I’m yanked backward and sideways, my feet leaving the ground for a heartbeat as my body is dragged out of the lane.

The car tears through the space where I just was, horn screaming. Wind from its passage whips my hair across my face. A male voice yells something out the window—curse, insult, apology, I don’t hear it. Then the engine roars away, tires squealing as it disappears down the road without slowing.

My back hits brick.

Hard.

The impact knocks the air from my lungs. I grunt, instinctively trying to suck in a breath and getting almost nothing.

There’s a solid weight in front of me, pinning me to the wall so I don’t crumple. Strong forearms bracket my shoulders, palms flat on the brick on either side of my head. A chest pressed to mine, hard and unmoving, absorbing my trembling.

For a dizzy second, all I can process is physical sensation: rough brick at my back, the heat of another body at my front, the dizzying urge to sink or shove or both.

Then my lungs remember how to work. I drag in a breath and the scent hits me.

Not car exhaust. Not asphalt. Something darker and cleaner—soap, skin, the faintest trace of smoke or spice.

“Do you have a death wish?” a low voice says, inches from my face.

I know that voice.

My eyes fly open.

Knox Graves looms over me, his face close enough that I can see the flecks in his irises, the tight set of his jaw. His expression isn’t neutral now. It’s carved with anger—contained, yes, but lethal in its precision.

My heart tries to punch through my ribs.

“What—” I start. My voice comes out hoarse. I have to swallow and try again. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving your life, apparently,” he says, each word clipped.

His arms are still braced on either side of my head, muscles tense under his shirt. His body cages mine, not crushing but unyielding. There’s nowhere to go that isn’t him or brick.

I become acutely aware of exactly how we’re aligned—hips, chest, the line of his thigh against mine. Heat floods my face, creeping down my neck.

“The light was red,” I say. Stupid, obvious. “I had the walk sign. He—he blew it.”

“And you froze,” Knox says. “You saw him coming and you did nothing.”

“I—” My mouth shuts.

Because he’s right.

I didn’t even raise my hands. I just stood there and watched the car come.

The realization makes dread coil tight in my gut. The ugly thought I had a second before—the one that had whispered maybe this is easier—curls up, shamed and exposed.

“I misjudged,” I manage. “It happened fast.”

His eyes flash. “Don’t lie to me, June.”

The way he says my name hits harder than the brick.

“Excuse me?” I snap, anger flaring to cover how shaken I am. “I didn’t ask for a performance review.”

“You didn’t ask to die either,” he says, voice low and dangerous. “You don’t get to step into a street and just… stand there. You don’t get to gamble with your life like that.”

His hand is still at my waist. The heel of his palm presses right where my scar is, and it burns, a white-hot line under his touch. It’s like the near-out-of-body slip has been yanked back and jammed into place, the seam sealing under pressure.

“What the hell are you doing,” I say, “grabbing me out of nowhere in the middle of the night and—”

“Keeping you alive,” he interrupts. “Again.”

My breath stutters. “Again?”

“At the bar,” he says. “Tonight. Here.” His gaze searches my face, furious and assessing all at once. “You have an impressive talent for stepping into danger and pretending it’s nothing.”

No one pulls you out twice, he’d said at Blackridge. He didn’t say it then, but I hear it now.

“I was crossing the street,” I say. “That’s not exactly reckless.”

“And when the situation changed?” he counters. “When it became clear someone else’s stupidity was about to kill you?”

The memory slams into me: headlights, horn, the sense of being half out of myself.

My fingers twitch against the brick. “I didn’t have time.”

He leans in a fraction, enough that his breath brushes my cheek. “You had time to go still.”

The words hit like a slap.

I want to shove him. I want to shrink away from the accuracy of it. Instead I flatten my hands against the wall, letting the roughness of the brick ground me.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I say, my voice shaking with more than just adrenaline. “You don’t get to stand there and act like you do.”

“I know what I just saw,” he says. “You stepped into that crosswalk, saw that car coming, and you didn’t even flinch. You looked like you were waiting for it.”

The strange, hollow part of me that had whispered maybe this is easier goes very quiet.

Tears prick the back of my eyes. I blink them back, hard. “What do you care?” I bite out.

His jaw tightens. For a moment something raw flickers in his expression, there and gone. “I care,” he says, “because I am not letting you get yourself killed in front of me.”

“In front of you,” I repeat. “That’s what this is about? Your conscience? Your liability?”

His hand flexes at my waist. The burn at my scar flares, then settles into a throbbing ache. I swear I can feel something pulsing there that isn’t just my heartbeat.

“It’s about the fact that you are not disposable,” he says, each word deliberate. “Not in my bar, not on my campus, not on this street. Not anywhere I can reach you in time.”

The possessiveness threaded through that makes my stomach flip. Anger and something else twist together, indistinguishable.

“You don’t own the sidewalk,” I say. “You don’t own me.”

His eyes darken. For a second, the air between us feels heavy, charged.

“No,” he says, quietly. “But right now, apparently, I’m the only one treating your life like it matters.”

That hits harder than I want it to. The protest dies on my tongue.

Because the uncomfortable truth is: I didn’t treat it like it mattered. Not in that moment.

I’d stood there and watched the car come.

The realization is a cold wave under the fading heat of adrenaline.

I shove at his chest, the best way I know to fight back against the feeling.

“Let go,” I say. “Back off.”

He doesn’t move immediately. He searches my face again, looking for… what? Panic? Lies? A sign I’m about to step back into the street?

“June,” he says, low.

“Seriously,” I snap. “You don’t get to pin me to a wall and psychoanalyze me because some assh*le ran a red light.”

His mouth goes tight. Slowly—too slowly—he eases back.

The loss of his body heat hits me like a rush of cold air. My skin hums where he was pressed against me, my nerves misfiring.

He doesn’t step far. Just enough that I’m no longer trapped. His forearms are still braced on the wall, his shadow still swallowing mine.

Behind him, the street is empty again. The car is long gone. The only sound is the click of the traffic signal cycling and the distant hum of campus.

“You’re shaking,” he says.

“I almost got hit by a car,” I say. “Of course I’m shaking.”

His gaze drops briefly to my chest, to where my palm has drifted without conscious thought over my sternum. The scar throbs under my touch.

His eyes flick up. A question glints there, something sharp and knowing and unspoken. For a second I’m terrified he can see more than he should—that he knows this isn’t just trauma and old injury, that something else lives under my skin.

Then the moment passes.

He straightens fully, dropping his hands from the wall. The absence of their weight is disorienting.

“Stay out of the damn road,” he says. His tone is flat, but there’s a crack of real anger under it, and something like fear. “I don’t pull you out twice.”

“I didn’t ask you to pull me out once,” I say, but it comes out weak.

He studies me for another heartbeat, as if committing me to memory. My hair a mess from the wind, my back against the brick, my hand still over my scar like I’m holding myself together.

Then he turns.

He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t ask if I need someone to walk me the rest of the way. He just steps off the curb and melts into the darkness between two buildings, his dark shirt swallowed by shadow in three strides.

One second he’s there. The next he’s gone.

The night feels bigger without him in it.

For a long moment I stay where I am, palms flat against the wall, heart pounding. The adrenaline ebbs in shaky bursts, leaving me cold and weirdly hollow.

I replay the last thirty seconds in my head. The car. The horn. The way the world had gone thin and strange right before impact, like I’d been halfway out of myself. The way his hand had slammed into my chest and everything had snapped back into place like a rubber band.

Maybe it’s just shock. PTSD. Old wounds and old wiring misfiring. That’s what any therapist would say.

It doesn’t feel like that.

It feels like something reached for me—and something else grabbed me and yanked me the other way.

“Stop,” I whisper to myself. “Stop thinking about it.”

The walk sign blinks on again, little white figure marching. I push off the wall on unsteady legs and make myself cross the street, this time checking both directions three extra times, as if that will make a difference.

I keep my eyes off the shadows where Knox vanished. I keep my hand over my scar until I reach the brighter, busier parts of campus, where the lampposts and security lights make everything feel a little less sharp.

By the time I get back to my dorm, my heart rate has mostly settled. My clothes still carry the phantom warmth of his body. My sternum still burns.

I tell myself I’ll forget this. That it will file itself away with all the other almosts and what-ifs.

But as I close my door behind me, the echo of his words lingers in the quiet:

You don’t get to be reckless with your life.

I’m not sure which is worse—that he said it, or that part of me believes he might care more about whether I live or die than I do.