CHAPTER 2.- THE UNTOUCHABLE NOTICED ME
969 Words
He walked away after that like he hadn't just rearranged my entire campus existence.
No explanation. No follow-up. Just those three words left in the courtyard air and then Cael turning and moving through the crowd the way water moved through gaps, easy and inevitable, gone before I had processed what happened.
People were still looking at me.
Not the way they had been looking at me thirty seconds ago, when Ethan was reading my private messages out loud for entertainment.
Differently now. With that particular recalibrating attention that meant they were trying to fit new information into a story they thought they already knew.
Seren.
The quiet design student. The girl nobody had particularly noticed.
With Cael Ashford.
I picked up my bag and walked to class.
Professor Yuen spent the first twenty minutes on visual hierarchy and negative space and I wrote down everything she said without absorbing a single word.
She's with me.
I had never spoken to Cael Ashford. I had been in his vicinity enough to have assembled an impression from a distance, same as everyone else. Controlled. Precise.
The kind of quiet that wasn't shyness but was closer to economy, a person who didn't spend anything he didn't intend to. In two shared electives he had never once looked in my direction.
I had handed him a printout once when the row passed the stack along and he had taken it without glancing up.
That was the complete history of us.
So either he was the most impulsive person alive, which everything observable about him contradicted, or he had said those words for a reason I wasn't seeing yet. Both options were unsettling in different ways.
I found him after the seminar.
It took less effort than it should have. I knew his schedule the way you knew the schedule of anyone unavoidable on a small campus. Tuesdays and Thursdays he ate lunch in the west courtyard. Alone, always, which was the other thing people talked about.
His teammates ate together. His teammates' girlfriends ate with them. Cael ate alone with whatever he was reading, seated with his back to the wall and his eyes occasionally lifting to scan the space.
He was there now.
I sat down across from him without being invited and put my bag on the table between us like a small declaration.
He looked up from his book. Nothing in his face shifted, which was somehow more unnerving than if it had.
"You don't seem surprised," I said.
"I'm not."
"You knew I'd come."
"I assumed you would."
I looked at him. He looked back.
The same grey eyes doing the same locating thing, like I was something he kept needing to verify.
"What did you mean," I said, "by what you said."
"Exactly what it sounded like."
"It sounded like you told the entire campus we were together. We have never spoken. You don't know my name."
"Seren Adley," he said.
"Design track, second year. Scholarship student. You work at the campus print shop three shifts a week and you take freelance illustration commissions to cover the gap your scholarship doesn't. You got here on merit and you're trying to leave the same way."
I stared at him.
"I know your name," he said.
"Why."
He closed his book and set it down and looked at me with the expression that I would come to understand meant he was calculating exactly how much to give.
"There are people on this campus," he said, "
who noticed you this morning. Not because of your ex-boyfriend. Because of something else. Something you wouldn't have a word for yet."
"Try me."
Something moved in his eyes. Almost became something. Didn't quite get there.
"Not here," he said.
"You just told three hundred people we're together including half your fan club who are going to have opinions about that.
You owe me more than not here."
Something crossed his face fast enough that I almost missed it. Almost looked like it could have been amusement.
"Tonight," he said.
He reached into his jacket and set a card on the table. A building number and a time, nothing else. "Come alone."
"And if I don't."
"Then the people who noticed you this morning will find ways to get close to you that I can't prevent."
He said it without drama.
"I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you how it is."
I picked up the card.
"You're a lot of work,"
I said, "for someone I've never spoken to."
Something crossed his face. Too quick to name.
"Tonight," he said again.
I stood and shouldered my bag. I was most of the way across the courtyard when something made me stop. Not a sound. More like the feeling of being watched by something that wasn't using its eyes.
I turned.
Cael was still at the table. Still watching me. But behind him, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his gaze fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing casual in it, was a man I had never seen before.
Older than the students around him. Broader. He wore no expression at all and yet every line of his body communicated something that moved through me like a current before I could think to resist it.
He wasn't looking at me the way people looked at strangers.
He was looking at me the way people looked at things they intended to have.
I looked back at Cael.
He had turned, seen where my eyes had gone, and the stillness in his face had become something harder.
His mouth barely moved.
Tonight, he said. No sound. Just the shape of the word.
I walked out fast and told myself it was not because I was afraid.
I was almost convincing.
- Writer
