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.

So, Nico understood—or thought he understood—why Jadon’s face had been the color of chalk, and why he’d been breathing those awful, ragged breaths like he wanted to throw up. He even understood, with a kind of compassion he hadn’t expected, why Jadon had left so abruptly, without explaining anything. But all of that only took up part of his attention. Because he couldn’t stop thinking about Jadon waiting in the cold for a chance to talk to him. And Jadon making that stupid joke about a place that didn’t ID. And the way Jadon had waited while Nico read each star on the Walk of Fame. And then Jadon had ruined it all. And Nico couldn’t stop being angry with Jadon, and he couldn’t stop being angry with himself, and he couldn’t stop being angry because he felt guilty.

Finally, he ended up in a navy quarter-zip, gave up on his hair, and rushed out the door. He was, without a doubt, going to be late.

For the second time in two days, he almost crashed into Jadon. And, for the second time, coffee was involved. The detective was leaning against the wall opposite Nico’s door, and he looked—well, not quite as great as the day before. His eyes were shadowed, his hair lank, and he was wearing the Chouteau College sweats again. In one hand, he held a cup of coffee; a second waited at his feet. He was scrolling on his phone when Nico almost ran into him, and he used the hand with the phone to steady Nico as Nico hit the brakes.

“Easy there,” he murmured.

“Jadon.”

Those darkly sandy eyebrows went up.

“This is my dorm,” Nico said.

“I told you I’m a detective. See how good I’m doing?”

“What are you doing here? The doors are supposed to be locked, and it’s—oh God, I am going to be so late.” Nico scooted around Jadon and headed for the stairs. “Do you realize how weird this is?”

“In my defense, I brought you coffee. And I’m not wearing it this time, so I think that shows both thoughtfulness and an ability to learn from my mistakes.” Jadon caught up with him and held out the second cup. As they took the stairs—Nico bounding two at a time and annoyed that Jadon kept up so easily—Jadon continued, “Also, I want to reiterate that I’m not a stalker, although I can see how this might appear to undermine my case.”

Nico shouldered open the door at the bottom of the stairs, took the coffee, and was surprised by a blast of kid-temp pumpkin latte. He forgot what he’d been about to say.

“I know it’s weird showing up here like this,” Jadon said, and he lowered his voice as a pair of men emerged from a door down the hall. “But I need to talk to you.”

“Look, I appreciate, uh, whatever this is, but we don’t have to have a talk. Nothing happened. Thank you for dinner. You seem sweet, but I’m not at a place in my life—”

“Oh my God, Nico.”

Nico stopped talking.

A radiator pinged. Jadon rubbed under his eyes. He didn’t look tired; he looked like he’d been dragged behind a car and then forced to do calisthenics in vintage college gear.

Finally, Nico shifted his bag and said in the most controlled voice he could manage, “I’m late.”

“We can talk as we walk.”

That didn’t seem to be a question, so Nico pushed out into the hard slap of the autumn morning, Jadon glued to his side.

For the first few steps, the only sound was a warbling birdsong, and a little brown-and-yellow bird flitted from bare branch to bare branch ahead of them. Nico glanced over. Then he said, “Did you sleep last night?”

“I caught a few hours in my car.”

“Outside my dorm.”

Jadon’s droll little smile was another surprise. “Yes, Nico. I hear it. I understand the pattern.” The smile faded, though, and again, Jadon seemed to disappear inside his thoughts.

“Okay,” Nico said. As usual, he was going to have to be the communicator in the—well, relationship didn’t seem like the right word. Stalker-stalkee thing they had going? That was closer. “Why didn’t you get any sleep last night?” In a rush, he added, “And I’m sorry if I upset you—”

Jadon actually groaned at that. “I didn’t sleep because I spent two hours fighting with the ancient security system this campus has, trying to get a decent shot of the suspect from last night.”

“What suspect? What happened? Did someone get hurt?”

“The guy? Last night?” Jadon waited, but when Nico didn’t say anything, he added, “The one who was following you?”

“Huh?” Then memory clicked. “Jadon, he wasn’t following me. I didn’t even know he was there until you started shouting.”

“That’s not exactly a point in your favor.”

“He was some guy walking across campus.”

“He wasn’t walking. He was following. And then he was running.”

“It’s a tiny campus, Jay. It probably looks like we’re following those guys.” He indicated the men ahead of him. “And maybe he was out for a run and taking a breather, then he decided to start running again.”

“At night?”

“I run at night.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Nico rucked his bag up. “Goodbye, Jadon.”

“There’s been a string of assaults on campus,” Jadon said. And then, as they walked, he told Nico about it, laying out the basics, sketching out his investigation. “I’m fairly certain the man I saw last night is the same suspect from the other assaults.”

“Okay, but—” Nico tried to pick from a dozen different responses. He settled on “Then we need more police on campus, right? Until he’s caught.”

“That’d be nice, sure. It’s not going to happen.” Jadon’s dark eyes moved restlessly, as though he were reading some invisible text of the world. “For one reason, the Metropolitan PD is, as usual, stretched thin. For another, nobody happens to believe that the same perpetrator is behind these assaults.”

“But they’re all happening on campus!”

“And, as you pointed out, there are a lot of ways of explaining this away. The most obvious one is that most sexual assaults on campus happen in fall semester—early in the semester, actually. Do you know why?”

Nico shook his head.

“Because there’s a new group of eighteen-year-olds who go to parties and drink too much and end up in bad situations. So, if you’re a lieutenant and you’re looking at Chouteau College and you have a choice between believing this is a normal pattern of assaults, with the usual suspects—the normal pieces of shit, in other words—or believing this is a series of carefully planned assaults by a single, calculating individual, which one do you think you’re going to choose to believe?”

“That’s awful.”

“That’s reality, unfortunately. Lieutenants are experts in reality; that’s pretty much their whole purpose.”

Their steps clipped the bricks for a few yards. Ahead of them rose Eldridge Hall, but instead of walking faster, Nico slowed his pace. “I don’t understand. It’s not like this guy could be targeting me specifically. I mean, you dropped me off. Nobody could have known I was going to be where I was.”

“Nico, that’s not how it works. He doesn’t have to know where you are. He has to know where you’re going. Harlow Hall. Eldridge Hall. Waverley Center. Sterling Library. And you’re right: it might not be you, not specifically.”

The cold made Nico’s ears feel, strangely, hot. “But?”

“But I’m not willing to take that chance.”

“What?”

A hint of color dusted Jadon’s cheekbones, and he gave a tiny shrug, but he didn’t look away.

“So, what?” Nico looked around. “You’re going to sleep in your car and watch my dorm and walk me to class?”

“If you promise me you won’t leave your dorm at night, I won’t have to sleep in my car.”

“Do you think this is funny?”

Nico wasn’t sure he’d seen Jadon angry before, but he saw it now: the way his whole body tightened, and the easy happiness in his face crystallized into something harder, sharper. Nico liked it. He was also fairly sure he was going to hell.

“No, I don’t think this is funny. Do you think this is funny?”

“I think—” Nico shouldered his bag higher. “—I don’t need a bodyguard. I can take care of myself.”

“Great. I’ve got no problem being redundant.”

“I don’t need some walking alpha-male stereotype trying to tell me what I should do and how I should live my life.”

“I think you can handle it for a few days.”

“If this is some weird, psycho way of trying to get me to, I don’t know, be with you, it’s not going to work.”

“Believe it or not, Nico, I don’t want to ‘be with you.’” The way Jadon drew the air quotes, the way he cut a tiny, icy smile at him, made Nico flush. “That’s why I stopped texting you, remember?”

That tiny bird warbled again. Then the morning seemed still.

“You’re a fucking asshole.”

“From what I hear, you’ve got plenty of experience with that.” Jadon folded his arms, planting himself, and chinned toward Eldridge Hall. “I’ll see you at five. Have a great day at school, honey.”