Leia’s POV
The first sign should've been the towel.
Not mine—definitely not mine, considering I use the world's shittiest bath towels that feel like sandpaper mixed with disappointment. This one's actually nice, still damp from someone's recent shower, draped over my desk chair like it belongs there.
Except I haven't been in the room all afternoon. Neither has Chloe.
The smell hits me next: cedar and tobacco, masculine and way too familiar. My stomach does this weird flip-flop thing that's equal parts dread and something infinitely more pathetic.
I stand there staring at this goddamn towel like it holds the secrets of the universe, waiting for some logical explanation to materialize.
Maybe Chloe borrowed it from a friend? Maybe maintenance came by and decided to redecorate with random bathroom accessories?
My body already knows what this means. Has known since that night when his voice made me come apart without laying a finger on me.
Since then, I've been treating my dorm room like it's contaminated with something radioactive, which, honestly, isn't far from the truth.
"You moving into the library or something?" Chloe asks, watching me shove my laptop into my bag with the desperation of someone fleeing a natural disaster.
"Just trying to stay on top of things." My hands are shaking, which is super subtle and definitely won't make her suspicious.
I don't mention the towel. Or how I came back yesterday to find the door cracked open, even though I'm obsessive about locking it.
Or how my Spotify keeps glitching mid-song like someone else has hijacked my account.
Or how my phone battery drains faster than my will to live, even when I'm not using it.
"Feels weird in here lately," Chloe says a few nights later, doing this slow scan of the room like she's trying to identify what's shifted in the feng shui.
I make noncommittal noises because what am I supposed to say?
"Oh yeah, my psychologically unstable deaf stepbrother is probably breaking in here regularly to fuck with my head and leave his scent all over my stuff like some kind of deranged territorial cat."
That conversation would go well.
I don't tell her about the footsteps I swear I heard in the hallway at 3 AM.
Or how sometimes, when I'm alone, the room feels like it's breathing around me. How the air gets thick and charged like right before a thunderstorm.
Ezra's not speaking to me anymore—not in public, not anywhere—but that doesn't mean he's gone.
If anything, the silence is worse. It's like being stalked by a ghost who occasionally leaves physical evidence that he's very much not dead.
I see him everywhere.
Lounging near the athletics wing like he owns the place. Sitting a few rows ahead in lecture, pretending to give a shit about whatever professor is droning on about supply and demand curves.
Walking across campus surrounded by a rotating cast of girls who laugh too loudly and touch his arm like they don't know they're playing with fire.
He never smiles at them. Barely acknowledges their existence, really. But I feel him anyway—this constant electromagnetic pulse of awareness that makes my skin crawl and my pulse spike and other things I'm definitely not thinking about in public.
Tyler starts walking me to class without being asked, which is sweet in that aggressively wholesome way that makes me feel like a fraud.
"You keep looking over your shoulder," he says one morning, all concerned golden retriever energy. "Like someone's following you."
I flash him my most convincing smile, the one I've been perfecting since middle school. "That's ridiculous."
Except it's not ridiculous at all, and we both probably know it.
Tyler's exactly the kind of guy I should like.
Tall, nice smile, breath that always smells like spearmint gum. Safe in the way that should feel comforting instead of suffocating.
His compliments sound like he practiced them in front of a mirror, but I let him deliver them anyway because maybe if I act like I could fall for someone normal, I'll eventually convince myself it's true.
I never let him touch me, though. Not when Ezra's already colonized all the parts of me that actually matter.
Some nights, I just don't go back.
I'll walk campus until my legs ache or curl up in a study lounge chair and pretend to be absorbed in my textbooks.
I blast music through my earbuds loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage, anything to drown out the constant low-frequency hum of anxiety that's taken up permanent residence in my chest.
But every time the music glitches or cuts out, I rip the earbuds out and check behind me like a paranoid person in a horror movie who clearly hasn't learned from other people's mistakes.
He's never there. But I keep looking anyway.
Then one night I come back late—really late, the kind of late that requires sneaking past the RA and praying she's too invested in her Netflix binge to notice. Chloe's already asleep, room dark except for the ambient glow from the parking lot lights.
The smell hits me the second I step inside.
Cedar and tobacco. Ezra.
My chest constricts like someone's wrapped barbed wire around my lungs. I lock the door—once, twice, three times—then sit on my bed and stare at the window like it might suddenly sprout legs and walk away.
I feel like I'm crawling out of my own skin. Want to scream or cry or get myself off just to release some of this tension that's been building for weeks.
But I don't. Because I know exactly whose name I'd whisper when I came, and that's a level of pathetic I'm not ready to acknowledge yet.
The next day in class, Tyler waves at me from across the lecture hall. I don't wave back because I'm too busy scanning the room for a different face entirely.
And there he is.
Ezra, slouched in his usual seat, jaw tight, pen motionless in his hand. He's not looking at me, but that doesn't matter.
The awareness between us is like being grabbed from the inside, all heat and want and the kind of inevitability that makes smart girls do catastrophically stupid things.
I last exactly ten minutes before I'm walking out, locking myself in a bathroom stall, pressing my forehead against the cool metal wall and trying to remember how normal people breathe.
When I get back to my room hours later, there's a note tucked under my bag.
Five words in sharp black ink: "You lock doors too slow."
No signature. No handwriting I recognize. Just those words that make my fingers go numb and my stomach clench with something that definitely isn't fear.
I stare at the note for a long time, and the worst part isn't that I'm scared.
The worst part is that I'm not.