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My student has disappeared into thin air.
I stand rooted in place, ice cold sweat trickling down my back.
Just like that, I’ve lost her.
Nine
Lane
It’s childish to run away from my problems, I know. Childish to hurry away from Ambrose’s calls, refusing to have an adult conversation about the fact that he just tore out my heart and trampled it. And childish to wander into Kephart town and pace the streets for hours, wandering in and out of book shops and thrift stores without buying a single thing, just desperate to keep my body moving and my thoughts away from campus.
This is probablyexactlywhat my parents would expect of me. Oh, Lane? Crushing on her tutor then falling apart when he doesn’t want her? Of course she’d go shopping to feel better! She has more shoes than brain cells!
Bleurgh.
My phone keeps buzzing in the bottom of my backpack, vibrating against the base of my spine, but I ignore it. I don’t need any stern welfare checks from Ambrose Brent, because he made his position completely clear.
This was becoming a distraction.
If only, motherfucker! If. Only.
If I’d haunted Ambrose Brent’s thoughts half as much as he haunted mine this week, he would never have called things off so easily.
Clothes hangers slide over the rail as I browse in a third thrift store, metal clinking, and I barely register the brush of fabric beneath my fingers. This is just something to do with my hands; somewhere to point my eyeballs while my insides fall apart. The store smells like dust bunnies and gingerbread, and it’s stuffy and warm, but at least it’s far from campus.
From Ambrose.
“Looking for a gift?” a white-haired older woman calls to me from the checkout stand, her eyes crinkling kindly behind her glasses. She cocks her head, expectant.
I glance down. I’m in the men’s section, flicking through lumberjack shirts.
Awesome.
“Looking for me, actually,” I tell the woman, hooking one arm like I’m flexing my non-existent bicep. “Thinking about running into the woods to become a lumberjane.”
She clucks with amusement, but now that I say it out loud, that plan is not half bad.
Sure, I have zero upper body strength and get awful hay fever in the summer. Sure, I’m scared of bugs and weird noises at night. But I could totally adapt to the woods! I could learn to swing an ax, I could light campfires, and I could…
No, these shirts are all ugly.
Whatever.
“Thank you,” I call to the woman, waving as I leave the store. Maybe I won’t run away to the woods, but I’ll findsomethingto distract me from Ambrose Brent.
* * *
One dumb horror movie later, I’m fast running out of excuses to stay away from campus. My phone stopped buzzing in my bag about an hour ago, and I can’t decide if that makes me feel better or worse. Mostly I feel empty, I think.
I get a giant slice of pizza and eat it off a paper plate, standing up outside and squinting out at the hazy pale sea in the distance. Hot cheese burns the roof of my mouth, but I keep chewing, robotic, trying to think of anything except Ambrose Brent.
That calculus test I have coming up.
The full laundry hamper in my room.
The voicemail my parents left me last week, asking with genuine concern how I was ‘coping’ with my classes.
Anything except narrowed hazel eyes, and that deep voice rumbling down to my bone marrow. Anything except the firm strength of a certain chest beneath my hand, and the way his buttons snagged on the heel of my palm as I stroked down his body, and the red mark his glasses leave on the bridge of his nose.
