One of the Lineage instructors sporting a faculty I.D. cut across the lawn toward us at record speed. Julian and I tried to separate and act like we were walking to our respective classes and didn’t hear the guy shouting at us, but it was too late. A second faculty member cut Julian off from leaving the campus, and the instructor who spotted us yelled at me until I stopped walking.
“What are you two doing?” the professor asked me as he stepped in front of me.
I saw from the corner of my eye that Julian was being brought back over to stand next to me.
“Just going to class,” I answered.
The professor looked down his nose at me. “It looked like you were having an argument, and it was getting physical.”
“Not at all,” I laughed. “We’re friends, we were just playing around.”
“Yeah,” Julian said to back me up. “We’re going to be late for class, though, so can we go now?”
“What class are you going to?” the other guy asked.
Even with sunglasses on, I could sense the blank look on Julian’s face. Our hesitation lasted a second too long, and before we knew it, we were being escorted to the Dean’s office. As we sat outside the office waiting, Julian looked for ways that we could sneak out of there without being caught. I, on the other hand, had my eyes on something else.
And the second the secretary stepped away on a phone call, I stood up.
“What are you doing?” he whispered to me as I walked behind the registrar’s desk to open the file cabinet.
“Looking,” I answered. I knew that one-word answers drove him crazy, but it served him right for tracking me down. If he hadn’t come, I likely wouldn’t have gotten caught. He was the one that started all the fucking noise, after all!
I opened the drawer and started flipping through the files when Julian hissed at me again. “Looking for what?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’ll know it when I see it.” I lifted my sunglasses up to the top of my head so that I could get a better look.
Julian jumped off his seat and ran over to me and pushed my glasses back down onto the bridge of my nose.
“Ouch!” I said. “What the hell?”
“There are cameras in here,” he said as he pointed to the corners of the ceiling. “Don’t be stupid. If they catch you on camera, you’ll get expelled from Goldshire for trespassing.”
He was right, I was being careless. I had to get better at sneaking around if I wanted to figure any of this out.
“Hey!” the Dean shouted at us as his office door opened, and he caught us standing in front of the open drawer of private files.
“Run!” Julian said. He grabbed my hand and shoved us right out the door, nearly knocking down the Dean in the process.
Once we hit the outside grounds, I was already breathless. I tried to keep up with him as we saw the cobblestone street come into sight, but then I remembered my backpack.
“Julian, I left my bag in the tree!”
“We can’t go back for it,” he said. “They’ll catch us. We need to get off the campus and back to Goldshire.”
“My I.D. is in my backpack.”
Julian came to an abrupt stop. Losing my I.D. wasn’t a problem, but Lineage getting a hold of it was. If they found my bag, they could prove I had trespassed on their property. We ran back to the tree, and Julian pulled my bag down and swung it over his shoulder. But just as we were about to make a run for it again, we heard the security guards coming near.
I looked at him in a panic, and without hesitation, he grabbed me around the waist and hoisted us both up into the tree. We climbed just above the bottom limbs of the branches to get higher and above the Spanish moss, which hid most of the canopy above. Balance was also not my forte as I struggled to hold onto the branch without falling. Julian saw me start to teeter dangerously close to falling off and climbed from his branch over to mine. He wrapped an arm around my waist as he laid on top of me and held us both steady against the wide branch of the tree.
“When did you become this nimble?” I teased him in a whisper.
Our bodies were pressed together, and our faces were so close that our noses were touching.
“I guess when I needed to start saving your ass.” He grinned. He stared at me silently as we heard the security guards pass by underneath us. I felt something press against my pelvis, and for a moment, I got that heated feeling again. Julian turned his head and diverted his eyes from me and acted like he didn’t feel it. But when the guards had passed, he turned his face back to me and our lips were so close that they brushed against each other.
It wasn’t a kiss. That would have been weird. But it was something. The kind of something that had been happening a lot between us and wasn’t simply going to go away.
“Come on,” he said as he rolled off of me and dangled by one arm from the branch. He dropped to the ground and then called for me to jump down too.
“Uh, it’s a bit high, Julian,” I yelled down to him.
“Trust me,” he said.
I heard him but couldn’t see where he was through all the moss. So, I closed my eyes and slid off the branch, hoping that if I fractured or broke something, it wouldn’t be my writing hand. But Julian caught me and set me down onto my feet without a scratch.
We were careful not to be seen again as we made our way back across to Goldshire, and it seemed like we had narrowly managed to escape detection that time. Julian came back to my dorm with me, and I fully expected a lecture about not being so careless and reckless or about dropping the wild obsession about finding my mother’s killer.
But instead of reprimanding me, he headed straight for the door.
I assumed he was too tired—or too furious—to tell me how stupid I was. But just before he left, he froze beneath the frame, his back still to me.
“The next time you plan on doing something stupid, you damn well better tell me. Because whether you like it or not, I’m coming with you.”
And as his words struck my gut, he passed through the doorframe. Leaving me with my thoughts, my suspicions, my questions, and my shock.
3
