Chapter 31 Thirty one
Chapter 31 Thirty one
Zara
The morning of departure was a chaotic nightmare, this made me understand why people booked private jets if they could afford them, the lobby of the Meridian Grand was packed wall to wall with exhausted students dragging overstuffed suitcases and professors trying to look patient while they waited for the checkout desk coupled with a hundred conversations overlapping each other about flights and Ubers and whether anyone had remembered to pack. I had barely slept the night before wondering how long it would be before Becca Halloway decided to act on whatever suspicions she had been nursing all weekend even though sex with Darren took me to another zone the exhaustion of thinking about it was still sitting heavy on my shoulders.
Clara was holding our place in the checkout line while Mia and I wrestled our suitcases through the crowd toward the coffee station, there was no way I was getting on a plane without caffeine in my system and Mia had also threatened to commit actual violence if she did not get her second cup before we left. I was focused on the coffee, when Mia grabbed my arm so hard that I nearly dropped my phone and spun around to curse her out, but the words died in my throat when I saw the expression on her face.
"Do not make a scene," Mia said, her eyes was fixed on something across the lobby, "but you need to look at who is standing over by the elevators, and you need to try really hard not to freak out right now because we are in public and there are professors everywhere and I do not think you want to explain to any of them why you look like you have just seen a ghost."
I turned slowly, my stomach dropped so fast I thought I might actually be sick right there, standing near the elevators with their heads close together and their eyes moving toward me every few seconds were Ethan Caldwell and Becca Halloway.
Ethan did not know Becca, or at least I had never seen them together before, had never had any reason to connect them in my mind, so seeing them standing side by side like old friends and co-conspirators, made me look like I've been sentenced to death.
Ethan alone was annoying and Becca alone was unsettling but the two of them together felt like a threat and I doubt this team up or sudden friendship isn't by chance.
"Who is that girl with Ethan?" Mia asked, her voice barely a whisper I could hear the tension in her voice, the same tension that was coiling in my own stomach like a snake getting ready to strike.
"Her name is Becca," I said my voice came out flat and strange, like it belonged to someone else. "She is a graduate student, political theory, and she has been watching me all weekend, I think she knows something, I think she has figured out what is going on between us and now she is talking to Ethan, if she tells him what she knows then two people will know my secret instead of one, and I do not know what Ethan will do with that information but I know he is obsessed with me and he has been rejected by me and I know that desperate people do desperate things when they have nothing left to lose."
Mia grabbed my arm and turned me away from the elevators, forcing me to look at her instead of at the two people who were making my blood run cold, her face was serious all the jokes and the sarcasm stripped away to leave something harder underneath. "Okay, listen to me, you do not know that she has told him anything, you do not know that they are talking about you, you do not even know that they know each other, they could just be two random people who happened to run into each other by the elevators, and you are spiraling right now, Zara, you are spiraling so hard that you are going to make yourself sick, and I need you to take a breath and drink your coffee and trust that we are going to figure this out together."
But before I could answer, before I could even take that breath that Mia was telling me to take, I looked over her shoulder one more time, and Becca was staring directly at me, her sharp blue eyes locked onto Minecraft that made me feel like she could see right through my skin and bones. She smiled and then she leaned over and whispered something in Ethan's ear, something that made him turn and look at me too with a hunger in his eyes that I had never seen before, something darker than his usual desperate longing, something that looked almost like triumph.
"What did she just say to him?" Clara asked, appearing at my side with our room keys and a worried look on her face. "And why are they both looking at you like that?"
"I do not know," I said, and my voice was shaking now, my hands were shaking, my whole body was shaking. I had been afraid of Becca alone and I had been annoyed by Ethan alone but the two of them together, united by whatever they had just discussed, looked like the beginning of something I did not know how to stop. "But I do not like it, I do not like it at all, and I think we need to leave this hotel right now before one of them decides to come over here and talk to me, because I do not think I can pretend to be normal right now, I do not think I can laugh off whatever they are planning, and if they know about Kane, if they know about us, then my whole life is about to become a nightmare that I do not know how to wake up from."
Clara and Mia exchanged a look and then Clara grabbed my suitcase handle and Mia grabbed my arm and together they pulled me toward the exit doors, away from Ethan and Becca and their cold smiles and hungry eyes, away from the lobby that had started to feel like a trap closing in around me.
I did not look back as we walked out into the cold D.C. morning, but I could feel them watching me, could feel their eyes on my back like hands reaching out to grab me, and I knew with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct that this was not over, that this was just the beginning, that Ethan Caldwell and Becca Halloway had just become a problem I did not know how to solve.
The scariest part was that I had no idea what they were planning to do next.