“I think he watches me,” she said at last, her chin tucked into her chest and her voice an inch above a whisper. “I think he’s out there right now.”
“What?” I gasped, standing up quickly. I started to walk over to the window but before I could reach it and peer outside, she grabbed my arm and yanked me back down.
“Don’t look,” she hissed. “Are you crazy?”
“Are you? Eliza, that’s so creepy. Do you not see how that’s creepy?”
“It’s not creepy,” she said. “It’s cute.”
“I’m sorry, but what exactly about being stalked is cute?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said, rolling her eyes. Shifting her weight from one arm to the other, letting the neck of her button-up yawn open wide.
“What is with you lately?” I asked her then, not bothering to hide the disdain in my voice. The judgment, the scorn, the frustration that I had been keeping bottled up at that point for far too long. “Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like this,” I said, throwing my arms up, gesturing to it all. “He’s just a boy, Eliza. Since when do you change yourself like this for a boy?”
“I’m not changing myself—” she started, but I interrupted her before she could finish.
“Yes, you are. You’ve been different. Distant.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered, and I let out a scoff.
“Try me.”
She looked up at me then, front teeth digging into her lower lip. I raised my eyebrows, egging her on, and watched as her eyes darted back to the window.
“There’s nothing wrong with letting him look.”
I stared at her then, disbelief washing over me, the thin line between danger and desire evaporating completely and melding the two together into something else entirely. It was so classically Eliza: driving without a seat belt, diving into the marsh when the tide was too low. Sometimes I thought she genuinely enjoyed the prospect of getting hurt, the threat of impending danger dangling over her heightening the sensation of being alive.
“Pretty soon he’s gonna want to do more than just look,” I said at last, my arms crossed tight. “What are you going to do then?”
Eliza just shrugged, ignoring me, lifting her pen to her lips and chewing on the cap in the same mindless way she used to saunter down the dock, adjusting the triangle of her bikini top before flipping onto her stomach and untying the straps. She was doing it on purpose, I realized, all of it cunning and calculated and entirely for him: cracking the window but never opening it completely. Flashing a glimpse of her bare back before clicking out the light and closing the curtains, letting him wonder what was happening in the dark.
I shot another look out the window, squinting my eyes against the inky beyond, and in that moment, I swear I could see him: a silhouette in the distance, standing on the dock.
The outline of Levi watching us both.
CHAPTER 15
I wake up to the sound of rolling thunder, a shuddering through the house I feel deep in my bones.
We’re three weeks into summer and the noise reminds me of that very first day, the bloated clouds encroaching on campus turning the sky a marbled gray. The way I had glanced out the window as the four of us sat on my bed, the spray of rain suddenly fogging up the glass. I remember thinking Levi had summoned it, somehow, his presence alone turning a perfect morning into something dreary and dark—but the truth, I knew, is that summer storms are normal around here, those reliable rumbles showing up as soon as the sun peaks in the sky. Those flashes of lightning; the torrential rain.
Quick, violent things that disrupt everything before disappearing again once they’ve found their release.
We ended up skipping the party at Kappa Nu, opting instead for a girls’ night in. And I was grateful for it, relishing the opportunity to both avoid Levi and settle into my strange new life. Nicole and Sloane latched on to my stories about him immediately, swigging straight from a bottle of bourbon they brought into my bedroom when I described the way we once found a cigarette butt smoldering in the grass outside Eliza’s window, proof of him moving even closer in the night.
“What a perv,” Sloane said, her hand wringing the bottleneck, mindlessly twisting. I watched as Nicole shivered, long fingers pulling my duvet tight around her shoulders. I didn’t tell them about how Eliza had picked it up, though; that curl of a smile as she rolled it slow between her fingers. The way she lifted it higher until her lips grazed the spot where his had been. I didn’t want them to blame her, somehow, but I also couldn’t help but feel a little thrill about the way we had all started to settle in so seamlessly together—though the irony wasn’t lost on me. The fact that Levi Butler was the thing bonding us all together when he was also the one who tore Eliza and me apart.