"Is it dangerous?"
"Yeah. Very much."
"Count me in."
ALEX
Seven and a half years ago
Biting my lips, I look out the window of the lecture hall, scanning the campus garden, and fear tightens in my stomach.
I know it, I feel it, they are out there somewhere, waiting for me, hunting me.
I push my glasses up on my nose and strain my eyes. Ever since Bay left, I’ve started wearing them again. My vision got weaker, everything turned blurry. When we were together, I didn’t need them, but strangely enough, I’m back to wearing my big pink frames.
I glance at Dereck, but after this class he has another one, and mine end for the day, and it doesn’t even matter; what could Dereck possibly do against alphas anyway?
The professor drags the lecture out a little and I am almost grateful for it. I take notes nervously on my tablet but my mind is nowhere near the material.
Should I call the guards again to walk me out, even though they already laugh at me and think I am an attention seeker, dismissing my requests as baseless, but I know exactly what is lurking in the garden.
The Tanners.
It all started more than two years ago after what happened with Jared. When I was in awful mental shape I made the mistake of not going with him to file the report for rape. I wasn’t thinking clearly and that was my fault. I let it go and that only made them bolder, more brazen.
I enrolled Jared in a local high school about twenty minutes from his old one, but that didn’t stop them from harassing him.
They waited for him outside the school and things became genuinely dangerous. If other students hadn’t been around that day he could have been in serious trouble again.
Another time, thankfully, the cameras caught them grabbing Jared and trying to drag him toward their car. A teacher noticed the commotion and intervened, and the whole thing was recorded on the school parking cameras. That was when I contacted one of my dad’s former acquaintances, who helped us file for a restraining order.
But that only made them angrier, and more violent. I saw them for the first time in court, and when we were leaving the building, one of them made a gesture that made it clear they would keep watching us.
They quickly tracked down where we lived because they simply followed the school bus and watched where Jared got off. It turned out to be a blessing that our property was under the watch of security guards stationed just two buildings away. We installed additional cameras along with motion sensors, but it didn’t change the fact that those guys kept watching us. Eventually they tracked me too and figured out that I studied on campus.
It became a game for them, walking behind me at a distance of about one hundred sixty feet, pretending to do nothing but letting me know they had their eyes on me.
Oh, how much I hated them. They reminded me of the Hansons, the worst scumbags imaginable. It felt like going fromthe frying pan into the fire. Those guys disappeared, but the Tanners took their place.
More than two years already were filled with depression, nerves, and the mental weight not only of losing Bay but of everything that kept happening.
It took a toll on Jared too.
He felt hunted, convinced they would get him sooner or later, and the stress and sense of terror crushed him. His grades dropped sharply. I caught him smoking a few times and slipping into a generally negative attitude toward any responsibility at home.
Raising a teenager while I was still so young myself turned out to be far from easy.
???
I live in a closed box. There are no joys in my days except for short trips to chess tournaments. I have nothing else. My only friend is Dereck, but he has a boyfriend and sometimes I feel stupid dumping all my misery on him, all the heaviness, all the constant exhaustion of feeling hopeless and dejected, like a walking embodiment of despair.
Sometimes I regret that Jared ever appeared in my life and that I didn’t just die then, that I can’t simply stop existing because this world has nothing pleasant to offer me anymore.
School, constant stress about the Tanners, growing issues with Jared, a suffocating loneliness, and a never-ending painful longing for Bay, for what we had.
My diary is filled with fantasies and sad notes about the possible paths our lives could take. I dream of having him beside me every day, and every night when I fall asleep my thoughts wrap themselves around Bay. When I wake up I reach for him in the bed. Every sexual fantasy I have revolves around him. Myhigh sexual appetite has shrunk to nothing more than a daily session of fucking myself with a dildo, something I do just to shut the world out. Every passing month hurts, and sometimes those darker thoughts creep back in, the ones about ending it all.
After some time, I begin obsessively researching the most effective methods of suicide. I spend long hours reading about people who have taken their own lives, and it becomes a kind of morbid fascination. I look at photos of people who hanged themselves, people who shot themselves, bodies pulled from under bridges, and I envy them. I hide that fixation, of course. I keep a passable attitude around Jared.
