PARANOIA

Jane

Gaze detection. That was the word given to the ability to tell when someone was watching you. 

I focused on the supposed science of the phenomenon rather than the sensation that made my skin crawl, even in the well-lit, populated library. The theory was murky at best, thoroughly debated in scholarly circles and I was just a girl who heard things that weren't there. 

I could have been imagining more than the echo of droplets on concrete, inventing things to get under my skin. Other evening library goers remained preoccupied by study groups or homework. Even the fast approach of Hallowe'en didn't put them on edge. 

Maybe it was time to go. Maybe it was time to put away my stack of books on premonitions and mediumship. How easy it could have been to blame the influence of all the pages. I could write it off as  a trick of the subject matter. 

Or, or I was just paranoid.

I gathered up my dream interpreting books, hauling them to one of the carts stationed at the end of a row of shelves for the librarians to sort back onto their shelves. One book, I held onto. I flipped through it, reconsidering whether it was really something I needed to bring home to get me more judgement from Bia. 

A flicker of movement caught my attention at the end of the aisle. 

The shiver ran down my spine before logic could stop it. It was nothing. One of many students digging for citations for papers due by Monday. Not everything was orchestrated by dead girls in their diaries. I couldn't keep trying to shape the rest of my life into that mold. 

I swallowed down my own justification, sidestepping to look down the aisle, then the next and the next. 

"Watch it!" 

I collided, dropping the one book left in my arms. The girl raised her hands, side-stepping around me. Deserved. She didn't owe me the help of gathering myself. I don't think she could. The books really were getting to me. 

I shuffled to the woman left at the check-out desk, her eyes enlarged behind her thick glasses. 

"Just the one?" she asked.

I nodded, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder as I handed her my student card. Get it together, Jane. 

"Holding a seance for Hallowe'en?" she asked, holding the book a little too long before giving me a knowing smile. "Talking with the Dead. Sounds like a good one!"

It was the right season for the subject. Every student society on campus had to have an event poster up, ranging from perfectly innocent activities like pumpkin carving to all-night, DJed Hallowe'en weekend parties.

The smell of pumpkin spice was in the air.

"Something like that." I played along, like it was our little secret. Like it was a game, trying to contact the deceased. Like I was headed off to a slumber party to sing Bloody Mary to a mirror or crack open the Ouija board.

Being scared was fun on Hallowe'en.

Could the librarian see the uneasiness on my face?

"Good luck." She handed the book back to me and before she could try any more small talk, I shoved the book into my backpack and shuffled away, hiding the cover and the title from sight in my backpack.

Without moving bodies to dampen the sound, my footsteps echoed through the Engineering building, reverberating off old brick and tall glass windows. Too quiet. I left the building through the first door I came across.

The air tried to nip at me while I walked, fighting to find the gaps in my scarf and my jacket and succeeding in burning my cheeks. October on the air. 

The towering, regal buildings of the university caught themselves against the last of the sunset, silhouetted against a practically red sky. Wind whistled sharp through the trees, tossing orange and yellow to the ground to crunch under foot.

I loved all those things about Autumn in Boston, but something about it sent chills up my spine and not because the bite of wind wrestled through my layers.

At least there wasn't the same feeling of eyes following me. Instead, it was replaced by the unsteadiness of being alone, even though I stood on the same curb almost every day, watching for Rhys to drive over from Boston College only twenty minutes away.

Definitely paranoia. I had a history of hearing things, seeing things. I crunched leaves under my feet as I waited, avoiding eye contact with people drifting over to the bus stops nearby.

"Need a ride?"

An older Buick pulled up next to me. Something from the '90s in an odd champagne shade.

I blinked, staring at the driver. He didn't look university-aged, not within the typical late teens-early twenties range students tended to be. His thin beard and wool jacket might've been appropriate for a professor, but not any of mine.

"I'm just meeting someone for sushi. It's not far." I forced my lips up. Damn my parents and my polite upbringing. I sure wasn't going for sushi now. 

"You sure?" He smiled something that turned my blood cold, no matter how warm and genuine he seemed.

Something in the back of my mind felt guilty, like a deep-seated societal kind of doubted that I assumed wrong, that I was rude without reason.

It was an almost funny kind of guilt. After all, didn't I deal with enough charming liars?

I wrapped my jacket tighter around me.

"Very sure."

I turned, continuing down the curb to the crosswalk toward McKinley High School. Only five minutes to Sichuan Gourmet or the Asian bakery. Five minutes to somewhere warm and crowded, somewhere that wasn't that curb in front of the Engineering department.

My hand twitched for my phone, desperately wanting to call someone, whoever would answer first. It wouldn't ease the continuing gnaw in my stomach, a paranoid belief that there were still eyes on me as I kept a quick pace down St. Mary's Street. I didn't dial a number until I was beyond the high school, sure that no champagne Buicks were lurking around the corner.

Rhys Davenport. Call. Leaves crunched under my boots, wind tangling into my hair. And the phone rang and rang and rang until I got his voicemail. Hi, I missed you. Get back to you when I can...

It was paranoia. It was 30% being a young woman just offered a ride by a stranger and 70% blowing it out of proportion.

I clutched my phone. Two more minutes to Beacon Street.

Beacon Street was a whole smorgasbord of different cuisine. Thai, Sichuan, tacos... not really evening hideouts, though. I walked into the Japanese bakery instead, lingering a moment by the front window.

My phone vibrated in my hand, but the second I hit call, a flash of iridescent champagne flashed by the window.

"Jane?... Jane? Hello?"

What was the license plate? A flash of Massachusetts: The Spirit of America red and blue. 3. There was a three in it.

"Jane!"

"Yes! I'm sorry," I answered. The car was gone, past the lights to who knew where.

"Jesus, you gave me a heart attack there for a second."

It took a second for the realization to sink in, the distinct memory of being on the other end of a call that turned into nothing but white noise.

"I know." I wasn't dead or nearly dead. Not yet. "Are you almost done over there? Is history finished with you for the night?"

No matter how hard I tried, my voice didn't convincingly sound innocent.

A long pause.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm just at Japonaise."

"Jane, I know you. You can't nothing me," he said.

That was an unfortunate truth, the darker side of that particular coin. An easy I'm fine didn't work on Rhys. Not anymore. He couldn't use it on me, either.

I sighed, weighed heavy by being, apparently, completely transparent.

"Just come get me?" Could that sound even sadder and more pathetic?

"I'll be there in twenty."

He hung up, leaving me to distract myself with red bean filling and green tea.

It only took him eighteen minutes to pull the Datsun to a rumbling stop outside the cafe.

Before he could jump out of the truck, I hopped in. Eighteen minutes was enough time to relax, enough tea to calm nerves, enough azuki to settle my stomach.

"What happened?"

The truck peeled out of the parking lot, back out onto Beacon Street. It wasn't a long drive to the apartment complex, caught between Boston University and Boston College.

"Some random guy offered me a ride and I can't tell if he was a creep or being polite or... or something else."

He reacted more or less the way I expected, starting in the more downplayed stage, his jaw twitching, knuckles going white against the steering wheel.

"What did he look like?" Rhys asked.

"Older than us. Almost like a professor, but not one of mine." He was far closer to the stereotypical English professor than one of the men who stood at the front of my classes, ready to crunch numbers or talk enthusiastically about robotics.

"What kind of car?"

"Buick. Like a shimmery cream. Might've been a Century. Maybe a Park Avenue? I wish I noticed. But old enough to have the hood ornament. Massachusetts plate with a 3 in it." The tri-shield logo was unmistakable on the hood. That was something I was very sure of.

"You're incredible." Rhys said.

"Thank you." I shrugged. "If we have stalkers, they'll need to do better."

It would be so much nicer if we didn't have stalkers.

"Do you ever feel like you can't tell the difference between paranoia and what's actually something to worry about?" I asked.

Rhys' hands tightened around the steering wheel. "More than I'd like to admit. I get this feeling like I'm being watched sometimes. I never know if it's real enough to bring up." He fumbled for his cigarettes at a stoplight, just holding it in his hand before it turned green again.

"I had that too, today. It's not just you." Goosebumps prickled across my skin.

Rhys inhaled sharply through his teeth. "Fuck."

Yeah, that about summed it up. What were the chances of imagining it independently?

He pulled into our building's parking lot.

No sign of champagne or hood ornaments.

I dragged myself out of the truck, reluctant to meet the wind again when the Datsun was so warm. Rhys' door slammed shut before mine did.

"Hey."

Before I even turned completely, he swept me into him with one arm. I let him and let myself be someone who needed to be swept up like that once in awhile. I pressed my face into his chest to breath him in, the whole mix of smoke and fabric softener and the smell that was just Rhys. Something comforting. For a second or two, I focused just on breathing before I looked up to find him waiting patiently to kiss me.

I needed him, even when he tasted too much like coffee. On my tiptoes, I met him halfway. The first kiss, a sweet brushing. The second, a deeper kind of thing that I sighed into. Then I settled back on my heels, satisfied enough for the time being because these weren't fleeting moments. It wasn't the same torture of seeing him too little over the summer, when he still lived in Cullfield and my family already moved back to Boston.

"I'll see you up there," he said, letting me go to light up his cigarette.

Part of me wanted to stand outside with him, but the wind wasn't especially convincing and I didn't smoke.

I let myself into the building, heading up a short flight of stairs instead of straight down the hall where I lived. I didn't have a spare key to Rhys' apartment, but I had something just as good.

"Lucas! It's me!" I rapped on the door of 202.

It took a second, but the lock clicked on the other side of the door. Lucas appeared looking wary behind his glasses.

Lucas perpetually looked like he just woke up: disheveled sandy waves of hair, sleepy brown eyes, a kind of generally unimpressed frown, like someone interrupted a good nap.

And he was notably shorter than Rhys. Lucas was barely taller than Bia, let alone getting anywhere near approaching six feet.

Then again, I was notably and comically shorter than Rhys.

"Hey, Lucas," I said. He had to put up with me. I came as part of the package deal. I brushed past him, letting my backpack slide off my shoulders to the floor.

"You know you live downstairs, right?" He shut the door behind me. 

"If it wasn't for me, would you have had the apartment to yourself the last three nights? No." I unwrapped my scarf from my neck, tossing it over the back of a chair.

Still in my jacket, I rubbed my arms.

"Something happen?" Lucas adjusted his glasses as he closed the door, leaning back against it. Was that actual emotion I detected in his voice? Was he perhaps not a companion android? Lucas Niequest version 1.3, software update now available. 

I blinked. "No. I'm fine." The strain of a fake smile in my cheeks suggested otherwise. "Why?"

Was it obvious? Did I look flustered?

"You were staring off into space. That's all."

For a long time, I watched Lucas lean awkwardly against the door, not sure what to do with his hands while he looked anywhere but at me.

"Long day. That's all," I said, finally.

Lucas nodded, turning into a human bobblehead until the door jarred against his back.

Just like that, Lucas regained his personality and vanished down the hall. The only sound he made was the soft close of his bedroom door.

Rhys needed someone. That was for sure. He needed Lucas the same way I needed Bia. There was something about being alone....

Peeling off his jacket as he came in, Rhys tossed it over a chair, too. And I remembered I was still bundled up, like layers would save me from the things I couldn't see, but could feel. Like eyes, like chills that brushed against my arms.

If I had any doubts about sanctuary, all I had to do was catch Rhys' eyes and immediately get swallowed up by his gaze. His hazel eyes fixed on me was an entirely different sensation. 

A/N So... Lucas. What do you think of him? New characters to trust and distrust!