Page 66 of Ladybirds

“Well, it’s not like I could distract them myself, could I?”

She shakes her head. “No, I mean, why’d you do it. I could have handled it.”

“Maybe,” he says, voice soft in the dark. She wishes she could see his face; read his expression. “But you shouldn’t have to.”

Curling onto her side, a pillow hugged to her chest, Sara murmurs, “You’re right.” Her eyes are so heavy, it feels like lashes are covered in lead instead of mascara. “But neither should you.”

If he replies, the words are lost between them—buried in the darkness behind her eyelids and the unconscious pull of sleep.

There’s a text waiting for her when she wakes—the number unknown, the message vague enough to feel threatening.

Hope you had fun.

Sara deletes the message, blocks the number, and tries to calm the racing of her heart.

She doesn’t tell Seth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

She continues to get phone calls from strange numbers, but she doesn’t receive any more texts. Sara tells herself it’s fine. If—if—it’s David on the other line, he hasn’t made any move to escalate things. The calls are no more frequent than what they were before, and the days and times are just as random. Months go by, but David doesn’t come knocking on her door again.

Sara’s done worrying about it, but she knows Seth isn’t (even if he won’t admit it).

The rest of the semester sweeps by in a blur of camera flashes and shutter clicks. Her first love is, and always will be, landscape photography, but she finds little ways to make the portraiture assignments her own. She takes the lines of the model’s bodies and makes valleys out of waists and mountains from their shoulder blades. She dresses one model in white tulle, soft and nearly transparent, and adjusts the settings until the image captured is as much fog rolling over the fields as a beautiful woman.

Seth always stays out of her way as she works, but his presence is always there—a quiet shadow at the edges of her vision. Sometimes she catches a strange smile on his lips. It’s soft, gentle in ways that look out of place when he’s hiding in the dark corners of the room. It’s only when he comments on her finished portfolio, that same smile dancing at the corners of his mouth, as he tells her she’s done well, that she realizes it’s pride.

Her answering grin is warm and a little teary, but it’s honest. She hopes he can read the ‘thank you’ tucked at the edges.

When she finally walks across the stage with a rolled up piece of parchment symbolizing her diploma in her hand, she looks across the auditorium and finds his face in the crowd first.

“Where do you go?” she asks while her hands are busy fiddling with the height of the tripod.

It’s been almost two weeks since she graduated, full of lazy mornings and marathoning Seth’s newest tv obsession (a historical fantasy she actually finds herself liking as much as he does), but it feels good to be outside again. It feels even better to bring her camera and take some photos just for the love of it and not because there’s an assignment due.

Her question is as out of the blue as the sky, but it’s been on her mind for a while now, so when she feels his gaze at her back, it’s the first thing to come to mind.

“Pardon?”

She looks up from her viewfinder, tracing his frown with her eyes. The abandoned stretch of railroad tracks, all stubborn weeds and rust, behind him is a sharp contrast to the clean lines of his suit. “When you disappear. Where do you go?”

“Oh.” His frown softens into curiosity—as if he’s surprised she even thought to ask. “Wherever else I’d like to be, I suppose. There’s no specific place.”

“So you can just… snap your fingers and be in Paris?”

A smile teases his lips. “It’s a touch more complicated than that, but yes. In theory,” he hums. “I’m rather more limited at the moment.”

“Why?”

He hesitates, long enough to feed her curiosity. “I’m… tied to you. I can only go so far.”

“Wait. Really?” Suddenly, she thinks of all those times she yelled at him for sitting in on her classes. Did he really have nowhere else to go? “How far?”

“I can reach most of the city provided you’re home.”

She can’t deny she’s relieved. The thought of him having to shadow her every footstep, blinking behind corners and closed doors, is a sad one. “So when you’re not, uh, tied to someone. You can go anywhere?”

“Technically, though not in a single jump. And it’s bloody exhausting to be honest. I much prefer to fly. Do you know how comfortable the seats are in first class on international flights? That they don’t make them all that way is criminal.”

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