Chapter 24: THE FOREST EDGE

Georgia

Liam’s words have been sitting in my head for two days straight, refusing to settle into anything I can make sense of. *Puck’s never talked about anyone the way he talks about you.* I’ve turned that sentence over so many times it’s started to lose its shape, meaning something different every time I try to pin it down. Sometimes it sounds like hope. Sometimes it sounds like a warning. Mostly it just sounds like a door I can’t figure out how to open.

By Thursday evening, I can’t sit still in my dorm room another minute trying to work it out on my own, the walls pressing closer with every lap I make between my bed and the window. So I walk. Out of the building, across the quad, no particular destination in mind, just the need to move while my thoughts keep circling the same loop, the same unanswered question about a boy who looks at me like I matter and then disappears the second I try to hold onto that feeling.

I tell myself I’m just going for a walk. Not anywhere near the forest itself, just close enough to feel the cold, sharp air coming off it. I’ve told myself smaller lies than this before and believed them just as easily.

Dusk settles fast, the sky bruising purple and gray above the campus, most students already filtering indoors for dinner, their laughter and chatter fading into the buildings behind me. I don’t head toward the dining hall. I drift instead toward the edge of campus, toward the tree line, some pull I can’t articulate tugging me in that direction the same way it has more than once since I got here. It feels less like curiosity now and more like a habit I haven’t decided to break.

Just a walk, I tell myself. Not anywhere near the forest itself, just close enough to feel the cold, sharp air coming off it, close enough to watch the last of the light fade behind the canopy. I’ve told myself smaller lies than this before and believed them just as easily. I’m getting good at lying to myself, I think, better than I ever was at lying to my mother.

I don’t go far. I stop well short of where the grass gives way to the first true line of trees, close enough to see into the shadows between the trunks but far enough, I tell myself, that I’m still standing on safe ground. The forest ahead of me holds a quiet it never quite manages during the day, dusk settling something heavier and more attentive over the whole tree line, as though the trees themselves are holding their breath along with me.

That’s when I feel it.

Not a sound. Not a sight either. Pressure, more like, a shift in the air that lifts the small hairs on my arms beneath my sleeves, as if the forest has noticed me standing here and turned some vast, slow attention in my direction. I’ve felt something like this before, watching from my window the night of the full moon, but never this close, never with nothing but open ground between me and whatever’s paying attention. The memory of that night flashes through me, quick and unwelcome, and my mouth goes dry.

My heart picks up speed despite myself. I scan the dark spaces between the trunks for any shape, any movement, anything that might explain the feeling crawling up the back of my neck. Nothing moves. The forest just sits there, dense and dark and silent, and somehow that stillness feels worse than if something had actually shown itself. I find myself wishing, absurdly, for Puck to appear out of nowhere the way he always seems to, steady and solid and impossible to be afraid of even when he shouldn’t make sense.

A twig snaps.

Close. Somewhere just beyond the first row of trees, sharp and sudden in the quiet dusk air. My whole body goes rigid. I search the shadows for whatever made the sound, my pulse loud enough in my own ears to drown out the wind.

Nothing.

No shape, no eyes, no massive shadow breaking the treeline the way it did that other night. Just the sound, undeniable and close, and nothing visible to explain it. A cold feeling spreads through my chest that has nothing to do with the temperature.

I don’t wait around to find out.

I turn and run, my feet pounding hard against the grass and then the cobblestones, my breath coming fast and ragged. I don’t glance back over my shoulder once, not until I’ve made it all the way to the dorm building and shoved through the door into the warm, ordinary light of the hallway, chest heaving, hands shaking against the doorframe.

Probably nothing. A deer, maybe, or some other ordinary animal doing ordinary animal things at the edge of a forest at dusk. I repeat that the whole walk up to my room, like it might start to feel true if I say it enough times.

It doesn’t.

That night, getting ready for bed, I pull off my jacket and go to hang it over the back of my desk chair. Something catches my eye against the dark fabric of the sleeve. I bring it closer to the lamp on my desk and squint at it, my heartbeat picking up again for reasons I can’t yet name.

A single hair, caught in the weave of the fabric, dark and coarse, longer than any strand of human hair has any business being. I pluck it free carefully and hold it up to the light, turning it between my fingers.

It’s warm.

Not room temperature warm. Not the kind of warm that would make sense for something that’s been sitting in my sleeve for the better part of an hour since I got back inside. Genuinely warm, radiating a small, steady heat against my fingertips that has no explanation I can construct, not from a fire I haven’t been near, not from any source I can point to and call the reason. I think of the twig snapping in the dark, of the pressure I felt watching me from beyond the trees, and my stomach twists with a feeling I can’t quite separate from fear.

I stand there holding it for a long time, the warmth of it pressing into my skin, one more line to add to a notebook that’s starting to feel less like a collection of oddities and more like the shape of something I don’t yet have the courage to name.