Page 38 of Creeping Lily

LILY

M y legs burn like fire, each stride sending a jolt of pain up into my hips, but I don’t dare slow down.

My breath saws in and out of my chest, ragged and desperate.

The dormitory rises ahead—tall, black, faceless against the night sky—and I throw myself toward it like it’s the only thing keeping me alive.

My keys slip from my trembling fingers. The metallic clatter hits the ground, sharp as gunfire in the still night, but I don’t stop. I claw at the door instead, fingernails scraping over rough wood until they catch and tear. Panic surges up my throat.

“Bethany!” My voice cracks as I slam my fists against the door. “Bethany, please!”

The sound barely makes it past the roaring in my ears.

My pulse is a pounding drumbeat, drowning everything else out.

My knees give, slamming into the hard ground, and I collapse against the door like I could melt into it.

The cold bites into my skin, but it’s nothing compared to the deeper cold clamping around my heart.

The door yanks open, and I almost fall backward. Bethany’s silhouette fills the frame, her voice a sharp gasp. “Lily?” She’s down in front of me in seconds, eyes wide and scanning me like she’s checking for blood. “Oh my God, what happened?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes. Only the broken sobs that tear from my chest, hot and uncontrollable. Bethany doesn’t waste a second—she loops her arm around me, dragging me up, half-carrying me inside.

The sudden light from her desk lamp is blinding. The quiet of the room feels wrong—too still, too safe for the storm still thrashing inside me. She steers me to her bed, lowering me onto the mattress as if I might shatter.

“Talk to me,” she says, but I can only shake my head and bury my face in my hands.

The words are there—jammed in my throat, locked behind the memory of rough bark at my back, a masked face, the flash of a knife. My skin still crawls where his hands touched me.

Bethany doesn’t push. Instead, she presses a cold water bottle into my palm and tips it toward my lips. “Drink.”

The first swallow feels like it scrapes over sandpaper. The next cools my burning throat. I drink until my hands stop shaking enough to breathe. She takes the bottle back, sets it aside, and smooths a damp strand of hair from my forehead.

“It’s okay,” she says softly. I want to believe her, but my eyes won’t meet hers.

I sink into her pillow, my body suddenly heavy, every muscle screaming for rest. But the moment I close my eyes, the images flash back—the dark park, the weight of him pressing me into the tree, the stranger who ripped him away.

Bethany’s voice becomes background noise, low and urgent, as she talks to someone on the phone. I catch words I can’t piece together. When she hangs up, she sits beside me again, fingers combing through my hair in slow, rhythmic strokes. It’s almost enough to quiet the panic clawing at me.

Until the knock .

It’s sharp and sudden, snapping my eyes open. Bethany freezes. The knock comes again, harder this time. She stands, her steps cautious as she opens the door.

“Where is she?” Justin’s voice slices through the air, hard with urgency.

“In here,” Bethany says.

He’s inside in two strides, his expression a storm. His eyes lock on me like he’s been searching for hours. “Lily,” he breathes, and it’s not relief—it’s something darker, heavier.

I try to sit, but he’s already scooping me up, tucking me against his chest like I’m breakable. His heartbeat thuds steady under my ear, a sound that feels too solid for the night I’ve just survived.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs. “You’re safe now.”

Safe.

The word sits in my chest like a lie I want to believe. My body gives out, sagging against him as if he’s the only thing holding me up. His arms tighten, sealing me in.

But in the back of my mind, the fear still lurks—coiled and waiting.

The shadows are still there. The knife is still sharp. And somewhere in the fog, the man in the mask is still watching.

Sleep drags me under, but it’s thin and restless. My last thought before the dark takes me is that “safe” is a word I may never feel again.

When I wake, the air feels thick, like the weight of last night never lifted.

My cheek is pressed to the cool wall, my body curled into the corner of my bed as if I’d been trying to disappear in my sleep.

Justin’s frame is draped over me, heavy and warm, like a human shield against something that’s already gone.

His breathing is slow and deep, the steady rhythm the only thing cutting through the stale silence of early morning.

My throat feels raw, the kind of dryness that tastes metallic, and my eyelids scrape when I blink, like they’ve been dusted with sand.

The dull, pulsing ache in my skull is the leftover ghost of last night—the fear, the sprint, the adrenaline.

I push damp strands of hair off my face and press my fingertips into my temple, trying to keep the pain from spreading.

Justin shifts beside me, rolling onto his side. Sleep still clings to him, his green eyes a little hazy as they scan my face. “Lily?” His voice is rough, deepened by sleep but edged with concern. “Hate to say it, but you look like shit.”

“Thanks,” I rasp, my voice cracking.

The corner of his mouth twitches like he wants to smile but knows better.

He doesn’t push. Instead, he swings his legs off the bed, the mattress lifting as his weight leaves it.

The faint sounds of the dorm’s tiny kitchen follow—water running, cabinet doors opening.

When he comes back, he’s holding a bottle of water with the cap already off.

“Here.”

I take it, fingers brushing his for a second. The normalcy of the gesture hits me like a lifeline. I sip slowly, letting the cold water coat my throat, cooling the burn.

Justin’s watching me, not in a hovering way, but like he’s measuring every movement, every pause. “You want to tell me what happened?”

The question makes my grip on the bottle tighten. How do I explain it? Three attacks in a matter of weeks, three nights where the air felt thick with death. And now… him. The hooded man who saves me like it’s his job, but whose presence feels as dangerous as it does protective.

“It’s… complicated,” I say finally, my voice weak .

His brow furrows. “How complicated can it be? Bethany said you came running in here like you were being hunted.”

“That’s not the part that matters,” I mutter. I shouldn’t have said it out loud. But my mind is already pulling me back into the fog, to the sharp gleam of a knife and the way my hooded savior moved—precise, practiced, lethal.

“Then what does matter?” Justin leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. There’s no softness in his gaze now, just a quiet demand for answers.

I set the bottle down, my hands trembling.

And I tell him. About the library. About the shadow trailing me.

About the sudden weight of a man’s body pinning me to a tree.

About the knife. About the stranger who appeared like smoke, yanked the attacker off me, and gave me the single word that got me moving— run .

When I finish, Justin’s silence is louder than his questions. His jaw works once before he asks, “You never saw his face?”

“No. The attacker had a ski mask. The other guy… just a hood.”

His gaze sharpens. “Are you sure you saw two men? Not just one?”

“I know what I saw, Justin.” My voice is firmer than I feel.

“This is serious, Lily. We have to tell campus security.”

“No.” The word shoots out before I can soften it. “I can’t handle hours of interrogation. Not right now.”

He pulls his phone out anyway, thumbs moving fast. “Then I’ll tell someone.”

I stare at him, torn between wanting to stop him and knowing he’s only doing what I can’t. My skin prickles under his concern, a strange mix of safety and suffocation.

“Bethany went for coffee,” he says, glancing up. “She’ll be back soon. I’m stepping outside for a minute.”

I nod, watching him leave. The door shuts softly, but the room still feels too small. I lean back against the wall, my mind dragging me back into the park.

The hooded man’s eyes flash in my memory—shadowed, unreadable, but burning with something fierce. Protective, yes. But not safe.

Who is he?

The question twists tighter the more I think about it, like a thread pulling through the fabric of my thoughts until everything feels frayed.

But it’s not just who. It’s where.

Because somewhere out there—maybe in the fog, maybe just beyond the dorm’s thin walls—he’s still here. I can feel it in the way the air seems to hold its breath, in the prickle along my skin that hasn’t faded since last night.

And I don’t know what’s worse—the idea that he might be gone…or the certainty that he’s not.