You Can Run To Me

Forty-Two

Everything was moving so fast. Exams were rushing closer and closer, of course, but that wasn't the main thing on Natalie's mind. She was busy thinking about Ephren. When the drawings had come out, she might have thought that he would be deterred from her, but if anything it had had the opposite effect. All at once he was singling her out to talk to her, standing so close she could almost see his veins pulse with blood (or at least she thought so). He would wait for her outside her classes; catch her out in the corridors, sometimes with his bemused henchmen but often without too. Everyone had noticed. Everyone was asking questions, both to her face and behind her back, and Natalie smiled, told them what they wanted to know if she dared, and hoped to God they lost interest sooner rather than later.

Not even the classroom was a sanctuary, regardless of his presence. In all fairness, the whispers grew softer after just a few days, but the night he asked her out on a date was about as loud as you could dare in the middle of a lecture, even with the most lenient of professors. He seemed to be entirely oblivious to it all, of course, as though he were above it all somehow. The contention, naturally, was over why he had moved on to her. It had been quite a while since Jolene had broken up with him by now (though not so much to hear it from the lips of some), so it wasn't anything to do with Natalie being a rebound. Natalie was on the fringe of the popular clique, too, so it shouldn't have been anything to do with that, until you factor in the previous girlfriend. Natalie would make the second "low-grade" girlfriend in so many months, more or less – not that they were that serious, of course. Natalie came to the end of her mental debate with the rather disappointing conclusion that maybe they just always gossiped about who was going out with who, and she hadn't paid it much attention until it was about her.

As for questions, they were far more wide-ranging. She'd been asked if they'd kissed yet. She'd been asked the rather obvious question of if she fancied him back, which she usually replied to with a nervous and silent smile. More worryingly, though, had come the question:

"What do you want from him?"

Natalie couldn't remember who had asked her that, but while the faces had blurred, the words had not. Did they think she was trying to take advantage of him somehow? She couldn't help but laugh them off. There was no way she could be manipulating him into anything. It was far more likely to be the other way around. Yet they'd lingered, clearly unsatisfied with that as her answer. She might have been a little offended if it hadn't seemed so ridiculous. Of course she wasn't forcing him into anything. How anyone could ever come to that conclusion completely eluded her.

"Where do you see yourself in five years' time?" Penryn had asked with a distant look in her eye, rather as though it wasn't Nat she was posing the question to at all. Natalie had hesitated, tempted to throw the question right back at her friend, but then told herself it would be reasonable to at least answer her first.

"I have no idea. Working for the FBI or something if I'm lucky, I guess."

Rachel, who was sat almost directly across from Nat at the table, furrowed her eyebrows somewhat. "Working for the FBI? I didn't really pick you for the action-girl type."

"Huh?" replied Natalie crudely. "Oh, I didn't mean like a field agent or anything. I still want to be a psychologist. I want to be a profiler but for psychopaths and stuff."

Simone added her nugget of wisdom, "I'm pretty sure that's not a real job."

"I know it's not like on TV-"

"It's not a real job," asserted Simone with an air of finality.

Natalie was having none of it. "Come and find me in five years and then we'll know." Then she relented a little. "But I know it's nothing like TV. I honestly have done my research."