The zip ties were the cheap kind, the ones you get in a ten pack from a hardware store for hanging Christmas lights or bundling extension cords. I know this because the plastic was already biting through the skin on my left wrist and cheap ones do that. Good ones have smooth edges. My dad taught me that.
I couldn't see much. A basement, clearly, from the unfinished ceiling and the water heater humming in the corner. Someone had hung a strand of fairy lights along the far wall and there was a folding table with a microwave on it and a mini fridge underneath. The floor was concrete but there was a rug, one of those woven ones from IKEA with the diamond pattern. It was blue. My chair was sitting in the middle of it.
The lavender hit me before anything else made sense. That fake, chemical lavender, the kind that comes in a spray can and smells nothing like actual flowers. It smells like someone trying. That's what I noticed. Someone had tried to make this place welcoming.
I heard the microwave beep.
She came around the water heater carrying a bowl with both hands, and her hands were shaking so bad the soup was sloshing over the sides. Campbell's tomato. I could smell it, that tinny, childhood smell, cutting right through the lavender. She set it down on the folding table and wiped her hands on her jeans and then she looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything for about ten seconds.
I knew her face. Not well, but I knew it. Organic Chemistry, Monday Wednesday Friday, the lecture hall in Whitmore. She sat three rows behind me and to the left. I'd turned around maybe twice all semester.
"You're..." I started.
"Marit."
"Yeah."
She picked the bowl back up and walked over and knelt down in front of me. Her knees on the diamond patterned rug. The soup was still too hot. I know because she tried to put the spoon to my mouth and I flinched and she pulled it back and blew on it, and the whole time her eyes were wet and her chin was doing that thing where it trembles before someone cries.
I'd bitten the inside of my lip at some point. Thrashing, probably, though I didn't remember arriving. There was a gap between the sidewalk outside the chemistry building and this chair and I couldn't fill it. The tomato soup mixed with the taste of blood in my mouth and it was metallic and thick and wrong.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, I know this is. I know."
She didn't finish.
"Why," I said.
She set the spoon down in the bowl and sat back on her heels. There was a long quiet. The water heater clicked.
"You tap your pen cap three times before you write anything. Like, exactly three. Every time. And you have a scar on your left thumb, here," she touched her own thumb, the pad of it, "and sometimes in lecture you run your other thumb over it when you're thinking. You mouth the words when Professor Dalton writes mechanisms on the board but you stop yourself because you think someone might see. Your backpack has a pin on it from a state park in Colorado and one time your phone rang in lecture and your ringtone was just the default one and you looked embarrassed about that. Like, genuinely embarrassed. And I thought that was."
She stopped again.
"I just see you," she said. "I see all of it."
Something happened in my chest. I want to say it was fear because it should have been fear, and for a second it might have been, but it didn't feel like the times I'd been afraid before. It felt warm. It felt like being found. Like someone had opened a door I forgot I'd locked and behind it was a room I didn't know I had and she had already been in there, sitting, waiting, noticing everything I thought I was doing in secret.
I stopped pulling against the zip ties.
She fed me the rest of the soup. By the end it was cold and I ate it anyway.
The second day she left the door unlocked. I heard it, the click of it not catching, and I heard the footsteps above us. Other tenants. Someone was playing music, something with a bassline that vibrated through the ceiling. I could have screamed. I did the math in my head, the distance, the volume, the likelihood someone would come. It was high. It was very high.
I sat there and I listened to the bassline and I didn't make a sound.
She came back twenty minutes later with a sandwich from the deli on Chestnut Street, the one with the green awning. Turkey and swiss. She'd remembered to ask for no mustard and I didn't know how she knew I didn't like mustard but she did. She cut the zip ties with scissors from the folding table and sat across from me on the rug while I ate and rubbed my wrists.
"You could have yelled," she said. Not as a test. She said it the way you say something you've been turning over in your head while you were out.
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you?"
I took another bite of the sandwich. It was good. The bread was fresh.
"I don't know," I said, which was a lie. I knew. It would have been cruel. She'd been so honest with me, so completely and terrifyingly honest, and screaming for help felt like something you do to a stranger and she wasn't a stranger anymore. She'd made sure of that.
"Marit."
"Yeah?"
"When did this start? The watching."
"Week three of the semester. You dropped your pen and you picked it up and you did the three taps before you started writing again and I thought, there's something about that, and then I couldn't stop."
I touched the groove the zip tie had cut into my left wrist. It stung. She noticed me doing it and she looked away.
We never talked about the zip ties again. We never called it a kidnapping. Later, weeks later, she would say "when we met" and I would nod, and the word basement became "where it started" and that was fine. That was better.
She brought me to the house party on a Friday. No threats, no conditions. She just said there was a party at a house on Elm and did I want to go, and I said yes, and she handed me a jacket because it was getting cold out. She had washed it. It smelled like her detergent, something clean, not lavender.
The party was loud and dark and smelled like spilled beer and someone's terrible cologne. A kid I vaguely recognised from my statistics class was doing a keg stand by the back door. Marit held my hand through the crowd and I let her. She got us drinks from the kitchen and I stood in the doorway watching her move through the press of bodies and she looked back at me once, just to check, and I was still there.
I was always going to be there.
The guy was big. Not tall, just thick, the kind of build you get from high school football and too much creatine. He grabbed Marit's hip as she was walking past and she tried to step away and he pulled her back and said something I couldn't hear over the music.
I picked up a bottle from the counter. I don't remember deciding to. My hand was around the neck of it and then I was crossing the kitchen and the bottle connected with the side of his head and it didn't break like in movies. It thudded. It thudded and he went down on one knee and there was blood, a lot of it, running through his hair and down his ear, and I looked at my hand and the bottle was still intact and my knuckles were white around it.
I felt clear. That's the only word. I felt the same way I feel when a proof comes together, when every line follows the one before it and you reach the end and it's clean and there's no ambiguity. I looked at the blood on my hand and I understood something about myself I hadn't known before.
Nobody had seen. The kitchen was empty except for us and him.
He was trying to get up. Making sounds, not words, just wet sounds. Marit picked up a heavy glass ashtray from the counter, the old fashioned kind that weighs more than it looks, and she brought it down once on the back of his head and he stopped trying to get up.
She looked at me. I looked at her.
And then she started laughing. Not normal laughing. It was breathless and hitching and it turned into crying and then it turned back into laughing and her mascara ran and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and she was still holding the ashtray in the other one. She set it down. She took the hem of her dress and she wiped the blood off my knuckles, gentle, one finger at a time, and she said, "You didn't even flinch."
That's when it happened. Not in the basement, not with the soup, not when she recited the details of my life back to me. Here. Standing over a body in a stranger's kitchen with bass shaking the walls, her hands wrapped in the fabric of her own dress, pressing my knuckles clean. I fell in love like falling off a ledge. There was a before and then there wasn't.
We got the body out through the side door. Marit knew about a storm drain access behind the house. She had already known. I didn't ask her why.
The second one was a boy named Derek Plous. Delta Sig. Marit had watched him slip something into a girl's drink at a bar the week before and she'd been thinking about it ever since. "Thinking about it" is what she said. I knew what she meant.
We followed him to his car after closing time and it was quick and I won't describe it except to say that the lavender air freshener Marit kept in her purse, a small spray bottle, the same brand from the basement, she sprayed it in the car afterward to cover the smell. I breathed it in and I felt safe. The same safe as the first night, tied to a chair on a blue rug, being seen.
The third was the girl. Amy Castlefield. She had started a rumour about a freshman named Dina Park, something about photos that didn't exist, and Dina had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol in her dorm room and survived only because her roommate came back early from a concert. Amy hadn't apologised. Amy had laughed about it at a party three days later.
We found her walking home from the library on a Tuesday. Marit had the plan. Marit always had the plan. But in the alley behind the bookshop on Fourth Street, Marit hesitated. Her hand stopped. Her whole body stopped, and she looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen before, something like a question, and I took over.
I finished it.
Afterward I held her face in my hands. Her skin was hot. There were tears on her cheeks that might have been mine.
"You're good," I told her. "You're kind. You know that, right?"
She nodded. I believed every word.
The detectives found me on a Wednesday outside the student union. Two of them, a man and a woman, both in plain clothes. The man had coffee stains on his tie. The woman did most of the talking.
"Cruz Jefferguson?"
"Yeah."
"We're investigating some disappearances on campus and in the surrounding area. Would you mind answering a few questions?"
"Sure."
They asked me where I'd been on certain nights. Marit had coached me on most of them. I had answers ready, times, places, names of people who could loosely corroborate. But for the night of Amy Castlefield I didn't have a script. Marit hadn't prepared one. So I improvised.
"I was at the Whitmore Library," I said. "Third floor, the quiet section. I had an Orgo exam the next day. I checked in with my student ID, you can look it up."
They wrote it down.
I hadn't been at the library. I don't know if my student ID would show anything. But I said it with the same clean certainty I'd felt in the kitchen with the bottle in my hand and they thanked me and left.
I told Marit about it that night. I told her the way you tell someone about a gift you found for them, something you saw in a shop window and knew was perfect. She kissed me on the mouth and said I was smart and I carried that with me like a stone in my pocket, smooth and warm, something to touch when I needed to.
The bathroom was small. One sink, a mirror with a crack running through the upper corner, fluorescent light that buzzed. We stood side by side. The water ran and I held the soap out to her and she took it and our fingers overlapped and then she handed it back. The sound of it, that small wet squelch of the bar passing between our palms, was the most peaceful sound I have ever heard.
Pink water swirled around the drain. I watched it spiral. Her shoulder pressed against mine and neither of us moved away.
"Cruz."
"Yeah."
"This is real, right? This is. Us. This is."
She couldn't finish. She never could, with the important things.
"Yeah," I said.
I reached for the soap and she handed it to me and our fingers touched again and I thought, this is where I live now. This is home. The buzzing light and the cracked mirror and the pink water going down and her shoulder against mine. I have never in my life been so completely seen by another person. I have never been so needed.
She turned off the faucet. The drip that followed was slow, steady, a small metronome counting nothing. I ran my thumb over the groove on my left wrist, the one from where it started, and she watched me do it and she didn't say anything and I didn't say anything and the faucet dripped and