Cross Island

by Santino Hassell

  It was more than I could take. I would never want anyone to put their lives at risk for me, but especially not Victor. And I knew, without a doubt, that something would happen soon. Travis wasn’t just standing across the street and keeping an eye on me, anymore. He was inching closer and closer as his obsession escalated, and it was only a matter of time before he tried to catch one of us off guard. Or before he tried to enter the house. If he did that, who knew if he’d do it with a weapon. Or if he had back-up.

  I couldn’t risk it. I wouldn’t risk Victor.

  I inhaled deeply and slid off the window sill. With Victor still sleeping soundly, worn out and snoring softly, I jerked my phone out of the pocket of my discarded pants. My hands were still as I opened Twitter and the most recent DM from my stalker.

  I want to talk to you and know why you did this….. Not the libshits at QFindr or that broken faced Neanderthal in your bed who thinks he can take me down. This is between me and you and ONLY me and you.

  He was raving. The DM was bullshit gibberish, but the thing that stood out was this unending goddamn fixation on me. Only me.

  I looked at Victor’s sleeping form, at the way his fingers had curled loosely and how his lips were parted, then I forced myself to leave the room. My mind was made up, but I couldn’t follow through while Victor slept only a few feet away. I’d given him my word that I’d listen to him, and now I was turning my back on that promise to hopefully end this once in for all.

  After taking another deep breath, I typed and sent a reply.

  I’m waiting for you to reach out in a real way. I don’t think you’ll hurt me, and I want to know what you think I can do for you. If it means putting an end to this, I’d like to help. Reach out. Enough of this Twitter shit. Talk to me like a man.

  To someone like Travis, it was both a challenge and a direct blow to the ego. Hopefully it was enough to lure him out so we could end the games.

  I walked noiselessly back into my bedroom, keeping a close eye on Victor, and grabbed some sweatpants and a hoodie. If this was going to happen, it needed to be now that he was dead to the world. His extinct were too good for me to get far before he woke and realized I was gone, so this had to happen fast.

  I slipped out of the room, jogged downstairs in my socks, and dressed quickly and with a pounding heart.

  My own common sense told me to stay the in the house, but the tight ball of frustration and rage that had been building since I’d walked into QFindr the morning after the party, forced me out the door.

  This was going to end, I told myself. It had to.

  My bravado faltered as soon as I touched the doorknob. I paused, mind racing, and took out my phone once again. I typed a text to Victor that read: I’m sorry, but this needs to end. I’m luring him to the entrance to the park near Cross Island. There’s always a cop car lingering just a block down.

  One deep breath later, I was out the door and jogging towards the bay.

  My footsteps were deafeningly loud in the quiet darkness of Whitestone so when another set rung out behind me, my body immediately keyed into it. Luring Travis out had clearly worked, but instead of feeling triumphant and relief, another lightning bolt of fear struck me. There was a very good chance I was making a huge mistake by taking this on myself, even if it meant protecting my new lover.

  Without slowing my pace, I pulled out my phone and sent the message to Victor. If the alarm on the door hadn’t alerted him to my departure, the text message would. He’d know where I was and what I was doing. If anything happened, at least I wouldn’t be disappearing without a trace.

  For the next few minutes, our matching footsteps echoed in the night. I never slowed, and he didn’t increase his speed to catch up, so I cruised along the deserted stretch of street that ran parallel to the bay. It was a cold dreary night and the ground was still slippery from snow and ice, but I kept my pace without looking back until we reached the section of the street that curved away from the junction of the pier and the entrance to the park. There was usually an NYPD patrol car on the corner of Utopia, pointing towards Cross Island, but for the first time in months… it wasn’t there.

  Swearing under my breath, I kept running through the entrance to the park. It was cold, icy, and pitch black except for the lights from the cars speeding along Cross Island Parkway which ran parallel to the park, and the expressway that crisscrossed above it, but something inside me told me to keep running. My haphazard plan hadn’t left room for me ending up in the park alone with Travis. My plan had relied on my ability to lure him to the vicinity of a police car before confronting him, but now everything was wrong.

  I increased my pace, heard him run faster behind me, and tried not to panic.

  I can handle this.

  I can handle Travis. Even if he tries some shit, I can hold my own.

  I can do this.

  “Stop running if you want to talk.”

  The voice was a gunshot in the dark, echoing for what seemed like miles around us. It jolted me and caused me to miss a step just under the overpass. My foot slid along the unsalted path, and I staggered to catch myself and keep from falling. That one goddamn misstep was all it took for the footsteps behind me to speed up, deafeningly loud as they moved closer.

  My options at that point were simple: stay and follow through with my plan, or keep running to the fort where I’d potentially run into the patrol car I’d been expecting on the other end of the park. If I did that, it would take us along an even more deserted stretch of the running path—one that wasn’t in view of the dozens of cars speeding along on the parkway.

  I took a deep breath and turned to face my stalker.

  Travis stood there, red-faced and haggard looking. His hair was longer, his face unshaven, and he wore jeans, an NYU sweatshirt, and a ripped leather jacket. Despite his tired face and unkempt facial hair, he didn’t look like a terrifying stalker. He looked like the sullen IT manager who I’d ignored for the better part of his tenure at QFindr. He also looked as troubled as he’d sounded in those emails—eyes darting, skin sheet white, and hands squeezing into fists.

  “What are you doing, Travis?”

  He blinked at me for a moment, looked around again, then took a step closer. I immediately retreated a step, drawing a frown.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, you know.”

  “Really?” The question boomed out of my mouth, loud and angry. “You’ve been standing outside of my fucking house for weeks, Travis. And those DMs—”

  “I just wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t know what else to do.” Travis took another step closer, his hands upraised and eyes wide. When the dim light from the street light hit him up close, I saw that there was more going on than him being troubled. His pupils were huge. He was probably high. “What did you want me to do?”

  “I wanted you to not stand outside of my house, Travis. What did you think stalking me—”

  “I’m not fucking stalking you!” His shout was explosive in the darkness. It held the ragged edge of someone who was close to losing control, and it was the first red flag about this entire idea. He took a deep breath, and it fogged out in front of him. He had to repeat the action twice more before he stopped trembling enough to get his next few words out. “I just wanted to talk to you. To see you.”

  “Why? What can I do to help you? Why are you looking in my windows, and sending me those messages? What… what connection do you really think we have, Travis?”

  “Because I used to think we were the same.” Travis raked his hands through his hair and clenched his fingers. “Even when I was at QFindr, I always looked at you as someone I admired. Someone who maybe shared my views on that place. How they used people to get ahead, to make money, and stepped on them unless they agreed with their fucking agenda.”

  “What agenda?” I asked, incredulous. “Travis, no offense, but I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about here.”

  “Come on, Clive.” Travis huffed out a disgusted sound and waved hi
s hand sharply. “The way they belittled anyone who didn’t see the world they way they did? The way they condescended to anyone who wasn’t the target audience for their little app?”

  “You mean… queer people? If you’re saying they primarily wanted to hear thoughts from queer people about an app for queer people—then you’re correct.”

  “But it was more than that! You saw it for yourself,” he sputtered. “You used to call them out on how they spoiled the other staff and played favorites. How they made stupid decisions for some while disrespecting others, and you were one of the people who was never appreciated. I saw the way people avoided you because they thought you were the asshole lawyer, because you and me were the only people who would ever speak the truth at those fucking meetings.”

  It was the biggest stretch I’d ever heard, especially considering how far apart in the aisle we were politically and socially, but I could tell he believed it.

  “Why have you been watching me, Travis?” I asked softly. “What did you hope to learn?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then began pacing in the darkness. “I thought we could talk. That maybe once you understood—if you understood how we’re on the same side, that it’s us against them, that you could change things. Fix everything with my parents.”

  “Travis, it doesn’t work that way—”

  “And then when I was watching you, I realized you were always alone.” He huffed out a sharp laugh. “No friends, no family, not dating anyone… I thought we were the same.”

  I frowned. “My parents live in Long Island. I think the narrative you’re creating—”

  “But then he showed up,” Travis spat, voice full of disgust. “And I realized you were more like them than I thought, and I didn’t know anymore if you would listen, or if I could trust you, so I started watching to make sure he was just a bodyguard and not—whatever else. But you’re really fucking him.”

  He was giving me whiplash. Between his babbling and the wind whipping against my face, my head was pounding. I blamed myself for not taking the advice I’d spent the last several months giving to Caleb, Aiden, and Oli—don’t try to understand the motives and rationale of a psychopath.

  “Travis,” I said again, patience dwindling. “I can’t help you. There is not one damn thing I can change the outcome of that settlement. So this needs. To. End.”

  “How?” he shouted again. “How can it end? I have nowhere else to go. My parents kicked me out. They think I’m some hateful Nazi who hates gay people.”

  “Do you hate gay people?” My teeth had begun to chatter, but I managed to keep my voice even. “Because when you said you realized I was like them, it sounded like you realized I might be gay. Not to mention the things you said on your social media, and how the actions you took—"

  “I don’t hate gay people.”

  “—affected the lives of many queer people who work at—”

  “I don’t fucking hate gay people.” Another shout, this one wilder than the first. “It was just a tweet. Just an annoyifucking tweet. In this day and age, the fact that I can be dragged into court and ruined over a tweet…” Emotion clogged Travis’ voice, but I couldn’t tell if it was sadness or rage. Judging by the way his breath began to come out in great gusts, I was willing to bet it was somewhere in between. “It really says something about our society that my parents, bleeding heart fucking Liberals, could be cleaned out and caused to disown me over a few tweets.”

  “A few tweets…” Flashbacks from the past several months went through my mind like a tableau. Caleb pale-faced and stricken every time another employee rushed into his office with screenshots of a new threat. The people who’d quit the company after being terrorized online. Meredith too frightened to go out at night alone after being attacked at the pop-up event for the beta testing of QFindr Plus. “Travis, you sat through the depositions. You had a lawyer. You know the harm those few tweets caused.”

  Travis’ eyes narrowed. “All I did was tweet information that could have been found by anyone with the know-how—”

  “You named people from the company in your hateful Tweets and made them targets,” I retorted. “Then you exposed their private information to your army of trolls.”

  “They weren’t my fucking army! They were people who followed me on social media. People who—who agreed—”

  “That QFindr was a corporation designed to keep down straight white people and elevate queers? Isn’t that what you said in one of your very first tweets?” Looking at him, and hashing this out, was beginning to disgust me. “Travis, your delusions—”

  “Delusions?” he demanded. “Oli stole the idea for QFindr Plus from me. I pitched the idea at a brainstorm meeting, of expanding the app to turn into an actual dating app, and he rolled out the fucking alpha not even a month later. I got no credit. No bonus. And when my evaluation came around, they shit all over me!”

  Even as Travis became more and more hysterical, the pieces of the puzzle were slowly coming together. This was information I’d never heard before. Accusations that had never seen the light of day. It was likely that his lawyer had forbade him from airing these grievances at the deposition because it gave him motive.

  “Travis… I suggested they expand the QFindr app before the company was even off the ground, back when we were still hashing out legal details. If you think you suggested something groundbreaking instead of the obvious—”

  “Stop,” he growled. “I swear to God, stop.”

  “If you think you thought of something groundbreaking that warranted you trying to ruin he lives of a company full of queer people?” I lifted my chin, eyes narrowed. “You’re a fool.”

  I knew it was coming when he dropped his head and released an incoherent shout, but it still surprised me when he rushed me and slammed me down to the icy ground.

  Cross Island, ch 20

  Chapter Twenty

  Victor

  Nearly two weeks of paranoia about my recent life choices colliding headlong with my job exploded inside me as soon as I read Clive’s text message.

  He was gone.

  He’d waited until I was asleep, and he’d snuck out to lure the stalker. And he had a hell of a head start.

  I was dressed and out the door within moments, but I was unprepared for the icy wind that hit my face or the ice that had formed on the sidewalk and stairs in the hours since we’d returned from the city. Clive was probably already long gone since he was used to running in the ice and snow, but my progress was stilted and slow to the point of fear filling my lungs along with the cold air. I was panting after only a couple of blocks, my breath fogging the air in front of me, but I didn’t break my stride unless the ice nearly sent my feet going out from under me.

  Every minute that passed was one minute too much. The horror scenarios were rolling through my head again: the stalker dragging Clive into a vehicle after coming up on him and choking him out, him bashing Clive’s head in and throwing him in the bay, or the guy having a weapon to ensure Clive had no chance. The mental images pulsed and got bigger and more vivid until my head was pounding as violently as my heart, but I kept going.

  My goal was the park, and Clive, and the panic and fear trying to choke me couldn’t slow me down. I wouldn’t let it.

  The gates to the park loomed before me as I followed the curved road leading to the entrance, but there was nobody around that I could see. No Clive, and definitely no cop car.

  I circled the area, looking up and down the streets, but didn’t see anyone except a couple of teenagers hanging out on the bench all huddled up together.

  “Hey,” I barked at them. “You see anyone run through here? Anyone fighting or arguing or some shit?”

  They looked up, two girls in oversized coats and beanies, and blinked at me. One looked ready to tell me to stop fucking with their cuddle session, but the other just frowned. “Two guys went running into the park a couple of minutes ago.”

  I swore and spun away, nearly breaking my nec
k on the ice again, and sprinted back to the entrance. One of the girls shouted behind me, something that faintly sounded like ‘are they okay?’, but I didn’t stop to respond. I moved from the path to the grass, and bolted up one of the hills at the entrance to the park so I can survey the area stretching out to the Fort. It was dark, with only a few street lights, but my eyes zeroed on two figures in the distance. Clive. And Travis fucking Gills.

  In that half a second, Travis rushed Clive and they both fell backwards onto the path.

  A fire roared through my body and spread inside of my chest. I slid down the hill as my breath shortened and my body trembled while an intense pressure built in my head. As soon as my feet hit the grass and I took off running, the sounds of a struggle echoed through the park, and the world blinked.

  Being consumed by rage wasn’t new to me. It’d been happening since I was a teenager. Maybe younger. My past therapist had once told me it was a product of seeing violence so young, of trauma, and of impulse control. But it had never happened on the job… until now.

  Until Clive.

  I forced myself to breathe in and out more slowly, to steady my heartrate, to pull it all together, and the world came back into focus as I drew closer to the overpass where they’d begun to fight. In one beat, I saw Travis pinning Clive to the cold hard ground and screaming in his face, and in another I watched Clive buck his hips and throw Travis off him the way he’d practiced during our sparring. Except in real life, Travis grabbed hold of Clive as he toppled over, and they both rolled to the side towards the trees.

  A pained shout rung out and further fueled my boiling blood. My footsteps thundered against the path, and I skidded to a stop by them. They were still struggling, Clive again pinned below him but with his hand on Travis’ throat while Travis tried to press his thumb into Clive’s eye.

  “Just fucking listen,” he was screaming, voice echoing all over the park. “You dumb fucking fa—”

  I snatched him by the throat, lifting him into the air, and choke slammed him down to the ground. He shouted hoarsely as his head bounced off the concrete, but struggled to get to his feet. They went out from beneath him due to the snow and ice, but still I straddled him. Without thinking, I cocked my fist back to punch him, and in that moment I saw his hand slide to his pocket.