“I’m well acquainted

With villains that live in my bed”

— “Control” by Halsey

I’m being followed.

I don’t know how I know, but I’m certain it’s happening. It’s been there all day—this prickling at the back of my neck, this low hum of wrongness I can’t shake.

It starts on my morning commute. The R train is packed as usual. I’m wedged between a guy stuffing his face with a breakfast burrito and a woman FaceTiming at full volume with no headphones. In a just and fair world, both would be imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

But they aren’t the real issue. When I glance up from my phone, I catch someone looking at me from the far end of the car. Black baseball cap, tinted aviator sunglasses, black N95 face mask, dark jacket with the hood pulled up. It’s an ensemble that says, Don’t fucking look at me.

But as a reporter, looking at things that don’t want to be looked at is literally my job.

So naturally, I look.

He’s standing wedged in the corner, over by the doors at the opposite end of the car, one hand gripping the overhead rail. He doesn’t look away when I catch him gawking. That’s the part that gets me. Most people in New York, when you catch them looking, drop their gaze immediately. Pretend to check their phone. Suddenly find the MTA map fascinating. It’s a city full of psychopaths, and you learn quickly to avoid eye contact unless you want trouble.

Not this guy.

He holds my gaze through those dark lenses. Even with half his face covered, I sense something in him that unsettles me. It’s written in the tilt of his chin, the looseness of his grip. The posture—tall and lean like the gaunt-eyed fashion models on Milan runways, feet apart, shoulders squared, completely still and unbothered in the middle of all this rush-hour chaos.

I get a full-body chill.

It’s not fear, exactly. Or, well, yes, it is, but it’s not just fear. There’s something ancient about the feeling that ripples through me, something that bypasses my brain entirely and bolts straight to the base of my spine. It’s prey recognition. It’s a hundred thousand years of genetic memory telling me that something with sharp teeth is watching me from the tree line.

I tell myself I’m just being paranoid. I haven’t been sleeping much since the first tip on this big story came in a couple weeks ago. It’s just been work, work, work, much of it fruitless and thankless. But as soon as I see Exclusive Investigation by Jillian Pierce on the front page of the New York Times Sunday edition, it’ll all have been worth it.

I scroll aimlessly through my newsfeed, refusing to look up until we’ve gone through the next station. My newsfeed isn’t helping calm my nerves. Every other post is some eager, horny BookTok girl clutching a paperback with a shirtless masked man on the cover, captioning it He can kidnap me any day with a billion heart-eye emojis and a few water splashes just in case the initial message didn’t land. It’s all dark romance this, morally gray that, put a knife to my throat and bash my face into my headboard, please, sir. Masked stalker love interests everywhere I scroll.

I’d laugh if I didn’t currently have one of those standing forty feet away from me on the R train.

The algorithm really said personalized content today, huh?

My thumb swipes idly.

Next: A pretty girl with mascara streaks on her cheeks pleading, Choke me, king, set to a Billie Eilish soundtrack.

Next: The Weeknd crooning over fan edits of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy.

Next: I think my fight or flight is malfunctioning.

Next: the way i would beg him to disrespect me.

Next: unhinged and unhinging me.

A screenshot of my For You could easily be inserted into the DSM-V. This shit is diagnosable.

None of it is for me. Thanks but no thanks. I’m a reporter; I rip masks off for a living. That’s the whole job: Find the masked creep, figure out what they’re hiding, drag it into the light, and write it up in twelve-point Times New Roman so a million people can read it over their morning coffee.

The mystery isn’t the appeal for me. After what I went through five years ago—what my best friend Rae calls “The Year That Jillian Went Missing and Refuses to Explain”—neither is the fear factor.

The reveal—that’s the magic. Shine a torch on the creeps and perverts of the world and watch them squirm.

I wish I’d had that power five years ago. It might have changed the course of my life.

I let two more stops pass before I give myself permission to look up again. This time, the corner by the far doors is empty. He’s gone. There’s a little old lady with a rolling grocery cart standing where he’d been.

Thank God. I exhale in relief.

I get off at Times Square, walk the six blocks to the office, and try to forget about the Man on the Train. But, weirdly, I can’t. At my desk, I keep pulling up the security camera feed from the lobby on my second monitor, scanning faces. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, but whatever it is, I don’t find it.

Maybe that’s for the best.

Lunch comes around. Things have not improved. The feeling of being observed has settled into my bones. I eat a sad, limp, lukewarm desk salad and squint at the street below through the break room window. The problem is that everyone looks suspicious when you’re already suspicious.

A guy on a bench reading a newspaper… he’s the right height. A woman standing too long at the crosswalk… could she be his accomplice?

I’m losing it.

I stab a wilted piece of romaine and chew without tasting. The thing is, I used to be braver than this. Or maybe not braver, but at least more reckless, more willing to barrel forward without checking the shadows first.

That was before, though. Before the thing I don’t talk about. Before the year I disappeared from my own life and came back lighter in some ways and heavier in others, and told everyone I’d taken a gap year for “personal reasons,” which is the polite way of saying please stop asking me, I’m begging you.

My best friend Rae, bless her, never pushed. She just held the door open and waited for me to walk back through it. That’s what I love about her: She lets me keep the locked rooms in my heart chained up tight.

But locked rooms have a cost. I know that. The fear that consumes me day and night—that’s the tax I pay. I don’t sleep well. I check locks twice. I sit with my back to the wall in restaurants.

Most of all, I notice men who watch me and don’t look away.

A husky male voice nearly scares me out of my skin. “Easy there, Jill. You look like you’re plotting a murder.”

I look up from my salad in alarm, but when I see who it is, I breathe a little easier. My work husband, Weston Porter, drops into the chair across from me, chomping on a protein bar and slurping coffee. He’s got his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and his sleeves rolled to the elbows, which means he’s been deep in edits all morning. It’s late November, so local elections just wrapped up. As one of our NYC politics writers, he’s busy as hell explaining to our readership what it all means.

I give him a false, cheery smile and throw my long red hair over my shoulder. “Me? Plotting? Ladies do not plot, Mr. Porter. We simply ponder.”

“Dangerous hobby for you,” he replies with a snort. “I’ve seen where it leads.”

Weston’s one of those annoyingly put-together people. Six-one, dark skin, razor-sharp jawline, and biceps that strain against his shirt sleeves because he does CrossFit five days a week. Hence the protein bar. But he’s got kind eyes behind those chic, black-frame glasses and a brain that works fast enough to keep up with mine. He’s also funny, driven, and all-around decent, which in a New York newsroom makes him practically an endangered species.

If I were in any kind of dating chapter of my life—which I’m emphatically not—he’d be exactly the type I’d go for.

Unfortunately, Weston’s husband Jeremiah would slaughter me if I tried to make a move. Jer is a cardiac surgeon at Mount Sinai who meal-preps Weston’s lunches in color-coded containers and sends him off every morning with a kiss and a thermos of cold brew. I bawled my eyes out at their wedding.

So, because of all that, Weston remains firmly in the work-husband category, which is probably better. All the banter and warm hugs, none of the psychosexual wreckage.

“How was your weekend?” he asks as he puts his feet up on my desk. “Wait. On second thought, don’t tell me. Last time you told me about a date of yours, I had to go to confession and I’m not even Catholic.”

I pretend to roll my eyes. “It wasn’t that graphic.”

“Jillian, sweetheart, I’m a gay man in Manhattan; I’m no blushing virgin. And yet I had to Google half the things you described in your exhaustively detailed report of what you did to that poor man.”

“You’re welcome for expanding your horizons.” I flash him a cheeky grin.

“My horizons were fine. Jer and I are very, very happy with our horizons.” He swallows his last bite of protein bar, licks his thumb, and drops the wrapper in my waste bin. “But, okay, fine, I’m a sucker for gory details. Fill me in on the latest. Any new conquests I should emotionally prepare for?”

“Quiet weekend, actually,” I say with a straight face.

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Another thing ladies do not do, Mr. Porter, is kiss and tell.”

“Right,” he agrees sarcastically. “That means that either you’re not a lady, or that twenty-first century ladies prefer to do anal and tell.”

He grins at me, and I let him have it. This version of me that Weston thinks he knows, the one who dates freely and hooks up raunchily without apology and has sexually deviant stories that make a grown man blush, is a character I’ve been performing so long that she almost feels real.

But she isn’t.

Because I haven’t slept with a soul in five years.

The reasons why are more complicated than celibacy or trauma or whatever neat little box a therapist would try to stuff it into. I like sex. I liked it before, and I’m pretty sure I’d like it again, if I dared. But somewhere between what happened and now, my body decided that wanting and allowing are two different things. I can want someone and still freeze the second his hand tries to go to my waist. I can be turned on and terrified at the same time.

None of it means anything, though. The locked rooms stay locked. The lights stay on. The hands stay off my waist, and it’s better that way.

That’s not to say I don’t pretend. I have to; if people knew how broken I was inside, they’d be horrified. So I play the game. I go on dates and make sure Weston hears all about them. I kiss strangers—safe-looking strangers, clean-looking strangers—in bars and let them think it’s going somewhere.

And then I leave.

Every.

Single.

Time. I’ve gotten very good at the exiting part. It’s as simple as a casual Oh, I really want to, but I have an early morning. The breezy Rain check, yeah? that means I’ll never look in your eyes again for as long as we both shall live.

Weston doesn’t know any of this. Nobody does. Not even Rae.

“Heyo, Earth to Jillian.” Weston snaps his fingers in my face. “You just went somewhere dark. I can tell because you stopped insulting me.”

“Sorry. Tired.”

“Tired?” he repeats. “You look more than tired. You look spooked, girl.”

I almost tell Weston about the man on the train. Then I decide it was nothing. Why bother him with it? It’s not even bothering me anymore.

It was just a creepy dude wearing sunglasses on a subway. There are probably a thousand more doing the exact same thing as we speak. I wish I’d gone up to him and said, Oh, hi. I know you’re staring at me, and I really want to do more, but I have an early morning. Rain check, yeah?

Because that way, I’d know for sure I’d never see him again.

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