Chapter 1: carter and Clara

Chapter 1

"Are you planning on staring at me all night, or are you going to hand me a towel?"

The aluminum mop handle slid out of my hands and clattered against the wet tile with a noise that rang off every locker in the room, and the cold dirty water I'd been dragging across the floor all night splashed up the cuffs of my gray sweatpants without my so much as flinching, because I was too busy not looking at the man standing three feet in front of me. Carter Graham, dripping and wreathed in steam from the shower he'd just left, was completely and shamelessly naked, and he wore it with the ease of someone who had never once been told that he ought to be embarrassed.

I hated hockey players, and I hated everything that came attached to them: the loud mouth-breathing in the back rows of every lecture, the varsity jackets they wore like armor, the smell of stale ice equipment that followed them across campus like the consequences of a bad decision. Carter, however, was in a category entirely his own, the campus golden boy and the son of Viktor Graham, a legend whose retired jersey hung in three different NHL arenas, and a boy who had grown up in a world where the word no was something that happened to other people.

He lifted one damp hand and waved it slowly in front of my face, scattering droplets across the front of my shirt. "Hello? Do you speak English, or have I broken you?"

Eyes up, Clara, I told myself, fixing my gaze on a spot just above his left eyebrow. Only his eyes, and nothing else, for the rest of your life.

"I'm not staring," I said, with a calm that surprised me more than it did him. "I'm calculating how much bleach this room is about to cost me."

The corner of his mouth twitched, as if he couldn't decide whether to laugh or be offended. "Most girls would ask for a photo."

"Most girls didn't take a fifteen-dollar-an-hour job scrubbing your shower drain, and trust me, that doesn't cover the trauma." I snatched a towel off the wooden bench and threw it at his chest hard enough to make it land with a slap, and then I turned and walked out of the room at a pace that I hoped looked dignified, though my knees were shaking so badly that I could feel them knocking together beneath my sweatpants.

Out in the dim corridor, the cooler air did nothing to loosen the tightness in my chest, so I pressed my back against the brick wall and breathed through my nose until my pulse stopped pounding in my ears. My phone buzzed against my hip before I'd managed it, and Allie's name lit up the screen, which meant that she was either calling to check on me or calling because she'd sensed from across the city that something interesting had happened.

"Where are you?" she asked, loud enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. "You said you'd be home by midnight, and it's almost one."

"I'm still at the athletic center," I whispered. "And I may have just insulted the most popular guy on campus while he was wearing absolutely nothing."

There was a pause long enough for me to picture her sitting up in bed. "Clara, you once tried to start a petition to cut the hockey team's funding."

"And now I clean their showers, so clearly the universe has a sense of humor." I ended the call before she could ask any follow-up questions and slid my hand into my coat pocket to find the brass master key I needed to lock up the building.

The pocket was empty.

My stomach dropped as the memory arrived, the heavy key and its bright plastic tag, which read PROPERTY OF FACILITIES – $200 LOSS F*E in letters large enough to read from across a room, resting on the tile beside my mop bucket where I'd dropped it. Two hundred dollars was my grocery money for two months, along with my wifi bill and my laundry fund and the last thin margin between me and the tuition payment I was already dreading, and I couldn't afford to lose it any more than I could afford to walk back into that room, which left me with the unpleasant realization that I was going to have to do both.

I crept along the corridor toward the locker room doors, praying that he'd had the decency to put on pants, and I had nearly reached them when the sound of footsteps rang out from the other side, one set heavy and slow and the other quick and light. I ducked into the narrow gap behind a snack vending machine just as the door swung open a few inches, and the voices that carried out into the hallway were close enough that I could hear every word.

"Your grades have fallen off a cliff, Graham, and you're standing there acting like it's a joke," Coach Miller said. "You failed the psychology midterm twice, and I've already spent every favor I had with the dean."

"So spend another one," Carter replied, in the smooth and bored tone of someone who'd never had to pay for anything himself.

"Not this time. Your father wrote the new GPA policy with his own signature, and if you drop below a two-point-oh, you sit, no matter how many goals you've scored." Coach's boots crunched away across the concrete. "Find a tutor, or enjoy the playoffs from the bleachers."

The door slammed shut behind him, and a sensible person would have used the silence to retrieve her key and leave, but I stayed where I was, because the words psychology midterm had lodged themselves somewhere in my chest, and I happened to be the only student in that lecture hall who had earned an A on it.

Footsteps approached from the gym side, and Jaxson, one of Carter's teammates, jogged into the room with a protein shaker in his hand. "That sounded brutal, man. Is your dad actually going to cut off your trust fund over a class?"

"If I fail this final, I'm finished," Carter said, and for the first time all night, the lazy edge had slipped from his voice. "I haven't understood a word Professor Helen has said since the first week, and I need a miracle, Jax."

"There's one person who got an A."

"Who?"

My fingers dug into the metal edge of the machine, and I pleaded silently with Jaxson to be an idiot just this once.

"Clara."

"Who the hell is Clara?"

It was almost impressive, in a horrifying way, that someone could live in such a thick bubble of money and sports and privilege that a girl who'd sat in the front row of his own class for an entire semester was a complete stranger to him.

"Dark hair, front row, classical vocal performance," Jaxson said, pulling out his phone. "Allie posted a video from the diner last Friday, and she's in the background."

I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that someone, somewhere, had deleted that video. When I opened them again and leaned toward the gap near the door hinge, Carter was bent over Jaxson's shoulder, and the same slow, arrogant smirk that he'd worn in the shower had spread back across his face.

"Oh," he said quietly. "That's the girl who just threw a towel at me."

"What?"

"Nothing." Carter pulled a black T-shirt over his head, and as he reached for his gym bag, his foot nudged my abandoned mop bucket aside, and something small and bright glinted on the tile where it had been sitting. He bent down and picked it up, turning the brass key over in his fingers so that the plastic tag with its $200 LOSS F*E warning caught the light, and then he slid it into his pocket without any hurry at all.

My heart stopped in my chest.

"Send me that picture," he told Jaxson, swinging the bag over his shoulder with a grin that was slow and unhurried and entirely too pleased with itself. "It looks like I've just found my new tutor."

He turned toward the door and let his gaze rest on the dark gap behind the vending machine, exactly where I was hiding, as though he'd known all along that I was there.

"And I think she's going to want this back."