Chapter 4: The Girl Who Waited at the Door

"We're not friends," I say. "We're partners for a class project. There's a difference."

"Is there?" Sloane's smile doesn't move, but something behind her eyes recalibrates, filing the answer away like a card catalogue only she can read. She's beautiful in the specific, engineered way of girls who have never once doubted a mirror, blond hair falling in a perfect line despite the wind, a blazer that costs more than my rent. "Because he mentioned you at dinner. Which is strange, since Christian doesn't usually mention people who aren't friends."

My stomach drops through the library steps. He mentioned me. At dinner. To her.

"I wouldn't know what he says at dinner," I manage.

"No," she agrees pleasantly. "I don't imagine you would." She steps aside, finally, holding the door open with one manicured hand, and somehow the courtesy feels more dangerous than if she'd blocked my way entirely. "Enjoy your project, Rebecca. I do love a good study session."

She's gone before I can find a response, down the steps and into the blue evening, and I stand frozen in the open doorway with my heart doing something violent and irregular against my ribs. She knew my name. She knew to come find me here, tonight, at exactly this door. Which means either Christian told her where he'd be, or someone else did, and neither answer settles the sick feeling climbing my throat.

I almost turn around. I almost let the door swing shut and walk back to my dorm and text Christian a single word, no, and let the rainy staircase from six years ago stay a soft, sealed memory instead of whatever it's about to become.

Instead I go inside.

The library at this hour is a different building entirely, all hush and amber light, the after hours smell of old paper and radiator heat. The elevator is indeed broken, a laminated sign taped crookedly over the call button, so I take the stairs, and by the third floor my legs are shaking for reasons that have nothing to do with exertion.

He's already there.

Christian sits at the far study carrel by the window, one of the only lamps on this floor lit, his jacket slung over the chair behind him and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows like he's been sitting there long enough to grow restless in his own clothes. He looks up when my footsteps hit the last stair, and something in his face does a complicated thing, relief and nerves knotted together so tight I can't tell where one ends.

"You came," he says.

"Sloane was waiting at the door downstairs."

His face changes fast, all the softness draining out of it in one clean motion. "What did she say?"

"That you mentioned me. At dinner." I keep my voice level, though it costs me. "Do you want to explain that, or should I guess?"

He drags a hand through his hair, and for a second he looks less like the boy who owns half the quad's attention and more like someone cornered by his own mistake. "I didn't mention you. Not like that. Dom said something about the seating chart, some joke, and I said it wasn't a big deal, and Sloane latched on because Sloane latches onto everything that isn't her." He exhales. "I should have known she'd follow it. I'm sorry. That's on me."

"Is it just on you?" I pull out the chair across from him, not sitting yet, just gripping the back of it. "Because from where I'm standing, everything today has been on me. I lied to a professor's face this morning to protect you. I lied in that stairwell because you asked me to. And now I'm standing in an empty library because a note told me to come alone and tell no one, and the first person I ran into on the way here already knew exactly where to find me."

"I know." He says it quietly, no defense in it, and that quiet does more to me than any excuse would have. "I know how this looks. I know what I'm asking of you, and I know I haven't earned the right to ask it."

"Then why am I here?"

He's quiet for a long moment, turning a pen over between his fingers the way he did in class this morning, a habit I'm starting to recognize the way you learn the tell of someone you've watched too closely for too long. When he finally looks up, there's something raw in his face I've never once seen him wear in public.

"Because I'm failing this seminar," he says. "Not almost failing. Actually failing. I haven't turned in a single paper that wasn't rewritten by someone my father pays, and if Lindqvist finds out, I lose my spot on the crew team, and if I lose my spot on the crew team, my father finds out exactly what kind of son he's raising, and that conversation ends a lot worse for me than a bad grade." He says it fast, like ripping tape off skin. "I picked your name off that form because you had the top score in the class and because six years ago you were the only person at that entire gala who talked to me like I wasn't a name on a building. I told myself that was a coincidence. It wasn't."

The confession sits between us, heavier than I expected, and some old cautious part of me wants to ask why any of that means I should trust him with my evenings, my notes, my careful, guarded self. But another part of me, the part that has been quietly loving this boy since I was fifteen years old in a borrowed jacket, hears the fear under the arrogance and can't quite make herself walk away from it.

"If I tutor you," I say slowly, "there are rules."

Something like hope moves across his face, fast and unguarded before he catches it. "Name them."

"You don't lie to my face again. Not about the seating chart, not about the stairwell, not about anything." I make myself hold his gaze. "And whatever this is, whatever we're doing up here, it doesn't leave this floor unless we both decide it does."

"Agreed." He says it too fast, too easily, the way people agree to terms they haven't fully understood yet. "Rebecca, thank you. I mean it."

I'm about to sit, finally, the tight coil in my chest starting to loosen, when his phone buzzes against the table, screen lighting up bright in the dim room. He glances down out of habit, and I watch every trace of warmth drain out of his face in an instant.

"What is it?"

He turns the screen toward me without a word.

A photo. The two of us, right now, framed through the tall library window from the courtyard below, close together under the single lamp. No caption. Just sent from a blocked number, three minutes ago, to a phone that only three people on this campus have the number for.