6 - Anything?

Ryker's POV

Chase handed me the sweater without a word.

Just walked up, held it out, and looked at me the way guys look at each other when they want to say something they've decided isn't worth the energy. The glare underneath it was clear enough. Stay away from her.

I took the sweater. Tucked it under my arm. Gave him nothing back because there was nothing to give that wouldn't make this worse.

I wasn't going to stay away from her. We both knew it before he turned and walked back down the corridor, and the fact that he knew it and said it anyway with his eyes instead of his mouth told me Chase Whitfield was smarter than he looked.

That was a problem for later.

___________

Harper's idea of a small gathering was forty people, a catering table, and a playlist that cost more to license than most people's rent. I stood in her doorway at nine-fifteen and took it in with the patient expression of someone who had attended enough events exactly like this one to know exactly how it was going to go.

I had come because not coming would have been its own statement. We used to be friends, Harper and I, in the way of two people who grew up in each other's orbit and mistook proximity for closeness. She had texted me seventeen times in the three weeks before I transferred back, each one warmer than the last, and I had responded to enough of them to keep the peace without encouraging anything I couldn't manage.

I scanned the room once. Twice.

Found her on the second pass.

Nova was standing near the far wall in something black that had no business existing in a school context, talking to Chase with the relaxed attention of someone who was listening and calculating simultaneously, and the party, which had felt like an obligation thirty seconds ago, suddenly felt considerably more interesting.

She looked up.

The moment her eyes found mine, something moved through them that she didn't manage to catch in time. Discomfort. Wariness. The specific expression of someone who had been hoping, against better judgment, that a particular problem wasn't going to materialize tonight.

I smiled. I couldn't help it.

I crossed the room.

The air changed the moment I reached them. Chase straightened almost imperceptibly. Nova's hand tightened around her glass by a degree that nobody else in the room would have noticed.

I noticed.

"Lennox," Chase said, with the careful friendliness of someone who had decided to behave.

"Chase." I clapped him on the shoulder, turned to Nova. "And the mysterious transfer student. Great party, right?"

"Wonderful," she said, in that voice of hers that meant something else entirely.

I stayed. Joined the conversation smoothly like I belonged there, and every few minutes I let something slip, nothing that would mean anything to Chase, just enough to watch her face recalibrate. A comment about late nights. About picking up extra shifts. About how you never really knew what someone was carrying until you looked closely enough.

Each one landed. I watched her absorb them, watched her keep smiling, watched the effort it cost her and found myself, unexpectedly, admiring it.

By the fourth one she set her glass down on the nearest surface, touched Chase's arm with a smile that gave nothing away, and said she needed some air.

I waited forty-five seconds. Then I followed.

____________

The poolside was empty, lit from underneath the water in shifting blues and greens that made everything look like it was happening somewhere slightly underwater. She was standing at the far end with her back to me, arms crossed, and she didn't turn around when she heard my footsteps.

"What do you want from me?"

Her voice was low. Controlled. The voice of someone who had decided they were not going to give me the satisfaction of seeing them unravel.

"I haven't decided yet," I said honestly.

She turned. Her eyes in the pool light were doing something complicated. "Why haven't you told anyone?"

"What makes you think I won't?"

"Because you would have already." She tilted her chin up, which I was starting to understand was what she did when she felt cornered. "So what is this? What do you want?"

"Why are you really here?" I said. "Not the scholarship story. The real reason."

Something moved across her face. She looked at me for a long moment, and I could see her running the calculation, weighing what I knew against what I might do with it.

"You don't want to know that," she said finally.

"Trust me, I do."

She exhaled. Looked away, at the water. "I just, I need you to keep what you know to yourself. Please." The please cost her something. I could hear it. "I'll do anything. Just don't tell anyone."

Anything.

The word landed in the space between us and stayed there.

I took one step closer. The pool light caught her face and I looked at her, really looked, and she was desperate and exhausted and trying so hard to hold every piece of herself together that something in my chest did a thing I hadn't given it permission to do.

She was close enough that I could have reached out. Close enough that the distance between doing it and not doing it was just a decision, one I was absolutely, seriously considering, and she was looking up at me with those sharp dark eyes and the pretense had dissolved somewhere in the last thirty seconds and there was nothing between us except—

"Ryker."

Harper's voice came from the doorway behind me, warm and cold all at once, threaded with just enough edge to carry across the pool deck.

"It's your welcome back party." A small laugh. "Don't you think you should be inside?"

I didn't move immediately. Neither did Nova.

"The games are about to start," Harper added, in the tone of someone used to being the reason people changed direction.

I took a step back. Looked at Nova one last time. Her expression had closed up again, every door shut, the composure back in place like it had never been anywhere else.

"We're not done," I said, quietly enough that only she could hear it.

Then I turned and walked back inside without looking back.

Behind me, I heard nothing. No footsteps, no response, no sound at all from the girl standing alone at the edge of Harper's pool.

Which was somehow louder than anything she could have said.