Chapter Five: The Almost

It happened on a Thursday, in the school hallway, which was the least romantic location imaginable.

In Nora's defense, she had not planned for it. She had not planned for any of this — not the lunches that had quietly become a regular thing, not the texts that started as logistics and turned into conversations about nothing, not the way she'd started looking for him when she walked into a room without meaning to.

She had a system. The system was: keep things simple, keep things clear, get through the six weeks without catching feelings, collect her favor, move on.

The system was not holding up.

It started with Derek.

Specifically, Derek showing up at Millbrook.

She didn't know what he was doing there — some cousin thing, some weekend visit — but she saw him in the main hallway before first period and he saw her and said, loudly, to the person next to him: "That's Cole's girl. She was at dinner. She's actually kind of—" a pause that went on one second too long, "—surprising."

It shouldn't have bothered her. Derek was a nine out of ten on the cousin-is-awful scale, and his opinion was worth approximately nothing, and she was not the kind of person who needed—

Cole appeared from around the corner like he'd manifested specifically for this moment.

He read the situation in about half a second — the way he always seemed to, she was realizing, which was something she'd never noticed because she'd never paid attention before — and stepped up beside her in a way that was neither aggressive nor complicated. Just easy. Just present.

"Derek," he said flatly.

"Hey, cuz." Derek had the sense to look slightly uncomfortable. "Just saying hi."

"Cool." Cole looked at him in a way that said several more words without using any of them. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

Derek left quickly.

Nora exhaled.

"You didn't have to do that," she said.

"He's a nine," Cole said simply. "You're a ten. Mathematically it was the right call."

She stopped walking.

He stopped a half-step after her and turned. The hallway was loud around them — the usual pre-first-period chaos — but there was this small pocket of quiet in the middle of it, just the two of them, closer than she'd realized.

"That was—" she started.

"Too much?" he said.

"No." She met his eyes. "It was good."

Cole looked at her like she'd said something more complicated than that. His expression did something that she didn't have a word for, something that moved through her chest in a way she was rapidly running out of excuses to ignore.

"Nora," he said, and her name in his mouth sounded different than it ever had before — careful, almost, the way you hold something you're not sure you're allowed to hold.

She took one breath. The hallway was still loud. Someone's locker banged shut six feet away.

"We should get to class," she said.

He looked at her for one second longer. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."

They walked to first period four inches apart, which was four inches closer than they'd started, and Nora's hand brushed his once, entirely by accident, and neither of them said anything about it.

But neither of them moved away, either.

She sat through first period not thinking about it.

She thought about it the entire time.

The problem wasn't that she'd agreed to this. The problem was that she'd agreed expecting it to be simple— a transaction, a favor, a clean line between pretend and real — and somewhere between dinner and fries and dark blue, pre-game ice, the line had gotten complicated.

She liked Cole Whitaker.

Not the idea of him. Not the version the rest of school saw. The actual one — the one who panicked about his mom's dinner and held his shoulders tight when he talked about scouts and said blowing it to the laminated table of a diner with more honesty than most people managed in a year.

That one.

She chewed the end of her pen and thought very sternly about the ground rules.

Her phone buzzed under the desk.

*Cole: you good?*

She looked at it.

She looked at the ceiling.

*Nora: yes. Totally fine.*

*Cole: okay.*

Three seconds.

*Cole: you've been quiet since the hallway*

*Nora: I'm ALWAYS quiet*

*Cole: you've been a different kind of quiet*

She stared at that. At the fact that he had apparently catalogued enough of her to know that there were different kinds.

*Nora: focus on class Whitaker*

*Cole: I'm always focused*

*Cole: also fyi Maya is looking at me from across the room like she knows something*

*Nora: she always looks like that*

*Cole: does she KNOW something*

Nora looked at her notebook. At the clean blank page where today's notes should have been.

She thought about his hand not moving away.

*Nora: put your phone away*

*Cole: thats not a no*

She locked her screen.

She looked at the front of the room and tried to pay attention to the lesson and told herself firmly and clearly that she was going to get this under control.

She was smart. She was organized. She had a plan.

She just needed a new one.