Chapter 1: Caught

Tia balanced the takeout bag on one arm and knocked twice with the other hand, already smiling.

Tyler had texted her that morning sounding miserable. Stomach thing. Skipping practice. Might die.

She'd laughed, skipped her afternoon lecture, and picked up the ginger soup from the place he liked on campus. Twenty minutes on the bus for a boyfriend who was probably exaggerating a headache into a national emergency. That was just who he was.

Nobody answered.

She tried the handle. Unlocked. That wasn't unusual — Tyler never locked anything, which used to charm her and now, apparently, was about to be useful.

"Tyler?" She pushed the door open with her hip, bag first. "I come bearing soup and mild judgment—"

She heard it before she saw it. A laugh. Molly's laugh, unmistakable, low and delighted, coming from the bedroom.

For one stupid second, Tia's brain tried to build her a kinder story. Molly had stopped by to keep him company. Molly was watching something funny on her phone. Molly —

She set the bag down on the counter without deciding to.

The bedroom door was half open. She didn't remember crossing the room to it.

Tyler and Molly weren't fully dressed, and the sheets weren't doing the job sheets were supposed to do.

None of it mattered anyway, because Tia's whole body had already gone cold and still, the way it did before she cried. Except she wasn't crying. She was just standing there.

Molly saw her first.

"Oh my god." Molly grabbed the blanket up to her chest like that fixed anything. "Tia — this isn't — okay, it's exactly what it looks like, but it's not — "

"It's not not what it looks like," Tia said. Her voice came out flat and strange, like someone else's. "So maybe don't finish that sentence."

Tyler at least had the decency to look like he wanted to disappear. For about four seconds.

Then his face did something Tia would replay for weeks — a kind of resettling, jaw squaring, like he'd decided panic wasn't going to work so he'd try something else instead.

"Tia. Can we talk about this like adults."

"We're talking right now," she said. "You're just doing it naked, which is a choice."

"Jesus." He grabbed his jeans off the floor and yanked them on, which somehow made it worse, watching him get dressed in front of her like modesty was the thing that mattered here. "Look, this isn't — it's not what you think, okay, it's not some huge thing, it just happened—"

"How does this happen, Tyler? Did you trip? Did gravity do this?"

Molly made a small, wounded sound, like Tia yelling was the unreasonable part.

"Two years," Tia said, mostly to herself. "Two years and I bring you soup."

"I've been under a lot of pressure," Tyler said, like that was an answer to anything. "You know how finals are. And you're always — " He stopped himself.

"I'm always what."

He didn't answer right away. That was somehow the worst part, watching him decide whether to say it.

"You're always so — closed off," he said finally, like he was doing her a favor by explaining. "I'm twenty-two, Tia. I have needs. And you just — you never — "

"Say it."

"You've never once let me touch you in two years and I'm supposed to just — what, wait forever?"

There it was.

Tia had known, somewhere under the ice currently running through her chest, that this was coming. She'd braced for it without admitting she was bracing. It still landed like a slap.

"So this is my fault," she said. "I didn't sleep with you, so you slept with my best friend."

"I'm not saying it's your fault — "

"You're saying it's my fault."

"Tia, come on." Molly finally found her voice, and it came out pleading, which somehow made Tia angrier than the silence had. "It really wasn't planned, we just — we've been talking for a while, and he was upset, and — "

"How long is a while."

Molly didn't answer that either.

"How long, Molly."

"...A few months."

Tia laughed. It surprised her, coming out of her own mouth, sharp and humorless. "A few months. So the sleepover last month. The one where you told me you were staying at your cousin's."

Molly's face answered for her.

"Great," Tia said. "Great. Cool. Very cool, both of you."

She turned around before either of them could say anything else, walked back into the living room, picked the soup bag back up off the counter — she genuinely wasn't sure why, some autopilot refusal to leave anything of hers behind.

Then she stopped at the door.

"For what it's worth," she said, not turning around, "you could've just broken up with me. You didn't have to make it about whether I'd have sex with you. That's — " her voice cracked, just slightly, and she hated it, "— that's a really shitty thing to make it about."

Nobody said anything at first. Then, behind her, she heard it — small, involuntary, and unmistakable: Molly, biting back something that was almost a laugh.

A flicker of a smirk Tia caught in the hallway mirror before she could stop herself from looking.

Tia turned around at the door, slow and deliberate, and looked at both of them for a long second — Tyler still half-dressed and refusing to meet her eyes, Molly with that smirk dying fast on her face the moment she realized she'd been seen.

"This isn't over," Tia said quietly. "Not even close."

Then she left, and didn't look back.