Chapter 02: Room 306.

EVA.

I walked up to Graham slowly, and sat down in the empty space beside him.

He did not look up.

He did not even flinch.

He just sat there, completely absorbed in whatever was in that glass, swirling it gently, tipping it back, like the rest of the world did not exist.

My heart was beating so fast I was genuinely concerned about my own health.

I had walked across an entire party, rehearsed three different opening lines, discarded all of them, and now I was sitting beside Graham Hartway with absolutely nothing prepared.

"Hey," I said.

He turned.

And without thinking, without giving my brain even a single second to intervene and save me from myself....I grabbed his shirt, pulled him forward, and kissed him.

It lasted maybe four seconds before my brain caught up with what my hands had done, and in those four seconds I learned several things simultaneously.

His lips were soft.

Genuinely, unfairly soft, like someone had specifically designed them to cause problems for ordinary people.

He smelled like cedar and something faintly sweet from whatever he had been drinking, and my hands had somehow found his shoulders without being instructed to, my fingers pressing into the solid warmth of him as my heart completely abandoned any attempt at a normal rhythm.

I had intended it to be quick.

Strategic.

A single move that would set the rest of the dare in motion and give me some kind of control over the night.

Instead, my brain went quiet in a way it had absolutely no right to go quiet, and for approximately three seconds I forgot that I was in the middle of a party.

I forgot that I was supposed to be executing a plan, I forgot everything except the warmth of his mouth and the way his shoulders felt beneath my palms.

It was broad, solid and completely real in a way that no w*****d novel had ever properly prepared me for.

Then my elbow caught the glass on the table beside us.

It hit the floor and shattered, and the sound of it cracked through the small bubble I had been floating in and brought everything rushing back at once.

We separated.

Graham leaned back and looked at me, and his face was completely, utterly unreadable, like a wall that had been constructed specifically to give away nothing.

His eyes were amber, warm and deep in colour but absolutely cold in expression, and they stayed on my face for a long moment while I sat there trying to remember how lungs worked.

I could feel eyes on us from across the room.

Half the party had turned to look, drawn by the sound of breaking glass, and I kept my own eyes fixed forward because I was not ready to meet any of those stares.

I had already absorbed enough for one evening.

Graham looked at me for what felt like a very long time.

Then he shook his head slowly...not in anger, not in amusement, just in the quiet, exhausted way of someone encountering something they do not quite have words for.

He reached for another glass somewhere beside him, poured his drink, and went back to sipping it like nothing had happened, like I had not happened.

He was not flustered.

He was not flattered.

He was not even annoyed.

I suddenly understood with complete clarity why half the girls at Brentford were completely unravelled by this man.

His aura was extraordinary in the most aggravating possible way.

He had not flinched, had not made a single sound, had not given me anything to work with.

He had simply looked at me and returned to his drink like I was a minor interruption in an otherwise peaceful evening.

"Are you not going to say anything?" I asked.

He exhaled long and slow, like the question had cost him something.

Then he turned and looked at me, and his gaze was so steady and so direct that I felt it somewhere behind my sternum.

He held it for several seconds, then turned back to his drink, stood up, and started walking away.

I sat there staring at his back.

He had not said a word.

He had looked at me....really looked at me, long enough that I felt it, and then simply left.

No reaction, no comment, nothing.

I had kissed the man and he had walked away like it was mildly inconvenient.

Then my eyes drifted across the room and landed on one of the IT Girls standing over another girl who was on her knees cleaning her shoes, and the image settled into my chest like cold water.

That was going to be me if I went home tonight without executing the dare.

I thought about Maddie, the way she had looked at me during the dare circle, like I was already a conclusion she had reached before I even opened my mouth.

I had disliked Maddie long before I ever set foot at Brentford.

I had seen her I*******m, had seen the way she carried herself online, and had decided then that she was exactly the kind of person I spent energy avoiding.

The idea of spending thirty days answering to her was genuinely unbearable.

"Graham...." The word came out before I had a full plan attached to it.

My heart hammered in the silence that followed, loud enough that I was concerned it was audible.

The tension of those few seconds stretched out completely unreasonably, and I sat with it, waiting.

Then he turned around and walked back toward me.

He stopped in front of me and looked slowly, then he smiled. Every coherent thought I had, dissolved on contact.

His smile did something extraordinary to his face, moving through his jaw and reaching his eyes in a way that was deeply unfair to everyone in the surrounding area.

I stared at him like a person who had forgotten where they were and was not particularly motivated to remember.

"What do you want from me?" he said.

His voice was low and unhurried, carrying the particular ease of someone who had never once been rushed by anything.

I heard it move through me like a sound wave and immediately diagnosed myself as a finished woman for the second time that evening.

I stared at him.

I was smiling.

I could feel myself smiling and I could not stop it because Graham Hartway was standing in front of me asking what I wanted, which was objectively, a monumentally significant sentence.

"Okay," I said, pulling myself together with great effort. "I'm sorry about the kiss. The thing is, I'm caught up in this thing and...uh..."

I paused as he stepped closer.

His face had shifted, the smile gone, replaced by something quieter and more serious.

He looked at me directly, and I could feel the warmth of him from where I sat.

"What do you want from me?" he said again, and this time there was no smile in it at all.

I dropped my eyes immediately because looking at him at close range was an entirely different experience that I was not equipped for.

"Okay," I said to my own hands. "I'm the victim of a dare. They told me to kiss someone from the hockey team and sleep with the hockey captain, which is you. So I thought if I kissed you and maybe....touched your dick, you might take me somewhere and..."

He laughed but it wasn't a polite one.

He raised his glass and sipped through it, and then laughed again, and I sat there watching him...the movement of his throat, the line of his jaw, the way his arms shifted, and felt thoroughly defeated in the best and worst way simultaneously.

Then he reached out and tucked a strand of my purple hair behind my ear, casual and unbothered, as he looked at me steadily.

"That's pathetic," he said, not unkind. "But I think I've already helped you."

I frowned. "We didn't have sex. How exactly did you help me?"

He looked at me with the patient expression of someone explaining something to a person who should already know the answer, and there was enough quiet arrogance in it to fill the entire room.

"You said the first dare was to kiss someone from the hockey team," he said. "I am the captain of the hockey team, which also makes me a member of the hockey team. You kissed me." He held my gaze. "Dare one is done."

My eyes went wide.

I stared at him and felt the specific embarrassment of someone extremely intelligent who had completely missed the obvious answer.

He was right.

He was completely, effortlessly right, and I had not thought of it once.

I smiled, feeling my cheeks turn red. "I never thought of it. Thank you, Captain."

Something moved through his expression. "You owe me a car."

I laughed before I could stop it. "Don't worry, I'll steal my dad's."

He laughed again, and for approximately thirty seconds we existed in a small warm pocket of genuinely normal human interaction, and it was lovely.

Then his face shifted back to neutral, clean and sudden, like a door closing quietly.

I watched it happen. "Did I say something wrong?" I said.

"No," he said simply, grabbed his drink and walked away.

I sat there completely still, processing the fact that he had just made a joke with me, had laughed, had touched my hair, and had then stood up and left without any further explanation.

I could not identify what had changed or when it had changed or what I had done to cause the shift.

I stared at the party around me and exhaled slowly.

If this was how the night was ending, then I was going to have to accept my fate gracefully.

Suddenly, a hand landed on my shoulder softly.

So softly that I almost thought I had imagined it.

But then it moved slowly, deliberately....fingers pressing gently along the line of my shoulder.

I could not turn around.

I could not move at all.

I sat completely still with my eyes falling shut, warmth spreading from the point of contact outward, and then I felt breath at my neck, close and warm and unhurried.

A voice, low and slightly rough, moved against my ear. "Call this number. Meet me there in five minutes."

Before I could process the statement, the warmth disappeared, the breath disappeared and the hands were already lifted.

My eyes flew open and I spun around so fast the room tilted slightly but there was no one there.

Just the party, loud and indifferent, a group of people laughing near the wall, two girls dancing badly, someone spilling a drink.

I blinked several times and pressed my hand flat to my shoulder where the warmth had been.

I knew what I had felt.

I was certain of it with every part of myself.

That had been real...the hand, the breath, the voice. That had not been my imagination, and I knew the difference.

My eyes dropped to the table.

A card sat beside my phone, small and plain, with two words written in clean bold letters.

ROOM 306.

Beside it, was a folded piece of paper.

I opened it with shaking fingers and found a number written in it.

I grabbed my phone, dialled before I could think myself out of it, and held it to my ear with my heart climbing steadily into my throat.

"Who the fuck," I whispered to myself, "is this?"