Burning Both Ends (Coming Into The Light #3)

Chapter 1

Cambridge

Fifteen Years Ago

Sarah lay on her bed, still in her training kit, staring at the wall and admitted to herself for the first time that she had a problem.

It was the last Sunday of November, mid-afternoon, the type of grey Cambridge day where everything seemed flat and you couldn’t tell if it was two o’clock or four. She’d come back from training an hour ago, made a cup of tea, sat down with her European Law notes, and somehow ended up here instead.

Doing nothing.

Thinking about Jess.

The thing was, this wasn’t a new problem for Sarah.

She’d had it badly at fifteen, with a girl in her boarding house in the year above called Cressida whose laugh used to do something to her deep down inside that no boy had ever come close to.

She’d had it at seventeen with her tennis doubles partner, and had channelled the entire weight of it into winning the school cup with her that summer because she’d had to channel it somewhere.

She’d had it on and off since she could remember, these crushes, and she’d always done the same thing with them: tell herself off for noticing whoever she was, wait it out, let the feeling recede and go back to being the person she was supposed to be.

Head girl with the handsome boyfriend. Star hockey player. Place at Oxbridge.

Never look too hard at the difference between who she was supposed to be, who everyone thought she was, and the person she actually was deep down inside.

She’d been very good at it, for a very long time.

But Jess… it was time to admit it to herself, this time was different. Seven weeks she’d known her and it was more than long enough to know that this time it wasn’t going anywhere.

***

The buddy thing was meant to be light touch.

A friendly second year face to buy you a coffee and help you get settled in during Freshers Week, someone you can ask when you don’t quite know what this archaic term means or what, exactly, is formal about formal hall.

Except that Jess was arriving with a reputation as a bit of a hockey star, an England youth international no less who would be fast tracked into the university Blues first team that Sarah already played for, and they’d been paired together for precisely that reason.

Within a week the pairing had become a habit despite being in different years with different groups of friends.

They cycled back from training together, they sat at hall together when neither of them had any other offers, they got tea together in the morning if they bumped into each other before lectures.

Sarah had her own life already. She had her friends from her year, the people she’d started with a year before and with whom she’d already been through all the ups and downs that seemed magnified by the intensity of college life.

She didn’t need a new person. Jess was just supposed to be the fresher she occasionally checked in on and bought a drink for at socials.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Jess was funny in a leftfield, sideways manner that Sarah hadn’t been expecting, and direct in a way that Sarah found disarming.

She was at the taller end of average, around Sarah’s height, lean through the shoulders the way good hockey midfielders were.

She had the kind of face that didn’t quite fit a single description: dark eyes, a slightly crooked smile, a small scar above one eyebrow she’d got at sixteen from a stick to the face, an olive complexion and dark hair that spoke to genes from a sunnier climate.

Hot was the unhelpful word that kept popping up in Sarah’s head whenever she let her guard down.

It summed it up perfectly though… everything about Jess was, to Sarah’s mind, hot.

Jess having a girlfriend had helped, at first. She’d mentioned Steph within ten minutes of their first proper conversation, the way another fresher might have mentioned a boyfriend at home.

My girlfriend’s at Bristol. She’s reading English.

We’ve been together since the start of sixth form.

Said completely casually. No big announcement, just a fact.

Sarah had felt a small, dull thump of disappointment that she’d immediately tried to ignore, then an enormous sense of relief, because if Jess was taken then nothing was going to happen, which meant Sarah didn’t have to do anything about anything and she could do what she always did when she felt herself falling for a woman: wait for it to go away and, in the meantime, do precisely nothing about it.

That had worked beautifully for a while.

Steph had visited three weekends ago. Sarah had met her at the college bar, been polite and friendly and witty in the way she could turn on like a tap, then walked back across the quad to her room alone in the cold and realised that she absolutely loathed her…

which was deeply unfair of her, because Steph had done nothing to deserve being loathed and seemed lovely.

Sarah had lain in bed that night and thought, this is jealousy, you idiot, this is what jealousy is, and had pushed the thought deep down and had tried not to think about what Jess and Steph must be doing that very moment in her own room, in her own bed, and…

sleep had come eventually, but it was fitful and she felt even worse the next morning.

There was a photograph on the chest of drawers in Jess’s room, Steph’s arm round her at a festival that summer just gone, both of them laughing, and Sarah had to walk past it every time she went round, which was now most days.

After Steph’s visit she’d developed a careful way of not looking at it, trying to pretend it didn’t exist even as she found herself watching Jess closely, having thoughts about Jess that were not the thoughts you normally had about a friend.

***

Sarah said it out loud into her empty room.

“I’m in love with her.”

It sounded insane.

It was also absolutely true in a way that none of her crushes for other women had ever been.

She closed her eyes and thought about Cressida and the doubles partner, and how none of them had ever come close to this, because none of them had ever known her properly.

None of them had ever wanted to. This wasn’t a crush from across a classroom.

Jess knew her. Jess sought her out. Jess, Sarah was beginning to suspect, despite her girlfriend, was looking back.

Until now, Sarah’s self-narrative had been I’m straight, but it’s natural to notice women sometimes and have thoughts about them, totally natural, but of course I wouldn’t do anything about it. She dated guys, she didn’t date girls. That wasn’t her.

Except now… now she found herself, for the first time, wondering about something happening, something genuinely happening. Not a fantasy about some unattainable woman but a real, tangible what would this be like?

That was the new part. That was the terrifying part.

She rolled onto her back, stared at the ceiling, and reminded herself, very firmly, of the things she was going to do this week.

Finish her European Law essay. Send it on Wednesday morning.

Get through the squad’s end-of-term social on Wednesday night.

College Christmas party on Friday night, then her dad was driving up to collect her and her stuff Saturday.

Today was Monday. Make it to Saturday and she had six weeks at home with her family for Christmas where she could give this time to settle the way it always had, then come back in January and move past whatever this was.

Five days. She could last five days.

***

She lasted two days.

***

The squad social was at a pub near college, most of the men’s and women’s Blues squads packed into a function room upstairs, wine and beer chilling on a side table along with a distinctly budget selection of finger food, the club secretary’s playlist coming out of the speakers and, mercifully, no sign of any speeches.

The temperature of the room rose steadily as the night went on.

By ten the windows were running with condensation, the floor was sticky, and somebody had knocked over a glass that nobody had quite got round to clearing up.

Sarah had been drinking carefully, conscious that she had a supervision in the morning…

not that she wasn’t averse to turning up a little hungover, but she’d turned up to a couple of them in her first year with raging, world ending hangovers and it hadn’t been pretty.

She’d been across the room from Jess for most of the evening, by accident at first and then by design, because every time she let herself look, Jess was doing something that made her heart race just that little bit faster.

Laughing at something the goalkeeper had said.

Wearing jeans and a tight black top with the sleeves pushed up.

Hair down for once that dialled up the she’s hot to stratospheric levels.

Sarah was talking to Beth and Imogen, second years like herself though at different colleges, when Jess came over.

“So… after party,” Jess said without preamble. “They’re chucking us out at eleven. The night’s still young.”

“I’m game,” Imogen replied. “Just point me wherever.”

“Me too,” Beth added.

Sarah smiled apologetically. “I’ll pass… last supervision of term in the morning.”

All three women protested at once.

“It’s the Christmas social…”

“You can’t just go to bed…”

“You practically have to do the last supervision of term hungover…”

It was good natured, but Sarah knew they weren’t going to let her slip away without trying their hardest to stop her.

“Quite a few people are planning to go to that new club, the one on the corner,” Jess added.

She rested her hand lightly on Sarah’s shoulder, a friendly gesture that did something funny to Sarah’s insides, particularly when accompanied by the way Jess looked deep into Sarah’s eyes. “One drink won’t hurt.”