Chapter 14
Junior Year, Second Semester
The first sign of trouble between West and Bethany came at a bonfire in the desert. A guy I’d just met had his hand on my knee when their fight started, and by the time he leaned in for a kiss, the ice coming off both of them was enough to douse the fire.
The second sign was at a game night in January. I watched the couple have an entire silent fight with their eyes over a game of Cards Against Humanity because West wasn’t picking her cards to win.
The third time is when I’m sitting on the floor in West’s room, scrolling through Facebook instead of writing, and I see that Bethany has posted an old picture of them with a long caption about how much she loves him—aka the relationship death rattle.
I glance at West. He’s sitting on his bed playing video games, The Canterbury Tales abandoned on the floor.
We don’t spend much time at his apartment, but Amber’s dad is making repairs at the house, so we ended up here, hiding from West’s roommates and their intense game of Dungeons it’s time to describe what he looks like, and I suck at description.
I type the first thing that comes to mind. He has a nose. Two eyes. And a mouth. In a hot way.
I groan and delete it. What do people even look like?
“I need help,” I announce when my fingers have been hovering over the keyboard for the time it takes West’s on-screen character to die and come back to life and then die again.
“Nine times five is forty-five,” West says without skipping a beat. I snort. Now that’s a callback I remember.
Hands still frozen, I study his face: long black eyelashes and a crooked nose. Without my permission, my fingers move. Fox Caldwell is born.