I would never dare
I am eating cereal out of the box with a fork.
There is a reason for the fork and I am not going to defend it. Because the reason is that all the spoons in this house are currently in Nate's room in a manner nobody has explained, and I have decided to be a problem-solver rather than a victim.
The email comes in while I've got the fork in my mouth.
Wycliffe College — Decision on your application
Here's what a normal person does.
A normal person sits down. A normal person breathes, opens it calmly, and processes the information like an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex.
I stand up so fast my chair goes over.
Dear Madeline,
I am delighted to—
I do not read the rest of it.
The noise that comes out of me is tiny.
I get my whole hand over my mouth before it can get any further, both hands, and what escapes through my fingers is a small strangled thing like something dying quietly in a hedge.
My eyes are doing something I cannot control.
I read the first eleven words again.
Delighted. They used delighted. That's a real word that a real person typed about me on purpose.
The rest of it is admin. The rest of it can be handled by whoever I become in the next hour. The girl currently in this room has left and what is standing here is a set of lungs.
I drag the nearest T-shirt over my head with hands that have apparently stopped working. Will’s. White. Enormous. Good enough. I do not have another second for anything else.
I run out of my room and that’s when the screaming comes properly.
Down the hallway. Full volume. No words in it at all, just noise.
DJ is coming up the stairs with a mug.
“No running with forks,” he announces calmly, without stopping. “That's how people lose eyes.”
“NOTED,” I scream, and keep going.
I run past Lizzie's open door where my sister is sitting on her bed with a laptop and looks up at me with her mouth already open. “Maddy, what is happen—”
“ONE SECOND.” I inform her, at approximately the pitch of a smoke alarm, and keep going.
And I go straight past my own sister. Eighteen years. She taught me to read. She punched a boy at a wedding for me.
I barge into Will’s room down the hall.
He's on his bed with no shirt on, one ankle up on a cushion, a printed reading in one hand and a highlighter in the other.
Highlighting.
This man submitted eighty-one pages to a library in April, four weeks after winning a championship, in the final semester of a degree he has already survived, and he is lying there highlighting a reading for a class that cannot possibly hurt him any more.
I have never seen anything hotter.
He's off the bed before I've fully got through the door. “Hey. Hey. Everything alright?”
And that's the whole thing about him, actually. Whatever my face is currently doing, I have no information about what my face is currently doing, and he has looked at it once and gone straight to is there a problem.
The screaming down the hall though? He’s obviously accustomed to it.
“ENGLAND,” I yelp, both my hands covering my open mouth.
“…Okay.” He nods once.
Oh My God. He doesn’t understand.
“WILL. ENGLAND.” I confirm, at volume.
“Right.” Both his hands come up to my shoulders. He's scanning me. “Is somebody in England. Has something happened in England. Are you coming—”
“I'm going to be in it—” I cut in.
“In England.” Now he gets it.
“YES.”
“Baby.” Very gently. “You're going to have to give me one noun.”
“Wycliffe.” I jump with both fists in front of me.
Will's hands stop moving on my shoulders.
“I GOT IN.” I spell it out for my boyfriend. “They said delighted. Look. Delighted. It's right there. That's the word.”
I get the phone up between us, about four inches from his nose, which is far too close for any human being to read anything.
He does not look at the phone.
He looks at me. “You got into Wycliffe.”
“That's what I've been saying, Will, that's been the content of every single thing I've said since I came through that door—”
“It really wasn’t,” he still looks shocked.
And then my extremely composed, permanently self-governed, once-described-by-a-coach-as-unnervingly-calm boyfriend makes a noise.
I have known this man six months.
I have watched him in all sorts of inconvenient situations.
He has never made this noise.
It's somewhere between a shout and a bark and something a large animal does in a documentary. It comes with him getting both arms under me and lifting me clean off the floor.
“WILL—”
“England.”
“Put me down—”
“You're coming to England—”
Now we are both making noise in a bedroom in a shared house at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
Downstairs, a door bangs open and Nate yells, “IS SOMEBODY BEING MURDERED?”
“NO,” we both shout back.
“IT SOUNDED LIKE MURDER.”
“IT'S FINE,” we shout, together, again.
He puts me down eventually. Sort of. He puts me down on his desk, which is not the floor, and stands there with both hands either side of me grinning like an absolute idiot.
Will Mercer. Grinning. Openly. Teeth and everything.
“Say it again,” he demands.
“No.” I press my lips together.
“Maddy.” He uses his captain voice.
“It's embarrassing now. You've made it a whole thing.”
“Say it.”
“England,” I mutter into his collarbone, and he does the noise again, quieter, into my hair.
“Of course you got in.” His hands settle at my side, forehead against mine, breathing like he's run something.
“You don't know that.”
“I do know that.” He pulls back just enough to look at me properly and his thumb comes up under my eye. “Maddy. Of course you got in.”
His nose brushes mine. “Have you told your parents?”
“No. I literally just got the email. Wait I have to read it again in case they tell me they’re delighted that I applied.”
“Sit down,” he grins, and then, “no, wait, you're already sitting.”
I pull out my phone and read the email properly for the first time, past the first eleven words, all the way to the end while Will puts a hand over his mouth.
“So you're really going.” He looks up. “To England. In September.”
“Yes.”
“You're really— Maddy, you're actually leaving Princeton. Now that they've said yes. You'd actually go.”
“Yes. I’ll be doing three years over there. So four years in total. Maybe some credits from Princeton. We’ll work out the details later.”
He nods. Then he laughs at nothing, and rubs the back of his neck, and looks at the floor. “Hang on.”
I watch the exact second his brain has come back online. “Mm.”
“Wycliffe's in England.”
“We've established this. Multiple times.”
“You applied to a university in England.”
“Yes.”
“When did you apply?”
I lean back on my hands. “Couple of months ago.”
“So you wanted to—”
“Because I lived there.” I shrug at him. “Half my childhood. My mother's whole family is there, we were in London until I was nine, and I have wanted to go back since approximately the day we left, and my parents moved us to New York and I have been extremely gracious about it for ten years.”
“You've never mentioned that once.”
“You never asked me where I'm from, Will. You asked me what I was doing, which honestly reflects well on you.” I flick his chest with one finger. “And I didn't tell anybody I applied because I never thought I'd get in.”
He raises his eyebrows at me. Damn it. Those eyebrows are my weakness, really.
“Okay, that's a lie.” I concede it immediately. “I thought I might get in. I just wasn't going to say it out loud. So I filled in the form and I put it in the sea and I stopped thinking about it.”
“You stopped thinking about it.” He doesn’t believe me one bit.
“Almost entirely.” I grin. “Okay. I checked my email like four hundred times.”
“So what happens to the business?” He asks calmly.
“Jenny takes Princeton.”
“She takes Princeton.”
“She is Princeton now, they're all in love with her, it's a genuine problem for me professionally.” I swing one foot at his shin. “And she keeps saying Japan, so honestly we might just sell the whole thing and do the next thing.”
Will's eyebrows go up. “Sell it.”
“Mm.”
“My girlfriend is in private equity.” He looks delighted and squeezes my cheeks between his palms.
“I have no idea what that means,” I admit with a smile, “and I already love the sound of it.”
“Wycliffe's not in London, though,” I can see the calculation start behind his eyes.
“No. Hour on the train.”
“So you'll be an hour away.”
“Correct.”
“And I'll be in London.”
“Also correct.” I keep my voice very level, which is a skill I have and use approximately never. “You could stay in our family house. It's in Kensington. It's empty. Somebody should be in it.”
Will stares at me for so long that I begin to frown. No words from my boyfriend.
“That’s your response?” I complain because I’m a child.
“I’m trying to work out whether you just asked me to live with you.”
“I absolutely did not.” I protest and my face has gone a little pink. I can feel the heat in my ears. “The house needs somebody in it.”
“You told me to move into your family home in another country.”
“I said you could stay there.” I flip my hair and give him the eyes. “A temporary place until you find somewhere acceptable.”
“How temporary?” He tilts his head.
“I don’t know.” I look at the ceiling. “A few decades.”
Will laughs properly. His head falls down into my shoulder, both arms round my back, still laughing.
Then, into my neck. “Seven hours.”
“What?”
“Newark to Heathrow. Seven hours, and there's an overnight that lands at six in the morning, so you'd barely lose a day.” He doesn't lift his head. “There's a Thursday one that's cheaper. I've had it worked out since February.”
Oh. Oh.
He has been sitting in this room with a highlighter for two months quietly solving an ocean.
“Will.”
“Mm.”
“It's fifty-eight minutes now.”
“I know it is,” he says, into my neck, and I can hear him grinning.
I bury my hands in his hair. “You're not allowed to wear shoes inside the Kensington house. It's a home, Will, it's not a locker room, there are rugs—”
“Fine.” Still laughing.
“You're not allowed to be emotionally unstable every time your team loses.”
“Impossible.” He lifts his eyes to mine.
“You're not allowed to alphabetise anything of mine.”
“They were in no order at all.” Now Will frowns properly.
“They were in my order.” I get a fistful of his hair and pull his head down. “Last one. This is the important one.”
“Hit me.”
“You are never, at any point, in front of anybody, in any country, going to tell one single person on this earth that I followed you to England,” I tell him.
My boyfriend smiles.
“Maddy.” His voice goes low and hoarse. “I would never dare.”
—- The end.