Chapter thirteen
Jessica
By the end of the first week, the entire freshman class has lost its collective mind over a number.
"Okay, we need to compare marks," Sophia demands, dropping onto the low wall outside the dining hall where we've started meeting after classes. "Group audit. I need to know if I'm dying."
We are all tracking Merit Marks like our lives depend on it — it’s a whole lotta stress for everyone.
My total sits at nine. Three from Jon's first class, two from an essay I stayed up too late on, a couple here and there for answering questions, and one I'm still not sure I understand from a professor who nodded at me once and then awarded it.
"Nine," I report.
"Nine?" Sophia clutches her chest. "I have four. Four! How do you have nine?"
"She argued with a prince in front of a whole class and the professor liked it," Renzo says, not looking up from his own screen. "That's the Jessica method. High risk. Occasionally fatal."
"I have eleven," Freya says, to no one, which is the most Freya thing imaginable — quietly winning while everyone else panics.
"Of course you do," Sophia moans.
Declan has seven and looks vaguely guilty about it.
Renzo has six and is loudly pretending he doesn't care, which means he cares enormously.
And it's not just us — the whole class has caught it.
You can feel it in every room now, this low competitive hum, everybody asking everybody else's totals, some students walking around glowing with twenty-plus and others going pale and quiet because a week in and their number's barely moved.
Two girls near us are having what is clearly a tense conversation about which professors "actually give them out. "
"Is everyone this obsessed?" I ask.
Torres, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, nods. "They will be. Until they hit a hundred, and then they'll be obsessed about the Trial instead."
"I have never in my life had anxiety over imaginary points," Sophia announces, mournful. "This is a new personality trait and I hate it."
Torres huffs a laugh. "They stopped feeling imaginary pretty fucking fast."
One by one the others peel off toward their dorms, Sophia still lamenting her four points, Renzo promising to "make a comeback," and somehow it ends up being just me and Torres, walking the long way back with no particular reason to hurry.
The conversation comes easy. It always does with him.
I ask about Frosthaven — what it was actually like, before here — and he surprises me, because instead of the careful half-answers he usually gives about his past, he tells me a story.
Something about a survival exercise gone wrong, a roommate named Leo, and an instructor who apparently still hasn't forgiven any of them.
It's ridiculous and funny and he tells it well, and by the end I'm laughing so hard I have to stop walking.
"That did not happen."
"Every word," he says, dead serious, and then ruins it by grinning.
And it hits me, watching him — the guy who sizes up every room, who sits with his back to the wall, who notices trouble before anyone else does — that there's a lot more to Torres than the jokes and the tattoos and the face I keep getting distracted by.
I want to know the rest of him.
The thought catches me off guard.
So does the fact that, sometime in the last few days, I've started looking for him when I walk into a room.
And apparently smiling whenever I find him.
He notices. Of course he does; he notices everything. But he doesn't say anything about it, and neither do I.
Somehow, without either of us deciding it, we end up in his room.
It's tidier than I expected, sparse enough to make me think he's used to leaving places fast. We sit on the floor with our backs against his bed and compare Merit Mark rumors because I want to know everyone's totals, and I immediately regret it, because now I'm worrying.
"Okay, but look — some of these people are still at one. One mark." I can’t understand what they are doing. "If they don't figure out which professors actually give marks, they're going to run out of time before they even—"
"Jess." Torres is watching me looking amused. "You can't save everyone."
"I know," I say.
"...I'm still going to worry about them, though."
He laughs — the real one, low and warm. "Yeah. I noticed."
And I realize he's smiling, the easy one that makes me feel special and very warm.
"Hey," I say. "I don't think I've actually said it. Thank you. For — everything, honestly. For looking out for me all week. For answering approximately four thousand stupid questions about a world I didn't know existed until, like, Sunday."
"They're not stupid," he says quietly.
And when I look over at him, he's already looking at me.
Neither of us looks away.
It's only then that I realize how close we're sitting — closer than I registered, close enough that I can see the dark of his eyes isn't flat brown at all but has warmth in it, close enough that the air between us has changed temperature.
My heart skips a beat. I'm nervous, suddenly, but not the bad kind, not the I want to leave kind.
Just — aware. Aware of him in a way I haven't let myself be all week.
He reaches up, slow, and brushes a loose strand of hair back behind my ear.
Barely touching. His fingers are careful.
Gentle. My breath catches. For half a second, sorrow flickers across his face—and then it's gone, and we're both leaning in, and my heart is absolutely slamming now, and his eyes drop to my mouth, and—
Someone pounds on the door.
We jerk apart so fast I nearly take out a lamp.
"Jessica?" Sophia's voice, muffled and cheerful through the wood. "You alive in there? You vanished. I'm invoking friendship rights."
I press a hand over my racing heart and start laughing, silent and helpless. Torres drops his head back with a groan that comes all the way up from his soul.
I get up, still laughing, and open the door.
Sophia takes one look at me — flushed, unable to stop grinning — and then past me at Torres, still sitting on the floor looking like a man whose life was ruined thirty seconds ago, and her whole face lights up with pure, delighted understanding.
"Oh my God," she says slowly. "I interrupted something."
"No," I say immediately.
"Maybe," Torres says from the floor.
I turn approximately the color of a stop sign, and Sophia gasps like she's won the lottery and takes off down the hall crowing something I can't fully hear.
I look back at Torres.
He looks at me.
And we both just start laughing — the giddy, ridiculous kind, the kind you can't stop — and he shakes his head at me and I shake mine at him and neither of us says a single word about what almost happened, because it doesn't need saying.
Not yet. It's just there now, warm and new and unspoken, and that's enough.
"Go," he says, still grinning. "Before she tells the entire dorm."
"Too late," I say. "She's telling the entire continent."
I catch up to Sophia halfway down the hall, and she loops her arm through mine and doesn't even try to be subtle about it.
"So," she says. "Torres."
"We were comparing Merit Marks."
"You were comparing something." She's grinning so wide it must hurt.
"Jessica. In one week you've charmed a professor, gotten carried off by a prince, made an actual enemy, and now you're getting cozy with Torres.
I've been here the same amount of time and my biggest relationship is with the coffee machine. "
"What can I say," I tell her, completely straight-faced. "It's a whole hot-guy buffet around here. I'm just filling my plate."
Sophia stops walking so she can laugh properly, doubled over in the middle of the corridor, and I'm grinning too, and I decide — buffet aside — that this is the best I've felt since I stepped off the plane.