Chapter I #2
The girls from down the hall appear on day four.
Two of them — the kind of beautiful that costs money to maintain, long legs in tiny shorts that have no business being that short and every business being exactly that short, hair that falls perfectly without appearing to try, faces that have never seen a bad angle and probably never will.
One is a redhead with a mouth that seems permanently on the edge of laughing at something, crop top riding up when she leans against the doorframe, which she does deliberately.
The other is dark-haired, tall, the kind of girl who makes an oversized hoodie look like a fashion choice rather than a hiding strategy — except hers is cropped at the waist and paired with shorts so small the hoodie is doing nothing.
They look like what twenty should look like.
They look like girls who don't have to be anywhere in the morning, who don't have anything to hide, who got dressed tonight for the specific purpose of being looked at.
Jake looks. Of course he looks — he leans back on his bed with that easy grin and lets his eyes travel in a way that makes the redhead bite her lip and the dark-haired one tilt her chin up, and he says something low that I can't hear over the nothing playing through my headphones, and both of them laugh like he's the funniest person they've ever met.
I keep my eyes on my screen and feel the particular low-grade humiliation of being the only person in this room nobody is looking at — and underneath that, quieter and more shameful, the knowledge that I couldn't be them even if I tried.
Not here. Not like this. Not with especially what's underneath this hoodie.
He doesn't bring them in. I'll give him that. He takes his phone and his keys and his jacket and goes, and he doesn't come back until after midnight, and I don't think about where he's been or what he's been doing or whether he kept his voice down.
I don't think about it.
What I can't stop thinking about is my body.
Day five I lose track of time in the library — genuinely lose it, the way I used to before all this, three hours gone into a chapter on contract law — and by the time I'm walking back across campus I'm already in trouble.
My breasts are heavy and hot and so full the weight of them pulls at my lower back with every step, my nipples chafing against the bra cups, a damp patch spreading at the edges that I'm praying looks like sweat and not what it actually is.
I walk faster. I take the shortcut through the east courtyard that I usually avoid because Jake's team sometimes trains there.
Tonight I don't care. I just need to get to the room.
His jacket isn't on the hook. I check through the gap in the door before I push it open — I've been doing this all week, this careful inch-wide surveillance — and the room is empty, his side in its usual state of cheerful chaos, his jacket gone.
I get inside. Lock the door. Get it done in what must be record time, hands shaking slightly, one ear on the corridor the whole time, certain that this will be the moment his key scrapes in the lock.
It isn't. I'm back in the bra and the hoodie with my pulse still uneven when he does come back, twenty minutes later, smelling like a bar and talking on his phone. He drops his jacket. Clocks me at my desk. Doesn't say anything. I'm not sure which version of him I prefer.
I don't say anything either.
It's fine. The system holds. Everything is completely, entirely fine.
Until day seven, when it isn't.
I sleep through my alarm for the first time in six months.
My body just — stops cooperating, wrung out from the week, and when I do wake it's five-fifty and the ache is already past the point of manageable, that specific deep throb that means I'm out of time.
I don't think. I just grab the washbag and move.
I'm already three steps from the en suite when I hear it — shower running, the particular acoustics of the bathroom occupied, steam curling under the door. Jake's bed is empty. His towel is gone from the hook.
I stand there in my sleep shirt with the washbag in my hands and my body making its needs extremely clear and think: okay.
Okay. How long has he been in there. Five minutes?
Ten? I could wait. Except I've been standing here for thirty seconds already and the pressure is building past ache into something that makes my eyes water — both breasts so full and tight the weight of them pulls my chest forward, nipples raw against the cups, a slow damp spreading that I refuse to look at. I can't wait. I physically cannot wait.
I drag the desk chair to face the wall. Sit. Tell myself the shower's still running, I have at least five minutes, probably more. Tell myself to be quick about it.
I push my sleep shirt off my shoulders and unhook the bra in one practiced move.
Behind me, the shower cuts off.
I don't move fast enough.
The bathroom door opens.
Jake walks out in a cloud of steam with a towel around his hips and water still running down his chest, and he stops dead in the doorway.
For one long, terrible second neither of us moves — me twisted in the chair with my sleep shirt pooled at my waist and my bra hanging open and my bare breasts completely exposed, heavy and flushed and already beading at the tips, and him with his hand still on the bathroom door, his whole body gone still in a way I've never seen on him — like something knocked the easy out of him and he hasn't got it back yet.
I grab my sleep shirt off my lap and crush it against my chest. Heat crawls up my throat and into my cheeks.
"Get out," I say. My voice doesn't work properly.
He doesn't move. He's looking at me — not leering, not grinning, not doing any of the things I'd expect from him. His expression is doing something I can't read, nowhere close to the last seven days of nerd and scholarship and kit bags on the floor.
"Get. Out."
"Chelsea—"
"Now."
He goes. Grabbing his clothes from the bed. The door clicks shut behind him. I sit in the ringing silence with my pulse beating hard in my throat, sleep shirt still clutched to my chest, my body still aching, and the absolute certainty that everything is about to change.
***
He knocks this time. Ten minutes later, three sharp raps on the door.
I've managed to get the bra back on and the sleep shirt over my head and I'm sitting at my desk with a textbook open to a page I haven't read, and I say come in because what else am I going to say, and he comes in.
He's dressed now. Tracksuit bottoms, a t-shirt, collar still damp. He closes the door behind him and leans against it with his arms crossed. No smirk. He looks at me the way he hasn't looked at me in seven days — like I'm a person, not a punchline — and somehow that's worse.
"So," he says.
"Don't." My voice is steadier now. I've had ten minutes. I've been using them. "Whatever you're about to say, don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything cruel."
"You're always about to say something cruel."
He tips his head, conceding the point. "Usually. Not right now." He looks at me for a long moment. "How long has that been going on?"
I keep my eyes on the textbook. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Chelsea."
"Don't call me that like you know me."
"How long?"
There's no version of this where denial works — I know that, I've known it since the door clicked shut ten minutes ago, I've just been hoping something would occur to me. Nothing has. He saw exactly what he saw. The only move I have left is damage control.
"Six months," I say. "It's a hormonal condition. It's being managed. It's none of your business."
"Does anyone else know?"
"No."
He nods, like he's filing that away. "And you want to keep it that way?!"
There it is. I look up at him properly for the first time since he walked back in, and I make myself hold his stare. "What do you want, Jake?"
"I haven't decided yet."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agrees. He pushes off the door and crosses the room, not toward me, just toward the centre of it, hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. I track him the way I track anything I don't trust. He stops a few feet from my desk. "You're in pain right now."
It isn't a question. My body has made it obvious — the way I'm sitting too straight, one arm crossed tight over my chest like I'm holding myself together. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You need to — " He pauses, choosing the word. "Deal with it."
"I'm aware."
"So DEAL with it."
I stare at him. "You're standing in my room."
" Our room." He lets that sit a second longer than he needs to.
"And I'm not going anywhere." He tilts his head, and there it is — the edge, the thing I recognise, except it's quieter than usual.
Pointed rather than loud. "You've got a problem, cupcake.
A pretty significant one. And right now I'm the only person who knows about it. "
I don't say anything.
His eyes drop — just for a second, just enough that I know exactly where they go — then back up to my face.
Something in them that isn't cruelty and isn't pity.
"I know what you need. You've had that hoodie on in a warm room for a week and you walk around like you're carrying something.
I've got eyes, Chelsea." A very brief deafening pause, then "I could help with that.
And I'm not the type to go running my mouth. " A beat. "About anything."
"I am managing it perfectly—"
"You were about to cry when I walked in."
My jaw tightens. He isn't wrong. Six months of this, alone, and I'm so tired I slept through my alarm for the first time ever and now I'm sitting here in yesterday's sleep shirt with my body still aching and Jake Edmund is the only person in the world who knows why.