Chapter 20
The weight of my lashes is threatening to pull my eyes shut and sink me back into sleep—but the darkness startles me.
My breath is sharp, a quiet wince, as I stare at the remains of a blackout.
It must be over by now.
I don’t know how long I slept, but it feels a while, and I have the morning’s promised headache axing my skull in two.
My face twists, eyes squinting.
I wait for my sight to adjust.
It doesn’t.
The blackout is still swallowing me.
No, not me.
Us.
Eric’s bed is soft beneath me, a cloud for a pillow, layers of feathery quilts and fleece blankets to combat the eternal mountain cold.
And he is moulded to my back.
His chest is pressed up against my spine, his arm snaked under my pillow and his fingers loosely threaded through mine.
The warmth of his steady, soft breaths rustles the hair tangled at the crown of my head.
I can tell by his breathing that he’s deep in sleep, a peaceful one, too.
I could slip back into it, the dreams I don’t remember, the rest that tempts me with the soft pillows and quilts.
But the damn headache really is like someone took an axe to my skull, and the more seconds that pass, the worse the thudding gets.
I need to get back to my dorm.
In my bedside table, there are plenty of brews for all sorts of pain.
That’s where I need to go.
Problem, I don’t even know where I am.
Sure, in the boys’ dormitories somewhere, but like… where? How many levels are there, how many corridors and doors, how many staircases?
Is it a mirror of the girls’ dorms?
Do I just follow the staircase all the way down to the grand parlour, then go from there?
All in the dark, too?
First, what I need, is a pain brew.
Eric must have something in his nightstand. No one has a useless top drawer.
Head pulsing, I shift my legs under the weight of the covers.
The soles of my feet glide over his shins.
His sleep is so deep, he doesn’t disturb.
A slumbering statue behind me.
The hand that holds mine, the fingers entwined with mine, belongs to the arm under my pillow. His other hand must’ve been resting on my waist at some point, because it has slipped to my back, at the small of my spine.
I can move easily enough without waking him.
It’s so not a moment I need to deal with when my head is thumping, thumping, thumping.
I untangle my fingers from his warm ones, and the bite of the cold is quick to nip at my hand.
Gently, I draw away from him, tilting onto my middle before scooting across the mattress.
I move with the lethargy fighting to pin me down—until I halt.
Because my toes poke out from the covers and touch thick fabric.
A dense frown settles on my face.
I wiggle my toes against the material, then reach out my hand for it.
The familiar velvety sensation gives it away.
Drapes.
Bed curtains.
The kind that silences sound and turns a bed into complete darkness, like a little pocket of blackout dust.
I’m not in the blackout anymore.
Eric just pulled the curtains over the bed.
The relief escapes me with a sagged breath.
There will be light to lead my way out of the boys’ dormitories.
I feel along the dense curtains, until my fingers poke through a gap.
I slowly stretch out a leg, then the other, until I’m drawing my body out into the cold.
The bare soles of my feet flatten on the floorboards—and it’s like standing on a sheet of ice.
My teeth bare around the wince that tenses me.
Rigid against the cold, I slip off the bed and stand in the early morning shadows of the dorm.
The drape falls shut behind me.
I throw a dazed look around.
My brow furrows, my head sways, but even still, I can make out the other curtained beds around the room.
A mirror of my dorm.
Eric’s bed is where Courtney’s is in my own dorm room, and so I’m on the wrong side for the nightstand.
The draught from the window brushes over my legs, bare from the thighs down, and my skin pebbles.
I look down my body—
And it’s only now I remember that Eric gave me his clothes to wear.
A soft, grey t-shirt that’s too pricey for his wallet, too costly to be ruined by sleeping in it, and a pair of plain black boxers.
He must have changed me into them.
I don’t remember doing it myself, and as I strain to think on it, a sudden burst of nausea erupts in me.
I bring the back of my hand to my head, as though the pressure will ease the thumping. It doesn’t, and those warped thuds follow my heavy steps around the foot of the bed.
The fireplace has dwindled, too low, but the imps should be coming to fix it soon. I know because, as I turn around the foot of the bed, I find the nightstand—and the clock on it reveals the viciously early hour.
Ten minutes past six.
Too early for a Saturday.
Between me and the clock is a pile of my things. The dress I borrowed from Serena, the fluff-strappy shoes, and the scraps of my underwear.
I scoop up the pile in one arm, pinning the bundle to my chest, as I drag myself to the nightstand.
I reach for the handle of the drawer—but as I tug it open, my heart bolts.
The bottle of cologne is in the drawer.
But I brush it aside to reveal the photographs stacked together and bound with a ribbon.
That stupid, dense frown furrows my face again, too thick, too sleepy—and I stare down at the faces in the photograph.
What the fuck is Eric Harling doing with pictures of Amelia, Dray and Harold Sinclair?
My brain is slow, just like the reach of my hand as I scrape out the pile of photographs and lift them to the faint, fractured firelight.
I stare at the photo for a long moment.
Amelia, Harold and Dray, all in their matching sweaters, Amelia’s tradition, and since I don’t recognise the sweater design, I know this must have been taken just this New Year.
I flick to the next picture.
My family.
The Cravens.
Oliver’s face is sour as he pours amber liquid into a tumbler on the terrace at Thornbury Park, and Mother wears a tight smile that doesn’t reach the hardness of her inky eyes. Father doesn’t even smile at all, doesn’t try.
They look miserable.
I flick to the next.
My heart skips a beat—because why the hell would Eric Harling have any of these pictures, especially one of my Nonna and Grandmother Ethel sharing tea?
Ropes of nausea are unfurling through me.
I flick to the next picture, but it’s a letter, folded twice over.
I glide my thumb through the creases until it’s unfolded, and I’m staring down at warping ink.
I skim it.
‘Dray,
I had these developed over the weekend.
They are incomplete without Olivia in attendance, but I do hope you enjoy them, nonetheless.
Next New Year, I look forward to having her smiling face among ours in the photographs.
I hope the semester is treating you well.
With love,
Mother’
The letter falls from my hand.
The photographs slip with it, landing in the open drawer with a flutter and scatter.
I blink down at the mess for a beat.
And my stagnant gaze lands on the cologne.
I snatch it, then bring the bottle to my nose.
The liquid sloshes against the tall glass encasing, trembling in the quake of my hand.
The glass rim is cold and damp on the tip of my nose. My throat is closed, tight, as if it can fight it. But I breathe, I breathe through the clenching of my lungs, and it hits me.
Dark, rippling waters.
My bones rattle, a sudden jolt striking through me.
Dark, rippling waters.
I bite down on the insides of my cheek, blocking the hollow sound that’s crawling up my throat.
The bottle trembles violently in my hand.
Bunched in my other arm, the silk dress and fluffy stilettos are steeled firm against my midsection, and the heels are digging into me.
I welcome the bite of pain into my rib.
It might just be the only thing grounding me, keeping me upright as, slowly, numbly, I set the bottle down on the bedside.
‘Not all gifts were appropriate this year.’
He thought it was an insult.
A dig at him, a colossal display of impropriety in a way we just don’t do, a way that breaks the rules.
But he kept it with him, at the school, in that drawer—and why he chose last night to dab it on his sweater…
I almost don’t know the answer to that.
But of course, I already thought of the answer, but for Eric.
I stand here, staring at the thick foggy blue of the bottle, and the pieces slot together in my unwilling mind.
Dray must’ve been in bed when the blackout struck. He went out there to find me… to bring me back to the dorms. And before he left the room, he dabbed that onto his sweater.
So I would know it was him.
Dray believed that I would recognise that cologne to be his.
He thought I believed I was kissing him, not Eric, grabbing him, not Eric, fisting my hand in his hair as he knelt…
A jolt pulses through me again, laced with nausea.
I’m assaulted by the memories, fractured flashes strobing in my eyes.
I clench my eyes shut, but still, they come.
I’m unsteady on my feet.
My hand comes up to my head, holding it firm, tears trapped on my lashes, face twisting—but all I see is my finger tracing around his palm in the dark, how it must have convinced him last night, that I knew it was him, that I welcomed him, fingertips tracing on palms just like when we were children trading secret messages in front of the others…
My lips part around a bile-laced breath.
I stagger a step back, the floorboards cold and clammy against my bare feet.
Like I’ve been stupefied, I turn, limbs stiff, and start for the door—and in that first step, my mind trips into a sudden whirl.
I sent the cologne to Dray.
I knelt in my bedroom with Abigail, wrapping gifts as she wrote the cards, but my mind was on Dray, it was on the engagement hidden from me, the blatant disregard from my parents, it was on the crumbling of my life, and I was interrogating Abigail about her perfect fucking life, hooked on the revelations that she’s married and has children, and my own head is so far up my own ass that I didn’t know that, and I still don’t care, I only care that she gets a choice.
And all of that…
In all of that, I fucked up.
I taped the cards on wrong.
I sent Dray the cologne.
But if I did that… that means Eric got the Vacheron Constantin.
Oh shit.
That’s why Eric wanted to know about the gift and if he could still keep it, because it’s so fucking extravagant—
I double over.
A horrible heave retches through me, and I think I’ve been struck in the gut.
It was Dray who caught me into his arms. Who kissed me. Who shoved me up against the wall and consumed me.
It was Dray who fucked me.
And I welcomed him.
At first.
But in his bed… I don’t know.
It’s hazy after the corridor, and if I try to think about it, I get an uneasy feeling in my gut.
Maybe that’s the hangover.
I stagger into the door, like I’m still drunk on cheap booze—and the door should steady me, but just as I try to right myself, it whips open from the other side, and I tumble into a hard chest.
“Oh, what the fuck,” the guttural morning voice is instantly recognisable.
I know it’s my brother before I step back and face him.
But he only realises it’s me once he’s wiped away the spills of hot coffee from his t-shirt, lifted his gaze—and frozen.
He stares at me with wild eyes.
My mouth wobbles.
Oliver’s lashes flutter for a beat.
Tears stream down my cheeks.
“What the fuck—”
I shove by him and race down the stairs as quick as my uneasy legs can carry me.
The early morning hour means the grand parlour is only dotted with students, and I rush by them to the girls’ dorms.
I shoulder past a familiar faced girl on my way, her clothes crumpled, and her gaze spinning around to watch me as I race to the bathroom.
If I cared for anything outside of my own world collapsing around me, or the fact that my breaths are ragged and so unfulfilled that I am lightheaded, then maybe I would give a shit about the crumpled dress I abandoned somewhere on the bathroom tiles, or that the water to hiss out of the showerhead is cold for the first minute, or that I don’t have a change of clothes or a towel, or even that I’m still in Dray’s t-shirt and boxers.
Maybe I would care that I throw myself into the tiled wall with a harrowed cry, hard enough to knock my head.
But I don’t care.
And that hollow shout follows me as I sink down to the shower floor.
The only thing I care about right now is that it was Dray.
It was Dray, it was Dray, it was Dray.
It flashes in my mind.
His hand on my neck, his thrusts pushing through the dark, my nails ripping at his forearm.
The cry twists into a scream.