3. Causal Chain
Causal Chain
Elias
It’s midnight on the last Friday of September when the last person I ever expected to see turns up at my bedroom door.
I don’t even hear the knock at first. My music is playing loud, the window open because I’m smoking. I’m bent over my desk, which is covered with notepads and textbooks.
We’ve only been back a month, but the workload is already insane.
Probably shouldn’t have let the teachers push me into taking physics, maths and further maths.
I even let Professor Li bully me into picking philosophy as a soft fourth.
“You can always drop it if the workload gets too much,” she’d said airily, knowing full well my pride would never allow such an outcome.
And that’s how I’ve ended up having to both solve differential equations and write an essay on free will and determinism on the same damn night. Talking of determinism—
The knock comes again, sharp, crisp. Insistent. Inevitable, as Professor Li might have suggested, the last link in a causal chain formed by every event and condition leading to it.
Maybe this was always going to happen, determinism in action. But at this time of the night, it only means one thing to me: an opportunity.
Crushing my cigarette against the windowsill, I toss one of my black hoodies over my desk. My clientele prefers me dumb, ruthless and compliant.
When I throw the door open, my breath hitches for a split second.
Then a grin slowly spreads across my face.
Desdemona Sutton-Knight is standing in the dimly lit corridor of the boys’ dorm, her back straight and her arms crossed and her long hair, half gathered back in a sapphire-blue ribbon, draped like a golden cloak over her shoulders. She’s angelic and celestial, yes, but cold as all hell.
“If it isn’t our virtuous and irreproachable head girl,” I greet her, crossing my arms and leaning against the doorway. I don’t raise my voice so that she can hear me over my music—I know she’s paying attention to every word coming out of my mouth. “To what do I owe the honour?”
“Are you smoking in here?” she says, glancing over my shoulder with a frown.
Pretty, uptight little busybody.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Turn your music down.”
“Playing music isn’t against school policy.”
She almost winces; I see the shadow of a twitch in her lips.
But Desdemona is, above all things, always fully in control of herself.
“It would be the courteous thing to do,” she says, every syllable emphasised.
Which, for her, is the equivalent of getting on her knees, only I don’t think anybody has ever succeeded in getting Desdemona to her knees. Still—wouldn’t it be fun to try?
“Why don’t you come in?” I ask her with zero sincerity.
“Not before you put on a shirt.”
Oh, I know she hates the sight of my bare chest. She’s been working awfully hard to keep her eyes pinned to mine, as if the mere sight of my torso would be enough to send her swooning back into a fainting spell.
Desdemona strikes me as the sort of girl who hates the sight of blood, the sort of girl who would have even the tiniest scar surgically dealt with. I can’t quite tell what bothers her more: my naked skin, or the ugly scattering of old scars covering it.
“It’s too hot to wear a shirt,” I tell her mildly.
“It’s the middle of autumn.”
“I run hot.”
She narrows her eyes—the closest she’s going to get to showing her annoyance. Her shoulders are tight, her jaw clenched hard. She looks like she’d rather be travelling deep into the bowels of hell rather than be here at my door.
But she’s here in the first place, so her back is already to the wall. And that wall is going to push her all the way into my bedroom, which smells like my aftershave and cigarettes and contains me, shirtless.
I step aside to let her in—only just enough that she will have no choice but to brush past me. She does so with her back so straight her spine might as well be made of granite; I know I’m not much to look at, but I wish my skin was as dirty as she’s acting like it is.
I close the door, and now she’s alone in a room with me, trapped in my space. She smells like summers on golden beaches and lazy evenings on a Cape Cod porch—like the sun only exists for her.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I tell her, gesturing at my bed.
“I prefer to stand.”
I tilt my head. “So formal, love, and for what?”
Her eyes widen almost imperceptibly, like I’ve reminded her of something.
“Don’t call me that,” she says.
“You don’t like it?”
“I prefer being called by my name.”
“It’s a bit of a mouthful, your name.”
“So? Time seems to be a plentiful resource of yours.”
She punctuates this with a distasteful glance around my small bedroom. The old skateboard propped against the wall, the hamper full of dirty clothes, the school laptop gathering dust on top of the wardrobe. I shrug.
“That why you’re here?” I roll my chair away from my desk, spinning it around so I can sit and lean my arms on the backrest. “You after some of my plentiful resources?”
She looks down her nose at me. God, she’s fucking beautiful, and like all beautiful things, she’s just begging to be ripped up and scribbled on. Desdemona’s had several boyfriends since I started at Spearcrest; not one of them has managed to make a mess of her.
Their hands are too soft and delicate—they lack the strength to leave a dent in something as hard and unfeeling as her.
“I’ve come to ask you for a favour,” she says.
Fuck, what trouble has she gotten herself into that’s brought her here, that’s forced her to stoop this low? To her, I’m the stinking muck at the bottom of a rotting pit. She must know there’s no chance she’s coming away from this clean.
“I know you have,” I tell her. “Why else would you be here? Nice girls like you don’t sneak into the bedrooms of scummy guys like me.”
“Sneak?” she says sharply. Of course, that’s the part that would ruffle her feathers. “I walked in through the front door.”
“In the middle of the night.”
She says nothing to this. Her fingers tremble.
Is she angry? Would she like to hit me? Has Desdemona ever hit anything other than a tennis ball with a racket?
Has she ever screamed or opened her mouth wider than an inch?
Even when she speaks, her lips barely move.
And now I’m looking at her lips and she catches me looking, so she takes a step back and a shiver of satisfaction runs through me.
“Come on,” I tell her. “Ask me, Desdemona. You need something only I can give you.”
“Not how I would phrase it,” she snaps.
“Then phrase it your way. Didn’t you win that poetry competition last year? I’m sure you know plenty of ways to phrase things.”
“Are you always this unpleasant?” she asks.
“I’m being as courteous as can be.”
“By your standards, maybe.”
There’s the little jab I’m used to. Desdemona might think she’s special, but they all do it—every single rich kid that comes to me asking for a favour. They always find a way of reminding me of my own inferiority before they ask me to save their necks.
“Yes,” I answer her mildly. “By my standards—sure.”
I don’t remind her that we go to the same school, that I’m one of only seven students in the entire year who got accepted for the further maths class, that I was even invited into the Spearcrest Apostles—the school’s competitive academic excellence programme—but turned it down because I don’t want the Oxford scholarship you get for winning.
Oxford is where Mr Pearson, my adoptive father, went, and I’d rather go straight to hell than follow in his footsteps.
Saying all this would feel good, I’m sure, but it simply wouldn’t be good for business.
And that’s all this is, in the end.
“What is it you’d like me to do for you?”
She takes a deep breath, clears her throat, stiffens her posture as if she’s about to give the head girl address at the start of assembly.
Whatever it is, it’s something big—she can barely bring herself to say it.
“Have you heard about what happened to Birnam Hastings?”
“Who hasn’t? He was beaten up a couple of days ago, hospitalised. Everybody knows, it was all over the Inquisitor.”
She sneers at the mention of the notorious account. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You too good for gossip?”
“I’ve more important things to do with my time.”
I look her up and down. “Like being here.”
She ignores this—wisely so.
“His parents are going to want to find out who put him in hospital,” she says delicately.
Ah. There it is.
This is what’s brought the perfect golden girl stumbling into my nasty little pit.
She knows exactly what happened to Birnam, and now she wants me to take the fall.
She wants to protect some rich little fucker from what would at the most be an unpleasant chat with the police and a scandal—in exchange for me compromising my own future by, in the best-case scenario, getting a criminal record and, in the worst-case scenario, going to prison.
Who in their right mind would say yes to something like this?
Someone who can look at the most beautiful girl in the world… and see nothing but leverage.
I stand brusquely and kick my chair out of the way, startling her. She steps back just as I step forward. I’ve always been tall, but so is she. Still, she’s the one who flinches when I lean in ever so slightly.
“You want me to go to jail for you, love?”
Something flickers in her brown eyes.
Yes. Of course she does.
It would be so easy for her to just say it outright—but girls like her can’t stand the way truth tastes. It’s not sweet and bubbly—it’s unpleasant and strong, it cuts sharp, leaves a bitter aftertaste.
But that’s exactly why I like it. The truth doesn’t soothe and shine—it’s as empty and neutral as the great void of space.
“No,” she lies. “I just want you to take the fall for the attack—if it comes down to it.”
“Which it will.”
“Maybe so, maybe not.”
I reach out and cradle her pretty face in my hand. Beneath my fingers, her skin is soft and luminous. I wish my touch had the power to dim that inner light of hers, to seep it out and steal it for myself like Prometheus’s fire.
“You think I’d do that for you?” I ask softly, intimately, like a doomed lover.
She tries to pull away, but her legs are up against my bed. The only way to avoid my touch would be to drop back onto my mattress.
In my hand or on my bed, Head Girl. Which will it be?
“For the right price,” she bites out.
And now, we’re at the heart of it.
Desdemona walked in here to ask something from me, knowing full well I don’t ever give anything away for free. She came here prepared to pay the price for what she’s asking. It’s the invisible knife at her throat that forces her to tolerate my touch.
I tilt her head ever so slightly back, and her lips part on a shuddering intake of breath.
“Go on, then,” I command her softly. “Tell me what it is you’re offering.”
A tremor courses through her—her entire body rejecting the humiliation of this situation, no doubt. For a moment, I almost think she won’t do it.
And then Desdemona Sutton-Knight does the dirtiest thing I think she’s ever done in her life.
She pulls money out of her pocket.