Chapter 2 #2
He wasn't, usually. Patience had never been part of his repertoire -- patience implied investment, implied caring about an outcome enough to wait for it, and Beck had built two years of a very deliberate reputation around never once looking like he was waiting for anything.
He had a system. It worked. It required nobody, including himself, to believe he wanted anything more than a single good night that never had to become a second one.
He broke his own system almost immediately, and hated, a little, how easy it was to let himself do it.
That was how it started. Not with anything dramatic, no grand declaration, no single moment she could point back to later and say that's when it began.
Just a slow, unfamiliar drip of messages over the following two weeks, none of them pushy, none of them the kind of thing she could hold up to the light and say see, this is a boy trying too hard, this is a red flag, get out now while you still can.
He asked about her classes, actually remembering the specifics when she mentioned them again days later, a level of attention that would have made Jax choke on his own drink if he'd witnessed it.
He sent her a photo of a golden retriever he'd seen on the quad with the caption this is objectively the best thing that happened to me today, how's your day going, does it involve any dogs, asking for research purposes.
He debated her, seriously and at length, about whether cereal technically counted as soup, a conversation that spanned three separate days and ended in a stalemate neither of them would concede.
He never once asked her to hang out. Partly, if he was honest with himself late at night when the reasoning got harder to avoid, because he genuinely didn't know what he was doing anymore.
His usual moves felt cheap when he pictured using them on her.
His usual timeline -- a party, a few drinks, a night that dissolved by morning -- felt, for reasons he couldn't fully articulate, like something he'd be ruining rather than winning.
So instead he just kept texting, unhurried, low and steady, and told himself it was nothing, all while breaking every single rule he'd built his reputation around one small, unremarkable message at a time.
That, more than anything, was what undid her a little, chipping away at something she'd built with real intention.
He wasn't chasing her the way boys chased in movies, all grand gestures and boombox moments held outside a window.
He was just there, low and steady and unhurried, like a porch light left on for someone who hadn't decided yet whether they were coming home, patient enough to wait through however many false starts it took.
She still didn't let herself want it. Not out loud, anyway. Not where anyone, including herself, could see it clearly enough to hold her accountable for it later.
? ? ?
"You could just talk to him," Nina said one night, scrolling through Tessa's phone with the casual, entitled authority of a best friend who had decided this was now partially her business, propped up on Tessa's dorm bed with her socked feet in Tessa's lap.
"Like, in person. With your actual mouth. It's a skill you already possess."
"I talk to him."
"You talk to him for four minutes at the dining hall and then you leave like the building's on fire and someone yelled 'evacuate.'"
"That's not—" Tessa started, and then stopped, because it was, in fact, exactly what she did, and she didn't have a defense for it that didn't sound insane out loud.
The real reason was so stupid, so small and humiliating, that Tessa could barely say it out loud without wanting to physically disappear into the mattress.
Beckett Callahan was tall and broad-shouldered and had the kind of easy, sunlit handsomeness that made whole rooms rearrange themselves around him without him ever seeming to notice or care, and Tessa had spent the last year becoming intimately, painfully aware of every single place her body didn't match that kind of effortless ease.
The soft stomach she'd started covering with oversized sweatshirts even in warm weather.
The thighs that touched when she stood with her feet together, a fact she'd catalogued and hated since roughly the eighth grade.
The face that, in her own head, had never once been the kind of face a boy like that actually wanted, not really, not once the getting-to-know-you novelty wore off and he had to actually look at her in full daylight, no filters, no flattering angles.
Tyler had never said any of that directly, not in so many words.
He hadn't needed to. There'd been enough small comments accumulated over two years — a joke about her second helping at Thanksgiving that the whole table laughed at, including her, because laughing along felt safer than the alternative; a girl he'd followed on Instagram with a body Tessa had memorized every single angle of in the dark on nights she couldn't sleep, hating herself for looking, unable to stop — that she'd built an entire architecture of certainty out of nothing but scraps and inference.
She was not the kind of girl boys like Beck actually wanted, not really.
She was, at absolute best, a kind of practice run, someone to be charming to for a while until the real thing came along and made his actual preferences clear.
"He's just being nice," she told Nina, staring at the ceiling instead of at her phone. "Guys like that are nice to everyone. It's basically a hockey team requirement, probably in the handbook."
"That's the thing though, he's not usually nice, not like this.
I did some digging." Nina held up her phone, a little sheepish.
"He's got a reputation, Tessa. A real one.
Girls talk about him like he's a weather event.
Fun while it lasts, guaranteed to move on.
I don't say that to scare you off. I say it because the fact that he's doing the opposite of his own reputation, for you specifically, seems like it should mean something. "
"Or it means I'm about to become a very predictable chapter in a very familiar story."
"Or," Nina said, gently, "it means you scared him a little, in a good way, and he doesn't know what to do with that any more than you do.
" She squeezed Tessa's foot in her lap. "I've watched you build an entire case against yourself for a year now.
I just want you to consider, even for a second, that maybe you're not the practice run this time.
Maybe you're the exception nobody saw coming, including him. "
"That's a very generous read of a boy with a reputation for disappearing by morning."
"Maybe. Or maybe you should let the actual evidence decide instead of Tyler's old voice deciding for you." Nina gave her a long look, patient and unshaken. "Either way. I'm not telling you to jump in. I'm telling you not to talk yourself out of finding out."
"Okay," Nina said instead. "Sure."
She was wrong, and some tired, guarded part of Tessa already knew it, had known it since the dining hall, since a boy crouched down to move a backpack with more care than most people gave to actual important things.
But knowing a thing and being able to let yourself believe it, actually believe it, deep enough to act on it, were two completely different skills.
Tessa had only ever really practiced one of them, and she'd been practicing it for almost a full year now, long enough that it had started to feel less like a defense mechanism and more like just who she was.