Chapter 4
Falling, Slowly
It became a habit almost without either of them deciding it should, sometime in late September — Beck sliding his tray down across from hers at the dining hall a few times a week, always managing to time it like an accident even though she'd started to suspect it wasn't one at all.
"You're doing the thing again," she told him one Tuesday, watching him claim the seat across from her with a tray piled disproportionately high with whatever the dining hall was calling protein that day.
"What thing."
"The thing where you 'happen' to sit down across from me at exactly the time I'm usually here."
"Wild coincidence. I don't control my own feet, Tessa, they just carry me places."
"Uh huh."
"Also, in my defense, this is objectively the best table. Good light. Close to the exit. I'd sit here regardless of who else happened to be occupying it."
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling, and he noticed, the way he seemed to notice most things about her, filing it away the way he filed away everything else.
They fell into an easy rhythm over those lunches — him telling her about practice, about a coach who ran them into the ground over a missed drill, about Jax's ongoing, deeply unserious campaign to be voted team captain next year despite having, by his own admission, zero actual qualifications.
She told him about her classes, about a professor she liked, about a paper she was dreading, small ordinary things that felt, somehow, less small every time he actually listened to the answer instead of just asking the question to be polite.
"You remember everything," she said one afternoon, surprised all over again when he asked a follow-up question about a project she'd mentioned exactly once, three days earlier.
"I told you. It's kind of my whole thing." He shrugged, like it wasn't remarkable, like most people didn't casually forget ninety percent of what they were told within an hour. "You're interesting. Turns out that makes remembering things pretty easy."
She didn't know what to do with a sentence like that, so she just smiled down at her tray and let it sit there, warm, in the middle of her chest. She had no idea he'd already started paying attention in ways she hadn't caught yet.
? ? ?
It was a small thing, the kind of thing she almost missed entirely -- Beck showing up outside her Tuesday lecture with two coffees, one of them exactly right, oat milk, extra cinnamon, the same order she'd mentioned exactly once, in passing, weeks earlier.
"How do you even remember that?"
"I told you. I remember everything about you. Apparently that's just a thing that happens now." He handed it over, grinning, easy. "Don't read into it."
She read into it completely, the whole walk back to her dorm, warmth spreading through her chest that had nothing to do with the coffee.
It became a pattern within two weeks -- him waiting outside that same lecture hall three times a week, coffee in hand, never making it a big deal, never asking for anything back except the ten minutes it took to walk her to her next class.
He learned the names of her professors. He learned which one gave her anxiety before every single class and started timing his arrival for right after, like clockwork, just to catch her the second she came out.
"You don't have to keep doing this," she told him one afternoon, though she didn't want him to stop, not even a little.
"I know I don't have to." He bumped his shoulder against hers, easy. "I want to. There's a difference. I like knowing something small about your day went right because I was paying attention."
She had no idea yet that "paying attention" was about to become the single most dangerous thing about him.
It came out sideways, a few days later, when he interrupted a story about her Poppi to inform her, entirely unprompted, that the world's first recorded coffee house opened in Constantinople in 1475.
Then, three days after that, a completely unrelated fact about Viking burial ships, delivered with the same casual confidence, like his brain was simply a faucet of historical trivia he had no control over shutting off.
"Do you just know things," she asked, "or is this a bit?"
"Both. I read a lot as a kid. Nobody wanted to hear it then either." He grinned. "You get used to it."
She never entirely got used to it. She started keeping a running list.
? ? ?
It happened at a house party in late September, loud and crowded, the kind of thing Tessa had only agreed to because Nina promised twenty minutes and no longer.
She'd stepped away to the kitchen for a water refill when she heard it — two guys from the lacrosse team, standing by the keg, not bothering to lower their voices.
"Backpack girl, right? Beck's been weirdly obsessed with her all month," one of them said, then, laughing, added something crude about her chest, the kind of comment that used to just be background noise, the kind she'd trained herself to absorb without reacting because reacting only ever made it worse, made her the problem instead of them.
She didn't see Beck come around the corner. She heard him first — the sharp, cold edge in his voice, nothing like his usual easy tone.
"Say that again."
The guy turned, still grinning, not registering the shift yet. "Relax, man, I was just—"
"I heard exactly what you said." Beck's jaw was tight, his whole body gone still in a way Tessa had never seen from him, something coiled and dangerous underneath the calm. "You don't get to talk about her like that. Not when she's in the room. Not when she's not. Not ever."
"Whatever, man, chill—"
"I am completely chill. This is what chill looks like." Beck didn't raise his voice, didn't move any closer, but something about the flat certainty of it made the guy actually take a step back. "Apologize. To her. Right now."
The guy mumbled something that might have technically qualified as an apology, and Beck didn't wait around for it to improve, just turned and found Tessa's eyes across the kitchen, some of the hardness in his expression melting the second he saw her face.
"You didn't have to do that," she said, once they were outside, the cold air a relief after the crush of the party.
"Yeah, I did." He was still visibly rattled, hands shoved deep in his pockets. "I don't know what happened in there. I heard him say that and something just — I've never wanted to hit someone that badly in my life, over something that wasn't even about me."
"It surprised you. That you cared that much."
"Honestly? Yeah." He looked at her, something searching in his expression. "I don't usually get like this. About anyone. I'm still figuring out what that means."
She didn't have an answer for that either, but she thought about it the whole walk home, the particular, unfamiliar warmth of being defended by someone who hadn't stopped to calculate whether it was worth the trouble.
? ? ?
They ended up at the library together most nights that October, an unofficial ritual neither of them had planned, both of them claiming the same corner table because it had the best outlet access, or so they both kept insisting, neither willing to admit the real reason.
"You're not even doing homework," Tessa accused, catching him staring instead of reading his textbook for the fourth time in twenty minutes.
"I'm doing extremely important research."
"On what."
"On you. Ongoing project. No end date in sight." He grinned, unbothered by getting caught. "You do this thing where you bite the end of your pen when you're concentrating. It's incredibly distracting. I can't be held responsible for my grades this semester."
"That's not my fault."
"I didn't say it was your fault. I said it was a fact. Facts don't assign blame, they just exist."
They both reached for the same highlighter at the same moment, hands landing together on the small orange cap, and neither of them moved for a beat too long, his fingers warm over hers, something electric jolting straight up her arm at the contact.
He didn't pull away first. Neither did she.
It was Tessa who finally, reluctantly, slid her hand out from under his, cheeks warm, unable to look at him for a full ten seconds afterward.
"You can just say you wanted to hold my hand," he said, entirely too pleased with himself, not moving on from it even slightly.
"I wanted the highlighter."
"Sure you did."
She threw a balled-up piece of paper at him, and he caught it one-handed without even looking up, and something about the easy, unhurried rhythm of it -- the teasing, the proximity, the fact that neither of them actually needed the library for anything except an excuse to sit across from each other for three hours -- made her chest ache in the specific way that only happened around him.
"Can I ask you something," she said later, packing up her bag as the library announced its last call for the night. "Why me? Genuinely. You could have anyone."
He considered the question seriously, walking her out into the cold October air before answering.
"Because you're the only person I've ever met who makes ordinary things feel like they matter.
A grocery run. A library table. A dumb joke about cereal.
Everything's better when you're in it, Tessa.
I don't really know how to explain it better than that. "
"That might be the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."
"Good. I plan on saying nicer things. Consider that a warning."
She walked back to her dorm with her whole chest full of something warm and terrifying, already counting down the hours until the next library night, already forgetting, for the length of one golden October evening, to be afraid of how much she wanted this.
The texting deepened alongside the lunches, both of them slipping further past the careful, curated versions of themselves they'd been performing in September, and by early October, the conversations had started stretching past midnight more nights than not.
Beck: I keep thinking about you at the weirdest times. he texted one night, close to eleven. like I was in the middle of a drill today and just thought about the face you made when I said cereal was soup
Tessa: that face was pure disgust and you deserved it
Beck: I know. I thought about it anyway. that's kind of the problem
Tessa: what problem
Beck: you're driving me a little bit crazy, Tessa. in a good way. mostly a good way. I don't really know what to do with how much I think about you
She read that message three times, feeling something warm and terrifying unfold in her chest at the same time, two feelings that had no business existing together but somehow always seemed to when it came to him.
Tessa: I don't know what to say to that
Beck: you don't have to say anything back. I just wanted you to know it's happening on my end, whatever it is
She didn't answer right away, thumb hovering, and he must have sensed the hesitation because his next message came a few minutes later, gentler.
Beck: hey. you okay? you went quiet
Tessa: yeah. sorry. just a lot
Beck: can I say something and you don't have to respond if it's too much
Tessa: okay
Beck: I feel like something happened with a guy that you're not telling me about. and I think that's why you're scared of this, of me, of whatever this is turning into. you don't have to tell me what it is. I just wanted you to know I've noticed, and it doesn't change anything on my end
Tessa stared at that message for a long time, heart pounding, feeling exposed in a way she wasn't ready for, some old wound flaring up loud enough to drown out everything good that had built between them over the last month.
Tessa: I have to go
She turned her phone face-down and didn't answer his follow-up texts that night, the old instinct rising up faster than she could reason with it — he's already seen too much, he already knows something's wrong with you, this is exactly how it starts — and spent the next two days barely responding to him at all, short, careful replies, all the warmth she'd let herself show him over the last month suddenly walled back up.
She didn't know yet that this same fear, this same instinct to bolt right when things got too honest, was about to define the next several weeks of whatever they were building.
She just knew, lying awake that night, that he'd gotten closer to the truth in one guess than anyone else had gotten in over a year, and that terrified her more than anything Tyler had ever actually done.