Chapter 5
Two A.M.
It happened on a Friday night in October, the kind of night where the whole campus seemed to hum with a low, restless energy, music leaking out of every dorm window along the quad, and Tessa was lying in bed at eleven forty pretending to read a chapter for her Tuesday seminar while actually just texting Beck back and forth in the dark, phone screen the only light in the room, Nina long since asleep across the room with an eye mask on.
The conversation had been easy all night, easier than usual, looser, the kind of texting that happens when two people have finally stopped performing carefully curated versions of themselves for each other and started actually, genuinely talking.
He told her about a fight he'd gotten into with his older brother three Thanksgivings ago that still hadn't fully resolved, something about their father and who got more attention growing up, an old wound neither of them had quite figured out how to close.
She told him, carefully, in pieces, testing each sentence before she sent it, about Poppi, about the funeral, about a family that used to fill an entire kitchen with noise and now couldn't fill a single group chat with a single message.
Beck: i'm sorry. that sounds like it broke something that isn't fixable by just moving on with your life, even if that's what everyone expects you to do on some quiet schedule they've decided for you
Tessa: yeah. exactly that. nobody ever says that part out loud though
Beck: for what it's worth I think you're doing an insane amount of holding it together for someone who's only been here two months. I notice it. I don't think you give yourself enough credit for it
She read that message four times, thumb hovering over the screen, something warm and unfamiliar unfolding low in her chest, a feeling she didn't immediately have a name for because it had been so long since she'd felt it.
The conversation drifted, the way conversations do at midnight when the whole world outside your phone screen has gone quiet and soft, softer and slower with each exchange, and somewhere around one in the morning, it turned into something else entirely.
She wasn't sure who started it, exactly — that would become a small, private argument she'd have with herself for weeks afterward, replaying the exact sequence, trying to assign blame to someone, usually herself — but at some point his texts got a little bolder, a little more honest about what he'd been thinking about since the dining hall, since the backpack, since a hundred small moments she hadn't realized he'd been cataloging as carefully as she'd been cataloging her own doubts, and hers, God help her, got bolder back, some reckless, midnight version of herself taking over the keyboard.
Beck: I've been thinking about you all week. like an embarrassing amount, more than I've thought about anything else including an actual exam I have tomorrow
Tessa: same
Beck: yeah?
Tessa: yeah
She was lying on her side in the dark, one strap of her bra already slipping off her shoulder, and before she could talk herself out of it, she propped the phone up and took the picture — full cleavage, low light, her hair spilled across the pillow behind her.
She hit send before she could think better of it, heart slamming so loud she could hear it in her own ears over the sound of Nina's soft, steady breathing across the room.
Beck: jesus, Tessa
Beck: do you have any idea what you just did to me
Tessa: I have some idea
Beck: if I were there with you right now I wouldn't even know where to start. your neck. your collarbone. that spot right where your shoulder meets your throat that I've been thinking about since the truck bed. I'd take my time with all of it
She pressed a hand flat against her own chest, feeling her heart hammering under her palm, and for about four minutes, lying alone in her dark dorm room, she felt something she hadn't felt in over a year, something she'd almost forgotten the shape of.
Wanted. Not despite anything. Not as a consolation prize for whatever version of a girl he'd actually rather have.
Just wanted, fully, immediately, without qualification.
Then, almost as fast as it had come, the old voice arrived to ruin it, right on schedule, cruel and familiar as an alarm clock she'd forgotten to turn off.
He's just saying that. He probably says that to everyone, or would say it to anyone who sent what you just sent.
You just handed him exactly what Tyler always wanted and never got from you fast enough, and now he has it, and now you're exactly as disposable as you always were, except now there's proof.
Now there's evidence he can show someone else, later, if he wants to.
She stared at his last text — Beck: are you okay?
you went quiet — for a full minute, thumb hovering over the keyboard, three different replies drafted and deleted in her head before she'd even typed a single letter.
Then she put the phone face-down on her nightstand, turned onto her side, and didn't answer.
? ? ?
She didn't answer the next morning either.
Or the text after that, softer, a little worried in a way that made her chest ache every time she reread it without responding — Beck: hey, no pressure, just checking you're good — or the one two days later, shorter, the kind of text a person sends when they've started to understand they're being avoided and are trying, gently, to give the other person an exit that doesn't require an explanation they clearly aren't ready to give.
Beck: totally fine if last night felt like a lot. just tell me and I'll back off, no hard feelings, I mean that
She read every single one, sometimes three or four times, sometimes late at night when she couldn't sleep.
She answered none of them. It wasn't that she didn't want to.
It was that some deep, well-worn groove in her, carved out over five years with Tyler and reinforced by every doubt she'd collected since, had already decided this was the part of the story where she got left, and it felt, in some twisted, self-protective way, safer to leave first. If she ghosted him now, today, entirely on her own terms, she never had to find out what his face would look like the first time he really saw her — not the six-second dining hall version, not the midnight-lit-phone-screen version, but the real one, in daylight, at a party, standing next to whatever girl he'd probably end up choosing instead once the novelty of chasing someone difficult wore off.
Nina found her three days later, still not answering him, curled up on her bed scrolling through his Instagram again like a wound she couldn't stop pressing on, checking for evidence of a girl who wasn't there, hadn't ever been there, existed only in the architecture of Tessa's own fear.
"You like him," Nina said, sitting down on the edge of the bed without being invited. Not a question.
"It doesn't matter."
"It very clearly matters. You've rewatched his hockey highlight video like nine times, I've been counting from across the room, it's genuinely a little concerning at this point."
"I'm not going to be someone's consolation prize," Tessa said, and heard, only after she'd said it out loud, how much of Tyler's actual voice was still living somewhere inside that sentence, borrowed language from a boy who'd never once earned the right to shape how she thought about herself.
Nina was quiet for a second, considering her next words carefully.
"Tessa. I don't think you've actually asked him if that's what you are.
I think you decided it before he ever had a chance to answer, the same way you've decided a lot of things before giving anyone the chance to prove you wrong.
" Tessa didn't say anything back. She just kept scrolling, past his highlight reel, past a photo of him laughing with his teammates at some tailgate she hadn't been invited to yet, past an entire life that looked, from the outside, like it had never once had to build an armor as thick as hers.
She had no idea he'd spent those same three days staring at his own phone, rereading her last unanswered message, replaying the whole exchange trying to figure out what he'd done wrong, and deciding, with a stubbornness she hadn't fully clocked in him yet, that he wasn't going to just let her disappear without at least one real, honest, in-person conversation first, no matter how many texts it took to get there.
? ? ?
What Nina didn't fully understand, in those three silent days, was that Tessa's avoidance wasn't really about the text messages at all.
It was about a much smaller, much more mortifying fear that she couldn't bring herself to say out loud even to her best friend.
She was petrified of seeing him in person.
Not because she thought he'd say something cruel — she knew by now, on some level, that wasn't really Beck's style.
She was petrified because some old, well-worn part of her was convinced that the photo she'd sent, reckless and midnight-brave, had given him a preview of her body he was now quietly reconsidering in the light of day, turning over the memory and finding it wanting, the way Tyler always eventually had.
She started rerouting her walk to class to avoid the dining hall at his usual lunch hour.
She skipped a study session Nina had planned specifically because his teammate mentioned Beck might stop by.
She spent one entire Tuesday hiding in the library stacks after spotting his hoodie across the quad, heart pounding, absolutely convinced that if he actually looked at her — really looked, in full daylight, no phone screen between them — she'd see something shift in his face, some flicker of disappointment he'd be too polite to voice.
"You're doing the thing," Nina said, catching her peering around a corner before crossing to their usual dining hall entrance. "The avoidance thing. I see you doing it."
"I'm not avoiding anything."
"You just did reconnaissance on an empty hallway like it was a hostage situation."
"I just don't want it to be weird."
"It's already weird, Tessa, specifically because you're making it weird by hiding from a boy who has done nothing except be consistently, almost annoyingly kind to you for a month." Nina softened. "What are you actually scared of? The real answer, not the deflection."
Tessa was quiet for a long moment, staring down at her hands. "That he saw the picture I sent and it changed something. That in person, in real light, without a filter or good angles, he's going to look at me and just — know. Know that I'm not actually what he thought he wanted."
"Oh, Tessa." Nina's voice cracked with something between exasperation and heartbreak.
"That's not how any of this works, and I think some tiny, stubborn part of you already knows that, or you wouldn't have sent the picture in the first place.
You wanted to be seen. You're just terrified of what happens after. "
Tessa didn't have an answer for that, because it was true, and she hated how true it was.
So when Nina announced that they were going to the hockey house for Beat State, Tessa's first instinct was still to find a reason not to go, some excuse solid enough to hold up under Nina's scrutiny.
She didn't find one in time. And so, despite every anxious cell in her body insisting this was a mistake, she found herself standing in front of her closet in a towel, about to see him in person for the first time in weeks, with absolutely no idea what his face was going to do when he finally looked at her again.