Chapter 15: Wuthering Heights
The rain had become a part of her, a fine, persistent mist that beaded on her jacket and clung to her eyelashes. Tessa walked without direction, her body operating on a dull, mechanical autopilot that her mind had long since abandoned. The city lights bled into streaky halos through the wet glaze of her eyes.
She walked until her legs protested, until the cold seeped through her shoes and numbed her toes. She found herself at a dimly lit bus stop, the schedule behind fogged plexiglass unreadable.The bus arrived, She sat on a seat, drew her knees to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. A shudder wracked her frame, starting deep in her core.
Then the tears came. Not the heaving sobs she expected, but a silent, relentless overflow. They tracked hot paths down her chilled cheeks, dripping from her chin onto the knees of her jeans. She stared at the fractured reflection of a streetlight in a puddle, seeing the ghost of his smirk from the video, hearing the crisp, casual snap of his fingers. Make her fall in love with me.
Every tender moment rewrote itself in her head, tainted by that single sentence. The poetry he’d read, low and rough in her ear. The grip of his hands on her waist in their apartment. The way he’d trace the lines of her palm as if reading her future. All of it, a calculated move in a game she never agreed to play. The bath, the candlelight, the words traced on her back, etched on her skin—it now felt like branding, not devotion.
The world outside was a smear of neon and shadow. She rode until the commercial glow of downtown gave way to quieter streets lined with older houses, their porches lightless, cars asleep in driveways.
She got off at a corner she knew by heart. The walk from the stop to the pale white house with the wilting hydrangeas was five minutes. Each step felt heavier than the last. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a hollow, aching fatigue in every muscle.
She stood on the front porch, the paint peeling under her fingertips. She rang the bell.
A light flicked on inside, casting a yellow rectangle onto the porch floor. The door opened. Carol Young stood there, wrapped in a worn terrycloth robe, her expression shifted from sleepy confusion to sharp concern in half a second.
“Hi, Mom,” Tessa said. Her voice was a rasp, used up.
Carol didn’t ask questions. She simply opened her arms. Tessa walked forward and fell into them, burying her face in the familiar scent of lavender laundry detergent and coffee. Her mother’s hug was tight, grounding, an anchor in a sea that had just vanished from beneath her feet. A broken sound escaped Tessa’s throat, and then she was crying in earnest, her shoulders shaking silently.
“Okay,” Carol murmured, her hand stroking Tessa’s wet hair. “Okay, baby. Come inside.”
She led her into the warm, cluttered living room, guided her to the couch, and draped a crocheted blanket over her shoulders. Tessa curled into it, staring at the dormant fireplace.
“I’ll make tea,” Carol said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Tessa heard the click of the kettle, the clink of a spoon in a mug. The normal, mundane sounds were a lifeline. She focused on them, on the pattern of the blanket against her fingers, on the faint tick of the clock on the mantel. Anything to keep from replaying the video. It played anyway, on a loop behind her eyes.
She didn’t remember deciding to close her eyes. The exhaustion was a sinkhole, pulling her down into a black, dreamless void.
By the time her mom back in the room Tessa was asleep on the couch. Her breathing had evened out, but her fingers were still clenched in the blanket. Carol stood watching for a long moment, her own face drawn with a quiet worry. She turned the light off and went to her room.
Tessa woke up to sun peaking through the blinds, sharp lines of gold cutting across the familiar floral rug. For a terrifying second, she didn’t know where she was. Then the memory settled over her, a heavy, damp wool blanket. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was just today.
She pushed the blanket off and walked into the kitchen. The room was warm, humming with the quiet of a weekday morning. She sat down in a chair at the round wooden table, its surface nicked from a lifetime of homework and coffee cups.
Her mom gave her a cup of tea whilst she sipped her own coffee. The silence between them was comfortable, filled only with the distant rumble of a neighbor’s car starting.
She looked at Tessa over the rim of her mug. “What happened?”
Tessa fiddled with the ceramic handle of her own mug, not looking at her mom. The heat from the tea seeped into her palms. “I don’t really wanna talk about it.” She took a breath, her gaze fixed on a sugar crystal stuck to the table. “I just, I came here to say that I’m sorry.”
Her mom leaned over the counter, looking at her. The lines around her eyes softened. “I’m sorry too.”
Tessa looked up at her, surprised to find her own eyes stinging again. “I love you.”
Her mom grabbed her hand, her grip firm and sure. “I love you too.”
The next morning Tessa got a bus back to campus. The trip was a blur of gray highway and her own reflection in the window. She walked through the halls of her residence building, the sounds of other students laughing behind closed doors feeling like they came from another planet.
She headed to her old dorm, her heart a trapped bird in her ribs. She turned the key, pushed the door open. The room was empty, the bed neatly made. She was thankful Ariana wasn’t there.
She closed the door and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor, The quiet was absolute. She pulled her laptop from her bag, the hinge opening with a soft click. The screen glowed to life, a blank page waiting.
She wrote up an email. Her fingers hovered, then began to type, each keystroke a deliberate act of building a new wall.
Dear Kimberly,
I got your name from Chancellor Black. I'm currently considering changing to an English major.
The words felt clinical, distant. She thought of Hardin’s father, the uncomfortable dinner, the way Hardin had simmered with resentment across the table. Using that connection felt like a betrayal, but also a reclamation. It was a resource, not a favor.
I would like to apply for the Vance Publishing internship.
She stared at the sentence. It was a line drawn in the sand. She added her student details, her fingers moving swiftly now.
She didn’t hesitate. She hit send.
The electronic swoosh of the sent message felt like the only definitive thing she’d done in days. She closed the laptop lid, the quiet click final.
Outside her window, the campus was waking up. She could hear the distant shout of someone calling to a friend, the sound sharp and strangely painful. She needed to move, to not be still. She grabbed her keys and left, the door locking behind her with a solid thud.
Hardin sat on his bed in his dorm, headphones on, the deafening static of nothing playing directly into his ears. He wasn’t listening to the music. He was just staring at the floor, at a water stain on the rug shaped vaguely like a continent he’d never visit.
His jeans were still damp from the curb, chilling his skin. When he finally took his headphones off, the silence in the room was a physical pressure.
He looked up. His gaze traveled over his desk, the empty bottle, the scattered pens. It landed on his bookshelf. There, nestled between a battered copy of Bukowski and a philosophy text he’d never opened, was Wuthering Heights. The memory hit him like a sucker punch to the diaphragm.
Tessa and him. In this room. Both holding the book. Their hands had touched on the spine, a simple static shock that had felt like a circuit closing. He could see it, clear as the stain on the rug: her looking up at him, a question in her blue eyes, him looking down, the world narrowing to the space between their faces.
He stood up, the movement jerky. He walked towards the bookshelf, each step an effort. He grabbed the book, the cool, familiar weight of it in his hand. He looked at it.
The same memory, unspooling. Their hands still on the book. Both leaning in. The scent of her shampoo, something like vanilla and rain. He had watched her, watched the way her lips parted, just slightly, the quiet catch in her breath.
He stood there, the book held tightly in both hands now. Tears glossed in his eyes, blurring the title into a smear of black and gold. A hot, shameful wave rolled up from his chest, tightening his throat. He sat heavily on the edge of his bed, putting the book down beside him as if it were burning.
His hands came up, fingers threading into his hair, gripping hard. He pulled, the sharp pain in his scalp a pathetic counterpoint to the hollowed-out agony in his chest.
“Fuck,” he whispered to the empty air. The word was useless.
He grabbed the book again, his thumb tracing the embossed letters on the cover. His phone buzzed on the floor where he’d thrown it last night. He looked at it, a black rectangle against the gray rug. Molly’s name was probably on the screen, or Noah’s, someone from the wreckage waiting to pick over the pieces. He didn’t move.
He saw Tessa’s face again, not from the memory, but from last night on the sidewalk. “You snapped your fingers and turned it off.” The devastation in her voice wasn’t anger. It was the sound of something precious being dismantled, belief itself crumbling.
He hadn’t turned it off.
A violent, restless energy seized him. He stood up, pacing the short length of the room, three steps and turn. The confined space felt like a cage. He needed to hit something. He needed to run until his lungs burned. He needed to see her.
He stopped, facing the wall. He slammed the flat of his hand against the cinderblock. Once. Twice. The impact shuddered up his arm, a dull, satisfying thud. He did it again, harder.
His phone buzzed again, skittering a half-inch on the rug. This time he moved. He snatched it up, his thumb smearing across the screen. It wasn’t a text. It was a campus news alert, some meaningless bulletin. The illuminated screen showed his background—a photo of Tessa, asleep on the couch in their shared apartment, sunlight striping her hair. He’d taken it weeks ago. She didn’t know it existed.
He stared at the image, at the peaceful curve of her mouth. The contrast between that softness and the shattered look she’d given him last night was unbearable. A fresh, sharp pain lanced through him, clean and hot.
The pain was a pinpoint of clarity in the fog of his numbness. He unlocked his phone, his thumb hovering over her name in his contacts. The text field was a blank void, demanding words he didn’t have. “I’m sorry” was a stain on a shirt you couldn’t wash out.
He typed, He stared at the words, the blue glow of the screen washing out his knuckles. His finger trembled over the send arrow.
He deleted it. The words vanished, a tiny digital death. He threw the phone onto the bed. It bounced once and lay still. He picked up Wuthering Heights again, the leather cover cool. He opened it to a random page, his eyes scanning lines he’d read a dozen times. “He’s more myself than I am.” He snapped the book shut.
The silence in the room was a held breath. He grabbed a hoodie from the floor, shoved his feet into his boots without tying the laces, and left. The hallway was empty. He took the stairs two at a time, the echo of his own footsteps a pursuit he couldn’t escape.
Tessa sat on the floor of her dorm, her back against her neatly made bed. The space felt foreign, a museum of a life she’d evacuated. She opened her laptop again, needing a task, any task, to silence the replay in her head.
Her inbox showed one new message. The sender was ‘Kimberly Vance, Vance Publishing.’ The subject line: Re: Internship Inquiry.
Her breath hitched. She clicked it.
The email was brief, professional. Thank you for your interest, Tessa. Your initiative is impressive. We’d like to invite you for an interview this Thursday at 10 a.m. at our offices downtown. Please confirm your availability.
A jagged little thrill cut through the hollow ache. It was something. It was hers. She typed a quick, polite confirmation and sent it, the action feeling like planting a flag on shaky, uncertain ground.
The next morning, she moved through her lit seminar like a ghost. The professor’s voice was a distant drone about submitted papers. Tessa took notes without seeing the page, her pen moving automatically.
“Overall, some compelling work,” the professor said, gathering his things as the class ended. “Everyone has their graded essays back on the desk here.”
Chairs scraped. Students shuffled forward, a murmur of relieved sighs and quiet groans filling the room. Tessa waited for the crowd to thin before she approached the front. Her paper was on top of a small pile, a red ‘A-’ circled at the top. She barely registered it.
She slipped it into her bag and turned to leave.
“Miss Young?”
She turned. Professor Daniels was standing by his desk, holding a simple yellow envelope. It looked worn, as if it had been crumpled and smoothed out several times.
Tessa looked up, a reflexive, polite smile touching her lips. She stood still.
“This,” he said, extending the envelope, “is what Hardin turned in.” He paused, his kind eyes behind his glasses holding hers. “I think it was actually written more for you than it was for me.”
Tessa’s hand rose slowly. Her fingers took the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. The weight of it was all paper, but it felt heavy in her grasp.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice barely audible.
She didn’t open it. She walked out of the classroom, down the hall, and pushed through the heavy doors into the weak spring sunlight. The campus lawn was dotted with students, but she walked past them, her vision tunneling.
She found a secluded patch of grass under a sprawling oak, its branches still bare but tipped with faint green buds. She sat down, her back against the rough bark, the world tilting.
She stared at the yellow envelope in her hands. Her name wasn’t on it. She just stared, breathing in the cold, damp scent of earth and coming rain. The wind rustled the dead leaves around her.
With a sudden, decisive motion, she pulled the contents out. It wasn’t a graded essay. It was several pages of loose-leaf, handwritten. And a photo.
Her heart stopped. Then it hammered, a frantic drum against her ribs.
Her fingers trembled as they brushed against the glossy surface of the top item. She picked up the photo.
It was of the bridge and the lake they swam at. She smiled at it, a small, fragile thing that hurt her face.
The memory surfaced, vivid and unbidden.
him helping her into the water, his hands firm on her waist as she stepped off the bridge. The kiss that followed, cool from the lake and startlingly warm from his mouth. When they got out, his fingers were gentle on her skin, brushing and tracing a path down her sternum.