Chapter 2: Party
The air in the sunroom vanished. It was just his question, hanging between them like a blade. Do you want to do this? It wasn’t a dare from Trent anymore. It was a choice from him, raw and unfiltered, and the way he asked it—like he already knew the answer, like he was testing the depth of a wound—sent a shock through her system that burned away the fear.
They looked at each other. In the jagged light of the flickering chandelier, his face was all sharp angles and shadows, his ocean eyes a turbulent, waiting dark.
Tessa stood up.
He moved back an inch, just enough to give her space to rise. His hands fell from the armrests, hanging stiff at his sides. They looked at each other, the noise of the party and the expectant, leering faces of their audience fading to a distant, meaningless roar.
Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs, but her voice, when it came, was startlingly clear and cold.
“I’m done playing this game.”
She didn’t look at Trent. She didn’t look at Molly, whose triumphant smile had frozen into something confused and furious. She turned around, shouldered past a gawking Zed, and walked out.
The hallway was a blur of hot bodies and louder music. She pushed through, a numbness spreading from her core to her limbs. She found the front door, stumbled down the creaky wooden steps, and spilled out onto the dewy lawn.
The night air was a slap of cool relief. She gulped it down, walking away from the house, from the thumping bass, until the sound was just a dull ache in her bones. She wrapped her arms around herself, staring up at the hazy slice of moon between the campus oaks. Her lips tingled where his breath had touched them. Her skin felt too tight. Do you want to do this? The question echoed, taunting her. The correct answer, the safe answer, was no. So why did it feel like such a lie?
After a few minutes, the cold seeped in. The anger, hot and prickly, replaced the numbness. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She wasn’t the one orchestrating cruel little games. Turning on her heel, she walked back towards the house, not towards the sunroom, but through the main throng near the kitchen. She needed a minute, a real minute, somewhere quiet. A bathroom.
She spotted a staircase, less congested, leading up. Without thinking, she took it, her hand sliding on the polished oak banister. The second floor was quieter, a long hallway lined with closed doors. The carpet was a stained maroon, worn thin in the center. The music from below was a muffled, rhythmic thudding through the floorboards.
One door at the end of the hall was slightly ajar. She pushed it open.
It was a bedroom, but not like any dorm she’d seen. It was dark, dominated by a large, unmade bed. And books. Everywhere. Sagging plywood shelves lined two walls, crammed with a chaotic array of paperbacks, hardcovers with cracked spines, and haphazard stacks of journals. The air smelled like old paper, ink, and something else—a faint, clean scent that was unsettlingly familiar.
Her curiosity pulled her in. She closed the door softly behind her, the party noise receding to a whisper. She approached the shelves, her fingers trailing over the titles. Philosophy, dense poetry collections, battered classics, contemporary fiction with dog-eared pages. This wasn’t a frat boy’s collection. This was a life raft.
She picked up a worn copy of The Bell Jar, its cover softened from handling. She opened it. Passages were underlined in sharp, aggressive pencil, the margins filled with cramped, angry annotations. False dichotomy, one note said. Lies she tells herself, said another.
“What are you doing?”
The voice came from the doorway. Low, calm, and laced with a quiet danger that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up.
Tessa turned around, the book still in her hands.
Hardin leaned against the doorframe, having pushed the door open again without a sound. He’d taken off his jacket. The tattoos on his forearms were fully visible now in the dim light from a cheap desk lamp—the three birds, the infinity heart, the stark lines of the ship. His eyes were no longer stormy, but flat, guarded, and deeply tired.
“Nothing,” she said, her throat dry.
He stepped inside, letting the door click shut. The space felt immediately, overwhelmingly smaller.
He didn’t move closer, but his presence filled every inch of the room.
“You looking for something?” he asked. His voice was rougher now, stripped of the performative boredom from downstairs.
She broke their eye contact, focusing on a stack of journals beside the bed. “Are you drunk?” The question was out before she could stop it, a deflection.
He let out a short, humorless breath. “I don’t drink,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “Just like you don’t.” They looked at each other again, a silent acknowledgment of the game they’d both refused to play. His eyes were clear, frighteningly sober.
He looked down at the book in her hand, his focus sharpening. “Wuthering Heights,” he said, the title a soft rumble. He looked back at her, and when he spoke next, his voice was different, lower, like he was quoting something carved into stone. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Tessa just looked at him, the words settling deep in her chest, resonating with a frightening clarity.
He stated, “It’s Brontë,” pointing a faintly trembling finger at the book.
She looked down at the cover, then back up, meeting the storm in his eyes. “I know it’s Brontë.”
A long, silent beat passed. The muffled bass from the party below felt like a heartbeat from another world.
“What are you doing in my room?” he finally asked, his voice returning to its guarded flatness.
She looked around at the overflowing shelves, the chaotic nest of blankets on the bed, the worn leather jacket slung over a chair. “Your room?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t elaborate.
They looked at each other, the air between them crackling with all the things unsaid—the dare, the poem in her pocket, the way he’d looked at her like she was a puzzle he both wanted and refused to solve.
Then he moved. In one fluid step, he was right in front of her. He reached out and grabbed the book, his hands brushing firmly against hers. They held the book between them, a fragile bridge. His skin was warm, the touch sending a current up her arms. He looked down at her, his expression unreadable, his breathing the only sound in the sudden, vast quiet of the room.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Her own breath hitched, catching somewhere painful in her chest. He looked back up, his eyes searching hers with an unnerving, electric focus.
Their hands were still pressed together on the cool, worn cover of the book. The heat from his skin seeped into hers, a shocking contrast to the charged stillness between them. He leaned in slowly, closing the small, cautious distance she had maintained.
His face was inches from hers now. She could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the tiny scar through his eyebrow, the impossible dark blue of his irises. “Are we still playing?” he asked, his voice a low vibration that felt intimate in the confined space.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He leaned closer still, his mouth brushing the shell of her ear. His whisper was rough, deliberate. “Because I think you still owe me a dare.”
He leaned back, just enough to see her reaction. His eyes traced the line of her cheekbone, then dropped again, lingering on her lips. The air between them grew thick, heavy with the scent of him and old paper and something else, something sweet and dangerous like anticipation.
He leaned in. This time, it was unmistakable, an undeniable tilt of his head.
Without conscious thought, she mirrored him. She leaned in too.
They looked at each other, their lips impossibly close. She could feel the warmth of his breath, a faint whisper against her skin. The world outside this room, the party, the poem in her pocket, his cold analysis of love as a transaction—all of it dissolved into a singular, pressing point of magnetism.
She felt herself tipping forward, gravity itself rewritten by the pull in his stormy eyes.
Then a sharp, clear signal fired in the back of her brain. Wait.
She leaned back slightly, creating a sliver of desperately needed space. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic protest. “I can’t,” she breathed, the words barely audible.
She swallowed, forcing her voice to work. “I need to go.”
For a long second, he didn’t move. His expression closed off, the raw hunger sliding behind a familiar, impenetrable wall of indifference. He released his hold on the book, leaving her suddenly holding its full weight.
She looked at him, at the carefully constructed blankness now on his face, and felt a confusing wrench of regret. Turning, she placed the book back on the shelf with unsteady hands.
She walked past him, her shoulder brushing his arm in the cramped space. He didn’t reach for her. He didn’t say a word.
Her hand found the cool metal of the doorknob. She pulled the door open and stepped into the brighter, noisy hallway without looking back. The thud of music rushed up to meet her, a vulgar replacement for the silence she’d just left behind.
She let the door swing shut behind her, the solid click feeling both like an escape and a sentence.
The hallway carpet, sticky under her shoes, led her back to the cacophony. She didn’t go back downstairs. She found a back staircase, a narrow, dimly-lit thing that smelled of mildew and pine cleaner, and she took it all the way down to a side door that dumped her onto a concrete patio littered with abandoned red cups.
The cold night air was a physical relief, washing over the heat he had left on her skin. She didn’t run. She walked, her pace quick and deliberate, putting entire blocks of quiet, sleeping houses between her and the thumping bass that seemed to chase her for a moment before fading entirely.
Her mind replayed it on a loop. The weight of the book in their shared grip. The warmth of his hands. The whispered question about a debt she didn’t owe. Are we still playing? It hadn’t felt like a game in that room. It had felt like the prelude to a collision.
She walked all the way back to her dorm, the sharp click of her boots on the pavement the only sound. Her key rattled in the lock. The room was dark and still, Ariana not back yet. Tessa didn’t turn on the main light. She just peeled off her clothes, letting them fall to the floor, and pulled on an old, soft t-shirt.
She laid in her bed, staring at the ceiling where headlights from passing cars painted fleeting, distorted shapes. Her body was exhausted, but her brain buzzed, analyzing every micro-expression that had crossed his face. The anger in the sunroom. The startling clarity in his own room. The way his gaze had dropped to her mouth, not with practiced seduction, but with a kind of raw, focused curiosity that had stolen the air from her lungs.
She went to sleep, finally, when the grey pre-dawn light began to bleed around the edges of the blinds.
She woke up hours later to the aggressive buzz of her phone on the nightstand. The screen cast a blue glow in the dim room. A message notification glowed: Mum.
The text was mundane, a anchor from a different world. Hope your first classes went well, darling. Did you remember to call Nana?
Tessa rubbed her eyes, the gritty fatigue a tangible thing. She typed a response, her thumbs clumsy. Classes were fine. Crazy busy. I’ll call her this weekend. Love you. She hit send.
The simple exchange felt alien, like trying to describe a wildfire in a language made for garden parties. She put the phone face down on her chest. The silence of the room was absolute now, pressed down by the weight of the weekend morning.
She thought of his books. The furious annotations. The soul he’d confessed to Brontë in a voice meant only for her. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. A transaction, he’d said in class. But that quote wasn’t about negotiation. It was about recognition. A terrifying, unavoidable mirror.
Her phone buzzed again, a soft vibration against her ribs. She didn’t reach for it. She let her arm fall heavily to the side, her fingers brushing the discarded jeans from last night.
She closed her eyes against the memory, but it came anyway. The storm in his blue eyes, not looking at a statistic, but at her. She pulled the blankets up higher, curling onto her side, seeking a warmth that wouldn’t come from the fabric.
She drifted off to sleep, the ghost of a whisper—owe me a dare—twining with the scent of old paper and the pending, unread message lighting up her silent phone.