Chapter 1: The Master Suite Smell
The van's heater quit somewhere past the second gas station, so we rode the last thirty miles in a fog of breath and Louis's bitching.
"For a hundred and forty a night, the man could've sprung for heat," he said, hands jammed under his thighs. "This is a luxury vehicle, Harold. Luxury."
Harry laughed from the front seat, easy as ever, one wrist draped over the wheel. He'd been grinning all day. He'd texted me at six this morning, a string of exclamation marks and one line: pack the red thing. I packed the red thing.
Four hours of pine and switchbacks, and then the cabin rose out of the snow like something out of a movie set. Timber beams, a wall of black glass, icicle lights strung under the eaves. I counted three chimneys before I gave up counting.
"Okay, that's obscene," I said.
"It's Zayn's uncle's," Liam said from the back, where Spencer had her boot hooked over his knee. "We're not paying for it. We're just not asking questions."
Snow squeaked under our boots. My overnight bag cut a line into my palm, the strap too thin, and I stood in the driveway a second longer than everyone else, letting the cold bite my cheeks so they'd be pink for a reason.
Inside, the heat hit like a hand on my chest. The fireplace took up most of the far wall, oak logs stacked in the grate, and the whole room smelled like whiskey and cut pine. Leather sofas, cashmere throws, a view of the trees sliding down into a valley that went white and disappeared.
"Holy shit," Hanna said, dropping her bags in the middle of the floor. Niall was already behind the bar, rattling bottles.
That first hour was perfect. I want to be honest about that. I stood in the kitchen with Niall while he made something with bourbon and honey, and Aria read the labels off the wine rack like poetry. Zayn fed Emily a grape off the fruit plate and she didn't even roll her eyes. Spencer toasted to spring break with a glass of water because she had a thesis chapter due Monday.
And every few minutes Harry found a reason to touch the small of my back as he passed. Once with his palm flat. Once with just two fingers. He did it while nobody was looking, which has always been the whole arrangement.
Then the doorbell rang.
Harry frowned at the door like it had insulted him. He opened it, and the cold came in, and so did Kendall Jenner with two girls behind her, all of them in matching puffer coats and lip gloss.
"Surprise," Kendall said.
The room did that thing where everyone looks at everyone else. Harry's face went through four expressions in a second, and the last one was a smile. A big, bright, sponsor-ready smile. "No way. No way. How'd you even know we were up here?"
"You posted the driveway this morning, you idiot." She hugged him. She hugged him with both arms, one leg kicked back, and he hugged her back with both hands spread wide across her coat.
I know that hug. That's the hug he gives me at parties when a camera comes out. Friendly. Nothing to see here.
"Okay, room assignments," Liam said, because Liam always does the logistics. He pulled a notebook out of his back pocket, actual paper, and started naming pairs off. Spencer and him upstairs left. Hanna and Niall upstairs right. Aria and Louis off the hallway. Zayn and Emily took the room with the window seat. Which left.
Harry caught my elbow and walked me three steps into the hallway, past the stone pillar, where the noise of the room got muffled down to nothing.
"Hey." His thumb moved against the inside of my wrist. "Kendall needs the master suite for her vlog crew. Camera stuff, lighting, she's got all this gear. I told her she could have it."
"The master."
"I'm sorry. I know. You don't mind crashing in the basement guest room, right?"
I looked at him. He was wearing a white tee under a flannel with the sleeves rolled, and there was a vein in his neck doing something I'd never seen it do before.
"We can't really hang out tonight anyway," he said. "It would look weird to the sponsors. You get it."
I got it. I got it the way you get a flu. I pulled my arm out of his hand, walked back through the room under the beams, and picked my bag up off the floor where I'd set it, and carried it down the stairs to the basement.
The basement was cold. Cold in a way the rest of the house wasn't, because the heat in a place like this only reaches the people who matter. There was a queen bed with a blanket folded at the foot and one small window at the top of the wall, showing nothing but snow and a slice of dark.
I dropped my bag by the door. I went back up.
They were all on the sofa. Kendall sat in the middle, legs tucked under her, telling a story with her hands.
"...and they lost my garment bag for six hours, so I'm standing backstage in a robe, in Milan, and Naomi walks by and goes, 'Love the look.'"
Everyone laughed. Even Emily, who laughs about once a year. Even Aria, which stung a little, because Aria knows everything.
Harry had his arm draped along the top of the sofa behind Kendall's shoulders. Not on her shoulders. Behind them. A hand span away. But the fire was going, and the light was gold, and it made everyone in that room look warm and soft and worth something.
My overnight bag was sitting by the basement door, where I'd left it. Alone.
"Wait," Kendall said, twisting to look up at him. "You two aren't, like, together together, are you? Because I heard things."
Harry's smile didn't move. "Nah. Nikki and me go way back. She's the best."
The best. I stood there with my coat still on and my hands in my pockets, and I felt something go hard behind my ribs, like water freezing fast.
Then he looked at me. Just for a second, over the top of her hair. His eyes caught mine and held, and I saw it, I saw the flicker, the little crack in the smile.
And I wanted to believe it meant something.
Louis came past me toward the kitchen, drink in hand, and slowed. He looked from me to the sofa and back, and his eyebrows went up about a mile.
"Want me to get you a drink, love?" he said quietly. "You look like you could use one that's mostly whiskey."
"Sure," I said.
He nodded, and we walked into the kitchen together, and I felt Harry's eyes on my back the whole way, and Kendall's laugh, bright and easy, following me like a door closing.
The kitchen was narrow, marble on both sides, with a window over the sink that showed nothing but black and the blur of snow coming down sideways. Louis had two glasses going before I'd even gotten my coat off.
"Neat or with the fancy ice?" he asked.
"Neat. Twice."
He poured heavy, no measuring, and slid mine across the marble. The whiskey smelled like a bonfire someone had put out early. I got a mouthful down and the cold in my chest moved sideways.
"Louis."
"Mm."
"Don't say anything."
"I wasn't going to say anything." He took a sip of his own and looked at the wine rack. "I was going to say she's been here four hours and she's already asked twice whether the fireplace is gas or wood, because she wanted to film it, and Harry answered both times like a fucking tour guide."
"That's saying something."
"That's barely saying anything."
Boots came down the hallway. Two of them, quick, and I didn't have to turn around. I know the sound of him in a house. He always walks like he's about to be photographed.
Harry stopped in the doorway with the fire light behind him and his sleeves still rolled. From the living room Kendall was laughing again, that bright church-bell laugh, and someone else was laughing with her.
"Lou," he said.
"Harold."
"You mind giving us a second?"
Louis looked at me. Just looked, glass halfway up, eyebrows doing the thing. He was asking. I thought about it, and I shrugged, because the whiskey was already working and because I was tired of being the one who left rooms.
He drained his glass, set it down hard enough to ring, and went past Harry with a hand on his shoulder that wasn't quite a pat.
"Five minutes," he said on his way out. "Then I'm back and I'm loud."
Then it was just the two of us and the fridge humming.
Harry took two steps in and stopped at the edge of the island, close enough that I could smell him, cedar and sweat from the car and whatever he'd had before dinner. He put his hands on the marble. He looked at the counter instead of me.
"You're mad."
"No."
"Okay."
"I'm not mad, Harry. I'm standing in a kitchen drinking whiskey while you're out there doing your networking thing. That's not mad. That's Tuesday."
He laughed, once, short, and it died fast. "That's not fair."
"It's not? You told me to pack the red thing. There's a red thing sitting in my bag in your basement right now, and I cannot figure out who it's for."
His jaw moved. He picked up Louis's empty glass and put it down again in a different spot, like the wrongness of where it was had been bothering him.
"Kendall showing up was not a plan," he said. "I didn't know. I swear on my mother."
"I believe you."
"Then can you just." He finally looked up. Green eyes, red around the rims, and his hair pushed back on one side where he'd been dragging his hand through it. "Can you not look at me like that in front of everyone?"
"Like what?"
"Like you hate me."
I set my glass down. The whiskey sloshed up the side and settled.
"I don't hate you," I said. "That's the whole problem."
The fire popped in the other room. Harry's mouth opened and nothing came out of it, which for him is rare enough that I felt it, the way you feel the floor drop a half inch.
"Hey," he said, quiet. "Hey. Look at me."
"I'm looking at you."
"You know what tonight is. It's one night. Her dad's company backs the whole athletic complex at Southern. Liam's scholarship, the new pitch, all of it goes through people like her dad. If I sit with you on that couch and put my hand on your leg, that's it. That's the thing everybody talks about instead of the season."
I stared at him. My coat was still on and it was hot in that kitchen and I didn't take it off.
"So I'm the thing that costs you something."
"That is not what I said."
"That's exactly what you said."
He came around the island. Two steps, then one more, and then he was in front of me with his hand open between us like he was going to touch my face and had told himself not to.
"I want you down there tonight," he said. "Basement, upstairs, doesn't matter. I want to come find you when everyone's asleep. That's the only thing I've been thinking about since we got in the van."
"Then say it out there."
Silence.
"Say it in the living room," I said. "Stand up and say Nikki's mine. I'll forgive you for the whole year."
His hand closed. He put it in his pocket.
"You know I can't do that."
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
I picked up my glass, took the last of it standing, and put the empty down between us. Then I walked out of the kitchen, and I felt him watch me go, and I stopped in the doorway because I'm not made of stone.
"Take your glass," I said, without turning. "Louis hates when people leave them."
Behind me, in the warm gold light of a room full of people who got what they wanted, Harry picked up the glass.
I took my time crossing back through the room. The fireplace had burned down into a bed of red coals and someone had thrown another log on, and the light it threw made everything look like it had been dipped in honey. Leather, glass, hair. Everybody gold.
Everybody but me, standing in the doorway with my coat on.
The armchair I'd sat in earlier was still there, empty, one cushion dented in the shape of me. Nobody had taken it. I walked over and sat down anyway, like I was reclaiming a piece of property, and pulled my coat open but didn't take it off.
Kendall was in the middle of the sofa with her feet tucked under her thigh. She had that thing where she never stopped mid-sentence to think. The story was already running.
"So we get to Milan and my agency puts me in this apartment with no elevator, right? Fifth floor, and I've got four garment bags. So I'm dragging them up one at a time, like a peasant, and on the third trip Naomi Campbell comes down the stairs and just looks at me." Kendall paused for the laugh. She got it. "She goes, 'You're doing it wrong.' And she took two of them. Just carried them. Up five flights. In heels."
"She's not wrong, she's just mean about it," Aria said.
"She's the best," Kendall said. "That's the thing about her, she's the best and she knows it and she doesn't pretend otherwise."
Harry laughed. He'd come back out of the kitchen with Louis's glass still in his hand, and he set it down on the side table, and then he sat back down next to her. Not on the far end of the sofa. Next to her. The cushion gave and their shoulders touched and neither of them moved away.
Then his arm went up and over and settled across her shoulders.
Flat. Easy. His forearm along the top of the sofa back, his hand hanging just above her collarbone, thumb moving a little, the way he does when he's not thinking about it. She leaned into it the way you lean into a door you know is unlocked.
Niall caught my eye from the bar. He had a bottle of something amber in one hand and he tipped it toward me, a question. I shook my head. He frowned, and then Hanna elbowed him and he turned.
The fire popped. A spark jumped the screen and died on the hearth stone.
Kendall kept talking. "So the show starts and everything's late, everything's always late, and I'm sitting between two editors who hate each other, and one of them is wearing the exact same boots as me. Same colorway. Same season." She made a face. "I wanted to die."
"What'd you do?" Emily asked. Emily, who never asks.
"I took mine off and went barefoot the entire show. Front row, no shoes. My agent almost had a stroke."
Everyone laughed at that one. Even Spencer, who laughs like it costs her money. The sound moved around the room and came back around and I was sitting in the middle of it not making any of it.
I looked at the basement door. My bag was right there beside it, the strap flopped over, a black shape against the wood paneling that was a slightly different shade than the rest of the room. Cheaper wood down there. Faster build.
Harry's thumb was still moving on the sofa back.
He hadn't looked at me once since I sat down. That was the part I couldn't get past. Not the arm. The not looking. He'd spent a whole year finding reasons to look at me across crowded rooms, and tonight he'd turned it off like a tap.
I started counting. Fireplace stones. Fourteen up the left side before they angled in. A log rolled and sparks went up the flue and the whole room brightened for half a second, and I saw Kendall's hand resting on Harry's knee. Casual. Familiar. Like it had been there before.
That one went in under the ribs, low, where it stays.
"And then Paris," Kendall said, and someone groaned, and Louis said, "God, there's more Paris?" and she threw a throw pillow at him.
"Come sit over here," she said. To me. She'd turned her head and she was looking right at me with those big brown eyes and a smile that was perfectly, warmly, totally sincere. "Nikki, right? Get out of that corner, it's freezing over there. I feel like I don't know anything about you except that you're Harry's."
The room went quiet in a way that wasn't quiet, the way a room goes when the music's still on and nobody's talking under it.
"His what?" I said.
She laughed. "His friend. His person. He talks about you constantly, it's honestly a little annoying."
"He talks about you too," I said.
It came out flat. Flat and pleasant, both, which I'm good at. Aria's head turned about a degree. Louis was suddenly very interested in the fire.
Kendall patted the cushion next to her. "Come on. Bring the whiskey."
"I'm good over here."
"You're not. You're in the cold corner. Harry, tell her she's in the cold corner."
"You're in the cold corner," Harry said. He didn't look up. He said it to the fire.
Something in my chest went very still. I stood up.
I didn't go to her. I went to the bar, where Niall had left the bottle out, and I poured myself two fingers without asking and drank it standing up with my back to the room. The glass was cold and the whiskey wasn't, and I held it against my lip longer than I needed to.
"Hey, Nik, you want a plate?" Niall said at my elbow, quiet. "I made too much of the thing with the potatoes. It's good. You'd like it."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since the gas station."
"Niall."
"Okay." He put the plate down. He didn't move away. He just leaned on the bar next to me and watched the snow come down in the window over the sink. It was coming down sideways now. Fat, hard flakes, like static on a dead channel. "That's not good," he said.
I looked. It had been falling all afternoon, small and pretty. This was different. This was a wall.
"That's not good," he said again.
I set the glass down. In the other room Kendall was describing a dress and Harry was laughing at the end of every sentence, right on cue, and the fire was doing its work on all of them. On all of us.
My phone was in my coat pocket. I pulled it out under the bar where nobody could see. Emily's name was at the top.
How fast can you get up here, I typed. Then the little bubble appeared and then the dots and then nothing, and the signal bars went from one to zero and the little spinner just kept spinning.
"I don't have service," I said.
Niall checked his. "Mine's got two bars."
"It's the basement," I said.
It wasn't the basement. I knew it wasn't, the second I said it, because I was standing in the kitchen.
Niall looked at the window again. Then at me. Then at the window.
"Maybe it comes back," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."
"Maybe," I said, "it doesn't."
The lights dipped. Not off, just down, like the house had taken a breath. Every head in the living room came up at once, and Liam was already standing.
"Generator's on the side," he said. "I'll go look."
"I'll come," Spencer said, and pulled her boots on without sitting down.
Kendall's friend in the cream puffer checked her phone. "Okay, but the roads. My flight's Tuesday. If they close the pass I'm going to lose my mind."
"They'll close the pass," Emily said. She hadn't looked up from her wine. "They always close the pass."
Outside, the window over the sink had gone from static to white nothing. Snow pasted flat against the glass and slid down in sheets. You couldn't see the pines anymore. You couldn't see the porch.
Liam came back in with snow in his hair and a red face. "Generator's fine, but the plow guy said the county's pulled everyone off the mountain as of nine. We're here until it stops."
"How long's that?" Niall asked.
"Tomorrow. Maybe the day after."
The room went through it. Kendall's two friends did the math on their faces. Kendall herself just shrugged and said, "Cabin's nicer than my apartment, I'm not mad," and went back to her story, and Harry laughed, and that was that.
Nobody asked me anything. That was fine.
I took my bag down to the basement while everyone was distracted. It was colder down there than I'd remembered from twenty minutes ago. There was a thermostat on the wall by the stairs, set to sixty-two, and it had a little red lock icon next to it. Locked. Whole house was on zones.
I stood in the middle of that room with my coat still on and listened to the ceiling. Feet. Laughter. The muffled thump of the fire being fed. My breath came out in a small white cloud and vanished, and it was the only thing down there that was mine.
I went back up.
The kitchen was warm. Niall had the oven going and the counter covered in a wreck of potatoes and onion skins and a bottle of oil he'd found in the pantry.
"Hold on, hold on," he said when I walked in. "Sit. No, don't sit, stir."
He put a wooden spoon in my hand and pointed me at a pot. Onions already going, translucent, smelling like the whole house should have smelled. I stirred. It gave my hands something to do, which is a thing Niall understands without being told.
"Where'd you get the potatoes?" I said.
"Pantry. There's a pantry in there the size of my whole flat. There's a second fridge, Nikki. A second fridge."
"Rich people."
"Rich people," he agreed, and handed me a knife and half an onion. "Small dice. Hanna's orders."
So I stood in Harry's friend's uncle's kitchen and diced onions and cried for a reason that had nothing to do with anything, and Niall worked the other board and told me about his grandmother's pub in Mullingar, and the snow came down, and I felt almost like a person.
Harry came in once. He stood in the doorway with the noise of the living room behind him and looked at me with the spoon in my hand.
"You're cooking," he said.
"I'm helping."
"You never cook."
"I cook when it's not for you."
He stayed another second. Then he went back out. Niall didn't say a single thing about it, which is why I like Niall.
We ate on the floor around the coffee table because there weren't enough table settings and nobody wanted to be the one to ask. Kendall sat at Harry's right. I sat between Aria and Louis at the far end, on the rug, with my back to the basement door.
The food was good. That's the thing. I hate that it was good. I ate everything on my plate and then some of Aria's, and Louis kept refilling my glass from a bottle he'd stashed under the sofa and not told anyone about, and Hanna told a story about a psych TA who cried during office hours, and the whole room laughed at that one, including me, actually me.
Across the table Harry watched me do it. He had his fork down and his elbow on his knee and he was looking at me like he was trying to figure out where I'd learned to laugh without him.
After dinner the cards came out.
Louis deals like a magician. Fast, low, snapping the deck off his thumb, and he'd already bullied Aria and Hanna and Emily into a game and was working on me.
"Rummy," he said. "Five card. You're in."
"I don't know rummy."
"You don't know rummy, she says. You know rummy. Everyone knows rummy." He shoved the cards at me. "Pick up your hand before I do it for you."
I played. I'm not good, but Louis is worse at losing than anyone I've ever met, which makes him fun at cards. Aria kept humming to herself and discarding exactly the wrong thing on purpose. Hanna accused everyone of cheating in alphabetical order. Emily won three hands in a row without changing expression.
At some point I noticed Harry wasn't in the living room.
I didn't look up. I looked at my cards, and my cards were garbage, and I was going to win this hand anyway.
Then there was the business with the firewood. Harry carried in an armload and stacked it, and when he straightened up he was near enough that his boot was almost touching my knee on the rug.
"Hey," he said. Low. For me only. "Come outside with me for a second."
"No."
"Two minutes."
"No."
"I need to explain something."
"You've explained it," I said, to my cards. "Twice."
He stood there. Louis, without looking up, laid a card down and said, "You're on my light, Harold."
And Harry walked away.
Around eleven the room broke up, the way rooms do. Kendall took the master with her camera bags and her two friends and the door shut behind them. Liam and Spencer went up. Hanna and Niall argued about the thermostat on the stairs and then stopped arguing about it. Zayn and Emily took the window-seat room identical to how they do everything, without a word.
I stood in the kitchen with the last of the dishes and ran the water hot enough to steam the window.
Louis came in and leaned against the counter and watched me scrub a pot that was already clean.
"So," he said.
"So."
"You're not going to cry."
"No."
"Because if you were, I'd stand outside the door like an idiot and pretend I was on the phone. That's my whole system."
"I'm not going to cry, Louis."
"Good." He took the pot out of my hands and set it in the rack. "Then I'm going to go say something to him, and you're going to stay down here and not hear it."
"Louis."
"Not hear it," he said, and left.
I heard it anyway. The kitchen isn't that far from the living room, and Louis doesn't have a quiet voice when he's angry.
"You treated her like a second-class citizen to impress a girl you don't even like."
"Lou."
"Look at her, Harold. She's completely done with you. She ate dinner at my feet and did your mate's washing up. She fought for a year for you and you gave her a mattress two floors down and told her it would look weird to the sponsors."
"That's not what I said."
"Say it again slower and listen to yourself."
Then footsteps, and a door, and the creak of the stairs going up.
I dried my hands. I went out through the living room to the basement stairs, and Harry was standing at the bottom of them, one hand on the rail, and he was looking at the dark down there like it had hurt him personally.
He heard me and turned.
"Nikki."
"Move."
"Let me talk."
"No."
"I'm asking for one thing."
Zayn came out of the hall with a glass of water and didn't break stride. He walked between us the way you'd walk between two cars parked too close, unhurried, and stopped in the doorway with his back to me, and shook his head once at Harry. Just once.
Harry's jaw worked.
"Heat's off down there," Zayn said. "I checked. Zone's locked and the code's on a fob in the master."
Harry's mouth opened.
"Night," Zayn said, and went back down the hall.
I went past Harry and down the stairs and shut the basement door behind me.