Chapter 1: Chapter 1
The Delta Chi house smells like burnt popcorn and body spray on a Thursday night, and I know the side door code better than I know my own Social Security number. Six years of knowing Harry Styles will do that.
He's in the back room he claimed sophomore year, sprawled in the battered canvas director's chair with his feet up on the couch, face lit blue by his phone. The bandana holds back his curls, and that henley does criminal things to his shoulders. He doesn't hear me come in. He's smiling at his screen.
Harry doesn't smile at texts. Harry groans at texts.
"Hey, stranger." I drop my bag on his bed. "Your house smells like a gym locker had a baby with a pizza place."
His head snaps up, and the smile shifts into something warmer when it lands on me. "Nikki." He sets the phone face-down on the chair arm. Face-down. He's never done that. "I thought you had your workshop tonight."
"Professor cancelled. So I thought I'd come see my boyfriend, since apparently I have to book an appointment these days."
"That's not fair." But he says it lightly, standing, and crosses the room in three long strides. His hands find my waist like they always have, thumbs pressing into the fabric of my cardigan, and I hate how fast my body forgets it was annoyed. "I've just been buried. Boosters' meetings, chapter stuff, Coach riding us about the scouts coming next month."
"You used to bury yourself in me instead." I mean it as a joke. It comes out naked and needy, and I want to swallow it back the second it's in the air.
Harry's green eyes flicker with something I can't name. Guilt, maybe. "Come here," he says, and kisses me.
He kisses like he's starving, always has, one hand sliding up my spine to cup the back of my neck, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise. I taste mint and the faint bitterness of pre-workout on his tongue. My fingers curl into his henley and drag him closer until my back hits the door and my hips press into his, and I feel him harden against me through his jeans.
"Missed you," he mutters against my mouth. "God, Nikki."
"Then show me."
He walks me backward to the bed without breaking the kiss, sits down, pulls me to straddle his lap. My skirt rides up my thighs and I feel the rough denim of his jeans against my bare skin, his cock a hard ridge under me. His mouth moves down my jaw, my throat, teeth scraping the tendon where my neck meets my shoulder, and I arch into it with a gasp.
"Off," I say, yanking at his henley. He pulls it over his head one-handed, that stupid graceful soccer-player motion, and his chest is warm and solid under my palms. I drag my nails down his stomach to the trail of hair below his navel, and he shudders.
"Yeah," he breathes. "Do that."
I slide off his lap and onto my knees on the floor between his legs. He watches me with heavy-lidded eyes while I pop the button of his jeans and pull the zipper down, one tooth at a time, just to watch his jaw tighten. I tug the denim and his boxers down his thighs together and his cock springs free, thick and flushed dark, already leaking at the tip. I wrap my hand around the base and he exhales like the air's been punched out of him.
"Fuck," he whispers.
I keep my eyes on his as I lick a slow stripe up the underside, from root to head, tasting salt. Then I take him into my mouth, lips stretched wide around the girth, sinking down until he hits the back of my throat. His hand flies to my hair, careful of the waves, gathering it off my face.
"Nikki, Jesus, your mouth." His hips twitch up and I let him, relaxing my throat, taking him deeper until my nose presses into that curl of hair at his base. He groans low in his chest, this wrecked, helpless sound I've only ever heard from him, and it makes me so wet I ache. I pull back and sink down again, again, my hand working what my mouth can't, spit slicking everything, obscene wet sounds filling the room.
"I'm not gonna last if you keep doing that," he warns, voice frayed.
I pop off him, lips swollen, and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. "Then don't."
He stands and pulls me up, spins me toward the bed. I kick off my boots while he yanks a condom from the drawer of his nightstand, the same drawer it's always been in. I strip my top over my head, unhook my bra, and by the time I'm climbing onto the mattress he's shoved his jeans off and sheathed himself, and he's looking at me sprawled there in nothing but my skirt bunched at my waist like I'm something he can't believe he gets to have.
"Come here," I say, reaching for him.
He covers my body with his, kissing me slow and deep while he nudges my thighs apart with his knee. Two fingers slide through my folds, find me drenched, and he smirks against my lips. "You're soaked."
"You made me that way. Take responsibility."
He pushes into me in one slow, relentless thrust, splitting me open until my back arches off the bed and a moan rips out of me, raw and loud. He stills, buried to the hilt, forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing hard.
"God, you feel like home," he says, so quiet I almost miss it.
Then he moves. Long, deep strokes, dragging against that spot inside me on every pass, the headboard knocking the wall in a lazy rhythm. I hook my legs around his back and claw at his shoulders, matching him, pushing up into every thrust.
"Harder," I demand. "Harry, harder, I'm not porcelain."
He growls and does it, hips snapping, the slap of skin loud in the quiet room, and the pressure in my belly winds tighter and tighter. He slips a hand between us and rubs my clit in tight circles, filthy and precise, and I come apart in under a minute, clenching around him, crying out his name into his neck.
"Fuck, Nikki, you're squeezing the life out of me." His rhythm shatters, three more frantic thrusts, and he groans through his orgasm, shuddering, collapsing against my chest.
For a while there's just his heartbeat under my ear and the smell of us. I trace lazy patterns on his back. This is what I hold onto. This, I think. He's still mine, whatever's been off lately.
Then his phone buzzes on the nightstand. Buzzes again. A third time.
Harry goes rigid on top of me. He lifts his head, looks at the screen, and something shutters in his face, the warmth draining out like a plug pulled.
"Who's texting you this late?" I keep my voice light. My stomach doesn't feel light.
"It's nothing. Chapter stuff." He rolls off me and grabs his phone, back still turned, thumbs moving.
"Chapter stuff doesn't make you smile at your phone at eleven p.m. I saw you when I walked in."
He doesn't turn around. "It's Kendall. Jenner. From Alpha Phi. We're coordinating the philanthropy gala, she's on the planning committee."
"The one next week." I sit up, sheets pooling at my waist, and the cold air prickles on my bare skin. "Harry, she's texted you four times in the last ten minutes. That's not a committee."
"It's efficient, that's all. Her president's credentials matter for the award, and the boosters want Delta Chi paired with Alpha Phi this year." He finally looks at me over his shoulder, and there's that flicker again, the one I keep pretending I don't see. "It's just PR stuff, Nik."
"It's just PR stuff," I repeat. My chest feels strange, tight and hollow at once. I get up, hunt for my bra on the floor, my voice coming out steadier than I feel. "Fine. Wear matching outfits, take cute pictures, whatever keeps your trophy case full."
I'm doing up the clasp when his arms come around me from behind, lips against my hair. "It's not like that. You know you're the one I..."
The sentence hangs there and dies, and he doesn't finish it, and I stare at the wall of his room, at the poster of Pele he's had since junior year, while my boyfriend's arms hold me like an apology.
"Finish the sentence, Harry."
He's quiet for three full breaths. "Just stay tonight. Please."
I stay. But I lie awake against his chest long after he falls asleep, listening to his phone light up once more in the dark, and don't reach for it.
At 1:14 a.m., the phone lights up again.
I know the time because I've been watching the ceiling, counting the pulses of light against the far wall. Harry's breathing has been even for an hour, the deep slow pull of an actual asleep man, except his thumb is on the screen and his face glows in the dark, and sleeping men don't smile like that.
So I do the thing I'm best at. I go still.
I keep my breathing matched to his, slow and staged, face slack against his chest. His heartbeat trips under my ear, quicker than a sleeping heart should be. I let one arm drape over his ribs like dead weight and I keep my eyes cracked open, lashes low, watching the blue wash of the screen over the curl of his jaw.
Kendall: so are we doing matching colors for the gala or do I have to decide everything myself again
Harry: sorry. was out. you tell me, you're the one with the eye
Kendall: navy. you'll wear navy, it photographs better with my dress. boosters eat that stuff up
Harry: navy it is. boss
Kendall: you say that like it's a bad thing
Kendall: drinks tomorrow? need to run the timeline by you and you're useless over text
I watch him type. Delete. Type again. His thumb hesitates the way it used to hesitate over my birthday texts back in eleventh grade, back when we were terrified kids fumbling toward each other in his mom's basement.
Harry: can't tomorrow. practice, then study group with nikki
Kendall: bring her. it's a planning thing, everyone's bringing people
Harry: she's not really a planning person
I feel that sentence land in my own body like a dropped stone. He lies there under me, warm and solid and mine, six years mine, and types she's not really a planning person with the same thumb that was inside me two hours ago.
Kendall: fine. thursday then, after the chapter meeting. the hideaway, 8. just us
Harry: just us. ok
Kendall: good boy
He laughs. Out loud, a soft huff of breath in the dark, and his chest shakes under my cheek. I keep my face slack. I keep my breathing even. Somewhere behind my ribs, something very old and very young curls up small.
"Kendall," he murmurs, half to himself, typing again. I can't see the words this time, his body angled away, the screen tilted. It doesn't matter. I heard the name in his mouth. He said it the way I'd say his, soft and unguarded, a name you say when nobody's listening because you like how it feels.
His heartbeat is still quick. He sends whatever it was, sets the phone face-down on his chest, and exhales at the ceiling. Then, quietly, like a secret the room keeps for him: "Almost there."
Almost there. To the award, probably. To the gala, to the thing he keeps calling PR stuff, to whatever it is he's climbing toward that he thinks I can't follow. Maybe to Kendall herself, that runway creature with her diamond studs and her cold exact smile, who says good boy in texts at one in the morning and probably in person too, probably against his ear in some candlelit corner of a philanthropy gala, and he probably likes it.
His arm settles heavier around my shoulders. Absent. Automatic. The way you hold a pillow.
I lie there and do the math I've been refusing to do for weeks. The face-down phone. The four texts in ten minutes. You're the one I... and the sentence dying in his throat. She's not really a planning person, which is Harry-code for Nikki wouldn't fit, Nikki doesn't belong at that table, Nikki is the part of my life I don't bring to the good rooms anymore.
I am not a stupid woman. I majored in unreliable narrators. I know what it means when a man builds a wall of small omissions and tells you it's architecture.
His breathing finally goes real, the long pull of actual sleep, phone dark against his sternum. His heartbeat slows to that deep drum I've fallen asleep to a hundred times. I stay another forty minutes because leaving now feels like admitting I saw, and seeing is a card I don't want to spend yet.
Then I move. Slowly, one muscle at a time, lifting his arm and replacing it with the pillow, the trick I learned in freshman year when I'd sneak out of this same bed before his 6 a.m. runs. He mumbles something, turns into the warmth I leave behind. His phone slides an inch down his chest.
I could look. It's right there, one swipe from the lock screen, and his passcode is still my birthday, I'd bet money, I'd bet everything.
I don't. Not because I'm noble. Because I don't need to see the rest to know the shape of it, and because whatever I'd read, I'd have to know it forever, and some part of me is still, stupidly, greedily, trying to keep one more day of not knowing.
I dress in the dark. Boots in my hand, skirt silent. At the door I look back at him, curls wrecked against the pillow, bandana on the nightstand, phone rising and falling with his breath, and he looks exactly like the boy who told me I was the only interesting thing at Crestview the night we got back together senior year. Looks are his whole game. I've been dating the highlight reel.
The hallway smells like burnt popcorn. I let myself out the side door with the code I know too well, and the October air cuts through my cardigan, and my hands don't shake until I'm at the corner of the parking lot.
There, under a dead streetlight, I pull out my phone and text Hanna: I'm coming over. Don't ask. Bring wine.
Three dots appear instantly. She's been waiting for this text for weeks. Hanna never sleeps before two anyway.
The phone in Harry's room buzzes one more time behind me, muffled by the walls and the dark and the whole careful life I built out of staying. I don't go back for it.
Hanna's apartment is lit by the neon sign of the ramen place across the street, pink light bleeding through the blinds. She opens the door before I knock, wine bottle already in one hand, two glasses in the other, face set to battle stations.
"Give him to me for one hour," she says. "One hour with no witnesses."
"Hi, I love you too. Yes, please come in."
She pours without ceremony, drops onto the couch cross-legged, and waits. Hanna is many things, but she's never once made me ask twice. I sit, tuck my feet under me, and tell her. All of it. The face-down phone. The texts. She's not really a planning person. Good boy.
By the end she's gripping her glass so hard I half expect it to crack.
"'Good boy,'" she repeats. "At one in the morning. While you're in his bed. I want you to picture me keying his car."
"Hanna."
"Fine. Fine." She drinks half the glass in one go. "Okay, but here's the thing, and I'm saying it gently because you look like a wet paper towel. You knew. Before tonight. You knew something was wrong and you stayed anyway."
"I didn't know. I suspected. Suspecting is not knowing."
"I'm a psych minor, Nik, I know the difference, and the difference is that knowing requires you to admit it, and admitting it requires you to decide what to do about it, and you don't do the deciding thing well when it comes to Harry." She sets the glass down and looks at me with actual softness under the bluntness. "How long?"
"Since the booster dinner in September. Maybe before that."
"September. It's October."
"I know how calendars work."
"Then why are you just telling me now?"
Because pride is a full-time job, I want to say. Because if I said it out loud to anyone, it would be real, and I'd have to either fight for him or leave him, and I wasn't ready to find out which one I'd pick. Instead I shrug and drink.
She lets the silence sit exactly long enough to be eloquent. Then her phone is out. "Group chat. All three. Not just a text, an actual summons, because this is now a squad situation."
" Hanna, it's Thursday, Aria has her screening lab at eight tomorrow, Emily..."
"Emily will be here in twelve minutes, she's a kinesiology major, she treats sleep like a rumor." Her thumbs fly. "And Spencer's awake because Spencer is always awake. She's got her laptop open right now, I guarantee it. That girl's circadian rhythm runs on research."
I press my fingers under my eyes to catch the mascara trying to slide. "It might be nothing. He said PR. The award, the boosters, the gala."
"Nikki." Hanna puts her phone down and turns her whole body to me, knee touching mine. "She texted him four times in ten minutes while you were still in his room. She said 'just us.' He said 'just us. ok.' There is no PR spreadsheet on earth that contains the sentence 'good boy' unless the deliverable is sex."
Emily arrives in nine minutes, hair still in a braid, sweatshirt over her pajamas, and sits on my other side without asking questions, which is Emily's superpower. She listens while Hanna retells it, faster and angrier than I'd told it. I watch my own disaster arrive secondhand and it looks worse in Hanna's version, because Hanna doesn't edit.
"So he said 'you're the one I...'" Emily starts.
"And died. Mid-sentence. Like a shot bird."
"And then what did you say?"
"I said finish the sentence. He said stay tonight."
Emily's mouth does something complicated. She rubs my shoulder once, slow, and doesn't say the thing. Which is how I know she's thinking it.
Spencer shows up last with her laptop bag and an expression like a courtroom. She doesn't hug me. Spencer shows love by doing, and I knew what her doing looked like before she sat down: she's already opened the laptop, already logged into the Greek life news site, already scrolling.
"The Alpha Phi philanthropy gala is in eight days," she says. "Co-hosted with Delta Chi. The award committee votes the week after. Chapter of the Year, and the athletic boosters have been leaning hard on the chapter presidents to pair up, because the scouts want clean, marketable, photogenic."
"So there is an actual reason," I say, and I hear the hope in my own voice and hate it.
Spencer looks up at me over the laptop. Her face does the Spencer thing, the thing where she decides whether to give you the truth or the version you can carry.
"Nik. Last spring, at the leadership summit, I did a workshop with Kendall Jenner. On personal branding." She turns the laptop toward me. There's a PDF, a portfolio template, a column of bullet points. "This is her résumé framework. Look at item four."
I read it. "Cross-platform partnership with high-visibility campus organization. Measurable engagement growth." Underneath, in smaller type: target demographic: athletic alumni network, NYC media market.
"Measurable," Hanna says flatly. "He's a metric. Harry is a KPI."
"He's a line item," Spencer says, and closes the laptop halfway, gentle about it. "That doesn't mean nothing is real for him. People confuse their spreadsheets with their feelings all the time. But it means you should stop thinking of this as a girl who likes your boyfriend. It's a girl who's building something, and your boyfriend is the scaffolding."
The wine has gone warm in my glass. I drink it anyway. Emily's hand is still on my shoulder, a steady pressure, and Hanna has gone uncharacteristically quiet, which in Hanna means fury with nowhere to put it.
"Okay," I say finally. "So what do I do. Because the options are either I blow this up now, in October, and I'm the jealous girlfriend who wrecked his award season, or I sit in the stands at his games and watch him wear whatever color she tells him to."
"Neither," Spencer says. "You gather information first. You don't accuse a man of a thing without knowing the whole shape of it, because half the time he doesn't know the shape of it himself."
"Since when are you on Harry's side?"
"I'm on yours. Harry's side is currently unoccupied. He left it."
Emily tilts her head. "When's the bonfire?"
"Greek Week," Hanna says. "Two Saturdays. Whole campus. Cameras out. Everyone's drunk by sundown."
"So there's time," Emily says. "You don't have to decide anything tonight. But Nik, you also don't have to keep performing, either. Not with us."
I look at her. Calm, steady Emily, who probably sees both sides of every fight between the girls and the guys and never once takes a cheap shot. "He said 'you feel like home,'" I tell her. "Right in the middle of it. Like he meant it."
"Men say 'home' in bed and 'Kendall' to their phones," Hanna says. "Believe the phone."
Spencer opens her laptop again, types fast, and I watch her face go through something. She stops. Reads. Reads it again.
"What," I say.
"Alpha Phi's chapter minutes are posted publicly. Their gala committee roster." She turns the screen. There it is, four names down, Harry Styles, Delta Chi liaison, next to Kendall Jenner, committee chair. And under liaison duties: attendance at all planning sessions. Private. As needed.
"Private," I repeat. "As needed."
"Thursday. Eight o'clock. The Hideaway," Hanna says quietly. "He told you practice, then study group."
"He did." I set the glass down on the coaster, straighten it, square to the table. The pink neon catches my rings. Something in my chest has stopped being sad and started being cold, and cold I can work with. "Tell me everything you know about the Hideaway's back booths."
Spencer looks at Hanna. Hanna looks at Emily. Emily nods.
"Thursday's a date, then," Hanna says, and reaches for the bottle to refill me.