Chapter 2: The Empty Side of the Bed
I woke up the way you wake up when something's already wrong before your brain catches up. Cold sheets. That particular kind of cold, the kind that means nobody's been in them for hours.
For a second I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the mini-fridge, and I tried to remember falling asleep with Nikki's back against my chest. I remembered her hip against mine, the little moon-and-ring tattoo on her skin under my palm. I remembered her breathing going slow and even. Too even, maybe. I hadn't thought about it at the time.
The clock on my phone said 6:47. Her sneakers were gone from beside my desk. Her jacket was gone from the hook. Even the hair tie she always left on my nightstand like a claim marker, gone.
Then I saw the cardigan.
The houndstooth knit thing, pink and black and white, hung over my desk chair like it was waiting for me to notice it. Nikki had worn it over her crop top last night. Nikki never forgot that cardigan. She'd once driven back twenty minutes to Hanna's apartment because she left it draped over a kitchen stool.
I sat up and my stomach dropped through the floor.
My phone was face-down on the mattress next to me. I knew why my stomach did that, because I remembered the night in fragments, and the fragments had a shape now. The buzz at some ungodly hour. The screen light through my eyelids. Me, half asleep, thumb moving on its own. I picked the phone up and unlocked it and there it all was, laid out like evidence at a trial I was already losing.
Kendall Jenner, 1:14 a.m. Thursday. Back booth. Don't be late, good boy.
Me, 1:16 a.m. I'll be there.
I read it three times hoping it would turn into something else. It didn't. My reply sat there under hers, cheerful and obedient, sent while the girl who'd spent six years loving me was breathing three feet away, pretending to be asleep. Or not pretending. God. Maybe she really had been asleep and I'd gotten away with it and I was inventing the worst.
Except the cardigan.
Nikki didn't leave the cardigan. Nikki left cardigans at weddings and funerals and gas stations rather than lose track of one.
I threw on sweatpants and called her. It rang four times and went to voicemail, and hearing her voice on the greeting, bright and a little sarcastic, you've reached Nikki, leave something interesting or don't bother, made my throat close up.
"It's me," I said, after the beep. "Nikki, I think you, okay, call me back. Please. It's early, I know. Just call me back."
I called again. Voicemail. I typed out a text, deleted it, typed it again. Saw the cardigan. Are you okay? It sat there with one grey tick and no answer.
Then I did the coward's math. If she'd seen the texts, she'd seen Thursday. If she'd seen Thursday, I couldn't have Thursday, not like that, not in a back booth while whatever this was rotted through my actual life. I opened Kendall's thread and typed fast before I could talk myself out of it.
Kendall. Can we move Thursday? Something's come up with Nikki.
I stared at with Nikki and almost deleted it. I left it. Send.
Her reply came in under two minutes, which meant she was awake, which meant Kendall Jenner was awake before seven in the morning, which meant the world was already off its axis.
What's come up?
Nikki left in the middle of the night. Something's wrong. I'll explain.
Three dots. Then: Harry. The gala is in eight days. We don't move things around because your girlfriend has feelings. Thursday, 8, as planned. Wear the grey sweater.
I read your girlfriend has feelings four times. There was no cruelty in it, that was the thing. It read like a line item in a spreadsheet. It didn't even occur to her that it was monstrous.
I put the phone in my pocket, pulled a hoodie over my head, and drove across campus with the windows down and the cold air hurting my face, because I wanted it to hurt my face.
Hanna's apartment was in a brick walk-up near the arts quad, and I'd been there a hundred times, tailgates and birthday parties and Niall asleep on their couch with his mouth open. I knocked on the blue door at 7:40 in the morning, barefaced and desperate, and heard the worst sound in the world.
Silence.
Conversation, the low murmur of it through the door, a girl's laugh cut short. Then nothing. That total, held-breath nothing of five people looking at each other.
I knocked again. Footsteps, careful ones. The door opened on Hanna Marin in pajama pants and a sleep shirt, blonde hair a wreck, blue eyes doing a slow, arctic scan of me from bandana to boots.
"Harry," she said. Just that. Hanna Marin had never once in nine years of friendship said just a name to me.
"Is Nikki here?"
"Why would Nikki be here at seven in the morning, Harry?"
"Because her cardigan's at my place," I said, and my voice cracked on the last word, which was humiliating, and I didn't care. "Hanna, please. She's not answering her phone. I need to know if she's okay."
Behind Hanna, down the short hall, I could see into the living room. Aria on the arm of the couch, arms crossed. Emily standing. Spencer at the window with her laptop open, and on the couch, curled small under a blanket with her phone dark in her hands, Nikki.
My Nikki. Hair loose, that blue-to-purple waterfall of it spilled over the blanket, hazel eyes coming up to meet mine with a flatness I had never once been on the receiving end of. Six years, and I had never had her look at me like I was a stranger at the door.
Hanna didn't move out of the doorway.
"You want to know if she's okay," Hanna said, loud enough for the room to hear it. "That's rich. You want to ask her, or do you want to ask Kendall? Because I hear you've got a Thursday thing."
Aria's arms tightened across her chest. Spencer closed the laptop halfway. Nikki didn't say anything at all. She just looked at me, and her jaw set, and her chin came up, and I knew, standing in that hallway in my hoodie with my heart going like a drumline, that she knew. Not suspected. Knew.
"Can I please just talk to her," I said. "Five minutes."
Nikki finally spoke, and her voice was steady, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than shouting.
"You had your five minutes last night, Harry. At 1:14 in the morning."
Hanna's head turned to look at her, and Nikki pulled the blanket tighter and looked at me with something flickering underneath the flatness, hurt and fury and a kind of exhausted love that made me want to be sick.
"Tell Kendall the back booth's free Thursday," she said. "I won't be needing it."
He didn't move. That was the first thing I noticed, standing there in Hanna's doorway with my cardigan still folded in my lap, that Harry just stood there on the mat like his legs had forgotten their job. His curls were smashed flat on one side from my pillow. My pillow. Six years of my pillows, and he'd shown up here smelling like my shampoo with another woman's schedule in his phone.
"Nikki," he said.
"Don't." I heard my own voice come out level, and it surprised me. Somewhere around four in the morning I'd stopped shaking, and what was left was this. Flat. Clean. "You don't get to say my name like it means something right now."
"Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
"You had the whole night," Hanna said. "You had six years."
He tried to look past her at me, and I made the mistake of letting him. His green eyes were wrecked, red-rimmed, honest in the way they only got when he hadn't had time to build the charm back up. A month ago that look would have undone me. I folded the blanket over my knees and waited for it to pass. It passed.
"What happened," he said, quiet now. "Tell me what you saw. Because I've been sitting in my room doing the math and I can't make it make sense."
"Doing the math." Spencer's voice came from the window, dry as chalk. She didn't close the laptop the rest of the way. She just tilted the screen and looked at him over the top of it. "Funny. We've been doing some math too."
"Spence," I said.
"You wanted information before we confronted anyone. He's here. Uninvited. I'm not confronting, I'm answering a direct question." She turned the laptop toward him. "Read the fourth bullet."
He stepped into the apartment. Hanna let him, arms still crossed, and the door clicked shut behind him like a cell. He crossed the room slowly, the way you'd cross a room with a bear in it, and took the laptop, and I watched his face while he read. It went from confusion to recognition to something gray.
"'Cross-platform partnership with a high-visibility campus organization,'" Spencer read aloud, in case he'd skims it. "Targeting the athletic alumni network and the New York media market. That's you, Harry. That's you in her branding portfolio. You're not her boyfriend. You're a deliverable."
"There's also a line in the gala committee minutes," I said. I hadn't planned to speak. It came out anyway, level and strange, like I was narrating someone else's morning. "You're listed as Delta Chi liaison. Private, as-needed duties. That phrase have a meeting scheduled Thursday at eight?"
His jaw worked. The laptop hung in his hand.
"I moved it," he said. "I texted her at seven this morning and told her we couldn't do Thursday. I told her something came up with you."
"And what did she say?" Emily asked from her spot by the bookshelf. She'd been quiet the whole time, but her voice had that gentle dangerous calm she saved for exactly this. "Word for word, Harry."
He looked at the floor. "She said the gala is in eight days. That we don't move things around because my girlfriend has feelings."
The room absorbed that. Aria made a small sound, not quite a laugh, and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
"And you came here," I said, "because I have feelings. And she doesn't. So you came to the girl with the feelings."
"Nikki, no. I came here because you left in the night and I thought something was wrong and I couldn't breathe." His voice cracked open in the middle, and for one second I saw the boy from junior year who'd memorized my coffee order and my grandmother's birthday and the poem I loved enough to get as a tattoo in orbit on my hip. Then I thought about 1:16 a.m., I'll be there, typed three feet from my sleeping body, and the second closed.
"Here's what's wrong with me," I said. I stood, and the blanket slid off, and I was in Hanna's borrowed sweatshirt with my hair a blue-and-purple mess and I still made myself meet his eyes. "I pretended to be asleep and watched you text her. That's what's wrong with me. I read every message. Good boy, Harry. You answered in under two minutes. You've never answered me that fast in your life."
"I answered because the whole thing is fake. It's PR, it's for the chapter, it's for the team, Liam knows, the guys know, it isn't real."
"It doesn't matter if it's real," I said. "That's the part you still don't get. You let her schedule you. You let her pick your clothes. You laid next to me and texted another girl back in the dark and then said almost there. I heard you, Harry. I heard the almost there."
He flinched like I'd thrown something. Hanna shifted her weight, ready, in case he did anything stupider than stand there.
"I know," he said. "I know what that sounds like."
"Do you? Because I've been sitting here since four trying to find the version where you're an idiot instead of a liar, and I can't land on one. Idiots don't hide the phone. Liars don't forget to hide the cardigan. You did both."
"Nikki." He put the laptop down on the arm of the couch, careful, like that mattered. "What do you want me to do?"
There it was. The real question, finally, stripped of charm. I looked at him for a long moment, at the bandana and the hoodie and the six years hanging off him like a wet coat, and I realized I actually knew the answer.
"I want you to go to the Hideaway on Thursday," I said. "Eight o'clock. Grey sweater, she'll tell you. Sit in the back booth and be exactly who you've decided to be. And I want you to not text me, not call me, and not show up where I am until I decide otherwise."
"That's it? That's your answer?"
"That's my opening offer."
Aria came off the arm of the couch and stood at my shoulder, and Emily moved too, and it wasn't a wall exactly, but it was four girls and a doorway and one boy who'd forgotten which side of the door he lived on. Spencer took her laptop back and shut it all the way.
Harry stood there another few seconds. Then he nodded, once, slow, and his eyes were shining and I refused to let that mean anything to me.
"Keep the cardigan," I said, before he reached the door. "Bring it Thursday. Hand it to her. Tell her I said thanks for the loan of you."
The door closed on him. Hanna turned the deadbolt, loud, deliberate, and leaned her back against it.
"Okay," she said, exhaling. "That was the coldest thing I have ever heard a human being say out loud. I'm framing it."
I sat back down on the couch. My hands weren't shaking anymore either, and I picked up my phone, dark in my palm, and turned it over and over.
"Thursday," Spencer said, settling cross-legged on the cushion beside me, laptop reopening. "If we're going to be at the Hideaway, we should know what we're walking into. I want the rest of those committee minutes."
"Then let's get them," I said.