Chapter 9: The Cracks Widen
The morning light crawled through the blinds in thin, grey stripes, painting the kitchen in the flat tones of a day that hadn't decided what it wanted to be. I stood at the counter with a mug of coffee I wasn't really drinking, watching Jordan move through the apartment with a kind of careful, deliberate grace. She'd been like that all week. Every motion measured. Every glance checked for approval.
She was dressed for class now, a cream cardigan over a simple blouse, her hair pulled back in a way that made her look younger than she was. Softer. She caught me looking and smiled, and there was something almost shy in it.
"I can make you something before I go," she said, already reaching for the fridge. "Eggs? I could do eggs."
"I'm fine," I said. "You'll be late."
She checked her phone, then nodded. "Okay." She hesitated at the door, one hand on the frame, and then she turned and crossed the small distance between us. Her arms came around my waist and she pressed her face against my chest. The hug was sudden, almost desperate, and I stood there with my coffee raised awkwardly to the side, puzzled by the weight of it.
"I'll see you later," she murmured into my sweater.
I set the mug down and let my arms settle around her. "Yeah. See you later."
She let go and left before I could ask what that was about. The door clicked shut behind her, and the apartment fell into a silence that was almost a relief. I stood there for a long moment, the ghost of her grip still on my ribs, and then my phone buzzed on the counter.
Bianca's name lit the screen. Just a few words.
We need to talk. The coffee shop, the one near campus. As soon as you can.
No heat. No baiting. No smiley face or barb hiding behind punctuation. Just a request, clean and stripped of everything I'd come to expect from her. That alone made my pulse pick up.
I told myself it was nothing. Maybe Andres had said something about the taco dinner. Maybe she wanted to warn me about another one of their plans. But the reason I was already reaching for my jacket and my keys was because I knew, in my gut, that Bianca Ricci didn't ask for meetings at coffee shops unless something had cracked.
The walk to the shop took fifteen minutes, and I spent every one of them replaying the taco dinner. The way Bianca had gone cold when I described Jordan's rough edges. The way Andres had laughed, oblivious, and asked what kind of food Jordan liked, as if that were the most important question in the world. I hadn't thought much of it then. But Bianca had been watching Andres too, studying him the way she studied everything, cataloging details for later use.
The coffee shop was a narrow, wood-paneled place tucked between a print shop and a yoga studio, perpetually warm and smelling of burnt sugar and old books. I pushed through the door and scanned the room. She was in the back corner booth, the one with the bad light and the good sightlines, hunched forward over a cup that had long gone cold. She wore a grey wool coat I'd never seen before, and her hair was unpinned, falling in a heavy black curtain that hid half her face.
I slid into the seat across from her. She didn't look up.
"You get my message," she said. Her voice was flat. Wrong.
"Bianca. What's going on?"
She pressed her palms flat on the table for a moment, then drew them back into her lap. When she finally lifted her head, I saw the pallor beneath her olive skin. Her eyes were rimmed red, not from crying, but from the kind of sleepless night that hollows a person out from the inside.
"He knows something," she said.
I felt the words like a cold draft under my shirt. "Andres?"
"He's been asking questions." Her voice had dropped to barely a whisper. "About you. About Jordan. About why you seemed so familiar at dinner. Why I reacted the way I did when you described your relationship."
"You were hostile," I said. "That's not exactly a secret."
"It's not just that." She shook her head, and the motion sent her hair sliding across her cheek. "Last night, he asked me if I'd ever been with someone else. Just out of nowhere. We were sitting on his couch, watching something, and he muted the TV and asked me if I'd ever been unfaithful."
"What did you say?"
"What do you think I said?" Her jaw tightened. "I told him no. That he was being ridiculous. But I couldn't tell him the truth, which means I lied, which means I'm now living inside the lie, and he can feel it. He's not stupid, Daniel. He's actually frighteningly perceptive when he wants to be. He just usually doesn't want to be."
I sat back, the wood of the booth pressing into my spine. "He asked about me specifically?"
She nodded, a single, clipped motion. "He asked if we'd ever studied together alone. Asked if you'd ever been over to my apartment. Asked what we talked about during those nights in the library when we were pulling all-nighters for the research project." She swallowed. "He asked if I'd ever touched you."
The silence stretched between us. A barista called out a name at the counter, and the hiss of the espresso machine filled the space where my reply should have been.
"And what did you say?" I managed.
"I said we were partners. That we worked together. That I barely knew you outside of the project." Her voice cracked on the last word. "And I could see in his face that he didn't believe me. Not entirely. He let it go, because he's a good man and he doesn't want to fight, but he's going to find something. He's going to keep pulling at the thread."
I thought about Andres. The easy laugh. The shared history of first-generation college struggles, of overachieving immigrant parents who never quite understood what their children were doing. I had liked him, in a way that made this worse. He was the kind of person you didn't want to hurt, which only meant he was the kind of person who would never see the knife coming.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
Bianca looked at me then, and the fear in her eyes was a real, tangible thing. I'd seen her angry. I'd seen her cold. I'd seen her desperate and hungry in the dark. But I had never seen her afraid like this. It cracked something open in her chest, and for the first time, she looked young.
"I don't know," she said. "I just needed you to know. Because if it falls apart, if he figures it out, I need someone else to know that it wasn't nothing. That what happened between us wasn't just some weakness I'm trying to shove into a box."
I opened my mouth to answer, but the weight of what she'd just said settled on me like a coat made of stones. She wasn't asking me to fix it. She was asking me to bear witness.
I watched her across the table, this woman who had always been the apex predator in every room she entered. Bianca Ricci, heir to a media empire, the girl who could eviscerate a classmate's argument with three words and a raised eyebrow. She'd never once shown me fear. Not when we were tangled in her car seats, not when she'd ended things with me, not even when she was screaming at me in her apartment about how I'd ruined everything by existing.
But here she was, small and pale, her hands wrapped around a cold cup of coffee like she was trying to warm them over a dying fire.
"You really think he'll push it?" I asked.
"I know he will." She finally lifted the cup to her lips, took a sip of the cold liquid, and grimaced. "He's methodical. That's what I've always loved about him. He doesn't rush anything. He builds a case. He waits until he's certain before he acts. And once he's certain, he doesn't let go."
"That doesn't sound like a man who suspects his girlfriend of cheating."
"It sounds like a man who's making sure he isn't paranoid before he blows up his life." She set the cup down with a soft clack. "And I've given him plenty of reasons to think he's not paranoid."
I studied her. The way her fingers worried the edge of her sleeve. The way she kept glancing at the door, as if Andres might walk through it at any moment. I had never seen her like this. She was always the calm one in the storm. The one who could lie to a boyfriend's face and then beg me to take her from behind an hour later without a flicker of guilt.
She kept glancing at the door, her shoulders tight, and I thought she was going to keep spiraling into the Andres thing. But then her posture shifted, softened almost imperceptibly, and when she looked back at me her eyes had lost some of their edge.
"How are things going with Jordan?"
The question landed wrong, like a step on a stair that wasn't there. I blinked at her, the gears in my head grinding to a halt. We'd been talking about Andres, about the thread he was pulling, about the lie she was living inside. And now she was asking about my girlfriend, the other half of the lie I was living.
"I thought we were talking about you," I said.
"We were." She wrapped both hands around the cold cup like she was steadying herself. "Now I'm asking about you."
I didn't know what to do with that. Bianca had never asked about Jordan before, not once. She'd referenced her in passing, like a fact she had to acknowledge but didn't want to touch. She'd called her "your girlfriend" with the same distaste she used for "budget cuts" and "group projects." But she'd never asked how things were going. That required a level of care she'd never shown me outside of closed doors and tangled sheets.
"Complicated," I said.
"Complicated how?"
I studied her face, looking for the trap. Bianca didn't ask questions without a reason. Every word she spoke was calibrated, weighted, aimed at something. But her expression was open, and I couldn't find the angle.
"She's different," I said slowly. "Since I started pushing back. She's not the same person she was a month ago."
"Different how?"
"Quieter. She asks permission to go to the grocery store." The words came out before I could stop them, and I heard how insane they sounded in the open air of the coffee shop. "She apologized. Like, real apologies. Crying on the floor, telling me she's afraid to be alone."
Bianca's fingers tightened around her cup. A small, precise motion I might have missed if I wasn't watching her hands.
"And you believe her?"
The question hung between us. I thought about Jordan in the dark last night, her hand gripping mine even in sleep. The way she'd said she'd take anything, any cruelty, just to know I'd come home. I thought about the way she'd mended my hoodie, the careful stitches, the way she'd watched me eat the enchiladas with something like hope in her eyes.
"I believe she means it," I said. "Whether it'll last, that's a different question."
Bianca nodded slowly. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind, examining it from every angle.
"And the other stuff? The rough stuff you told Andres about?"
I felt heat creep up the back of my neck. I'd described it to Andres at the taco place, but I hadn't meant for her to hear it. She had anyway, and I'd watched her go pale and tight-lipped as I talked about holding Jordan down, about taking what I wanted.
"It's not just about that," I said. "It's about control. Who has it. Who's allowed to have it."
"And you have it now."
"I have it now."
Bianca's lips pressed into a thin line. She looked at me with something I couldn't name, something that wasn't quite jealousy and wasn't quite fear. It was closer to recognition.
"I used to think I knew what I wanted," she said. "I wanted Andres because he was safe. Because he was stable. Because he didn't make me feel like I was going to come apart at the seams. And I wanted you because you did." She shook her head. "I wanted both, and I thought I could have both, because I'm good at lying and better at compartmentalizing. But it turns out you can't have a stable life and a secret that could destroy it. Eventually the secret starts leaking out the edges."
I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. I didn't move. The coffee shop was full of people, and any of them could have known us, could have seen us, could have carried the story back to Andres or Jordan or anyone else.
"What are we going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know." She finally let go of the cup, and I saw her fingers were trembling. "I don't know what the right move is. I'm not even sure there is one. And for the first time in my life, I can't figure out the rational solution to a problem because the irrational variable is me."
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the words died in my throat. There was nothing I could offer her. No plan, no reassurance, no clever workaround. We were both trapped in the lives we'd built, and the walls were starting to close in from every direction.
Bianca looked at me, and for a moment the mask slipped entirely. She was just a girl, twenty years old, terrified of losing everything she'd spent her life building. And I was the man who could take it all away from her with a single moment of honesty.
"I should go," she said, but she didn't move.
The coffee shop hummed around us, oblivious to the weight pressing down on that corner booth. A laugh from the counter. The hiss of steamed milk. The scrape of chairs at nearby tables.
"Do you regret it?" I asked. The words came out quieter than I meant them to.
She looked at me, and the question hung between us like smoke. Her eyes searched mine, and I saw something flicker there, a door opening and closing so fast I barely caught it.
"No," she said. "And that's the worst part. If I regretted it, I could move on. I could convince myself it was a mistake, a lapse in judgment, something to bury and forget. But I don't regret it. I regret that we got caught, not that we did it." She let out a breath. "I regret that I can't have you and keep my life at the same time."
The words settled in my chest like stones. She pushed back from the table, gathered her coat around her shoulders, and stood. For a moment she hovered, looking down at me, and I thought she might say something else. Then she turned and walked toward the door, leaving me alone in the back corner booth with a cold cup of coffee and the taste of her confession in my mouth.
I watched her disappear through the door, the bell chiming overhead, and I sat there for a long time, trying to figure out what it meant. I was still sitting there when my phone buzzed again, Jordan's name lighting up the screen. A text, just two words.
Home soon?