I think of the party, how I’d snuck away rather than face her after meeting Seb. Then later, on the Sunday, tucking myself in my room after he choked me, so I didn’t have to bear witness to her concern.
“Sure, I would,” I lie, using the biggest smile in my repertoire to convey how serious I am.
“That’s what I thought,” she says sadly, turning to head back inside.
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
ESME
Later that night,when I try to fall asleep, Rowena’s concern nags at me. I wonder why she’s worried enough to raise the issue with me directly, when I don’t feel the same for myself.
That leads me to think there’s something wrong with me, a playlist I know all too well.
Seb stirs in his sleep, throwing an arm over my waist to hook me a little closer. His body runs so warm, I barely need the covers. Before we had sex tonight, he examined the cut on the inside of my leg as he always does, checking to see it’s healing, that the damage I thought he’d revile but instead adores isn’t permanent.
Or no more permanent than the other raised lines of scar tissue on my sensitive flesh.
My thoughts bounce around, too energised to find a place to rest. Today’s gift was the knowledge that Seb remembered me from so far back. It delights me to think that right from the start, when I was noticing and storing up all the insignificant details about him, he was doing the same with me, too.
I let my hand wander over the planes and angles of his chest, enjoying the shape of his sculpted muscles. A service, really, because it would be a terrible thing for him to put all that work in and not earn admiration in return.
My thoughts wander again, this time landing on Joseph and the extra-large helping of guilt that goes with him. A serving size that increases for every day that I don’t tell him the information I’m meant to. A task I’ve now put off for so long, it seems like something that won’t ever get done.
That’s not fair, though. To him or to whichever girl he hooks up with next. I haven’t heard any rumours and his personality is such that I think I would. I think if he found someone he deemed worth his time, he’d saunter over to shout it in my face.
Tomorrow, I decide, then check Seb’s alarm clock. Today.
With a small groan of reluctance, I push myself to a sitting position and cast around for my clothes. The school frowns on students staging sleepovers, even those of us over the age of eighteen and theoretically outside the usual statute of in loco parentis. The fine print from our contract of residence coming in for the win.
Other students probably don’t obsess over these minor details, but I can’t force myself to disobey willingly. Not in a school as expulsion happy as Kingswood.
If I’d fallen asleep, sure. No problem. But I’m so far awake now seems an unachievable ambition.
“No,” Seb declares, reaching out to pull me back down by his side.
The gesture is heart-meltingly sweet, especially since he genuinely seems to be asleep otherwise, but I return his hand to under the covers and pull on the few items of clothing I’ve located in the dim light.
Sneaking out, I flick the bolt so it locks behind me as I leave, then tiptoe the two metres to my door.
I’m just slipping under my own covers when my phone buzzes with a text.“Such a stickler for authority. I’ll train you out of it one day.”
I patter my fingers against the wall, a tiny gesture to let him know I’m thinking of him, then immediately turn my thoughts to another boy.
In an hour, I’ve held the discussion with Joseph a dozen times over. From him screaming in my face about what a slut I am to his blatant refusal to understand what I’m telling him, it doesn’t help my nerves much.
The real thing can’t be as bad as the Joseph who lurks in my imagination.
Definitely today. Get it over with. Get it done.
Then I can move onto the guilt I feel for a hundred other different reasons because, like a girl scout, I always come equipped.
* * *
I seeJoseph at breakfast and decide no, not now. Not when he’ll then dwell on it all day long. At lunchtime, I give his table of friends a wide berth. Nobody needs an audience to what will be an uncomfortable conversation.
Not him and not me.
Later, after classes, I spy him in the common room, parked on a single chair by the window, doom scrolling his phone, oblivious to everything else going on, even the two friends nearby.
