She let out this small, frustrated breath, and her mouth started to move again, quiet, broken. “C–common s—”
She couldn’t finish it, but I understood.
And my brows shot up. “Oh, so you think I don’t have common sense now?”
That got her.
She whipped her head away so fast, hair brushing her cheek, and lifted her good hand to cover her face. Not because she was scared.
Because she was annoyed.
Annoyed at me.
And fuck, for some reason, that almost made me laugh. She was so much like Alex when annoyed. British menaces. Adorable though. Not Alex. Her.
The way her shoulders rose a little, her neck stiff, her ears going pink. She wasn’t used to arguing with me like this. Not without fear. Not with this kind of normalcy.
“Okay, fine,” I muttered under my breath, smirking a little as I backspaced the whole page. “Starting over. From page one. With common sense this time.”
Her hand twitched, as if she wanted to throw a pen at me but couldn’t. And I swear, seeing her that flustered, that human again, after everything that happened…
It almost felt like breathing for the first time in weeks.
We’d fallen quiet again after our little argument, well, she’d gone quiet, and I was still trying not to smirk about it.
Her notes were scattered all over the table, the pages soft at the corners from how many times she’d rewritten and highlighted them. The kind of detail only someone obsessed with doing everything right would have.
After a moment, I tried to strike up another conversation. Something random, something about her.
“You’re known as the scholarship girl, the genius,” I said, making her turn slightly to me. “It’s known Silverwood doesn’t offer those; why did you try to apply?”
Her head lifted slowly, as if she were debating whether to answer at all.
Then she picked up her phone, her cast hand awkwardly poking out of her sleeve, and started typing with those few free fingers.
The text blinked up on the screen a second later:
I applied and was rejected. But I emailed them about my grades and achievements back home, and they said to apply again. They gave me an interview. Then they accepted me. Full ride.
I stared at her.
“You got in after being rejected?”
She nodded once, looking back down at her phone, thumbs still moving.
They said I was persistent.
I looked up at her. “You must be so smart.”
She didn’t look at me. Just kept typing, then turned the screen back toward me again.
Smart enough to survive school. Not street-smart enough to survive people.
My chest tightened.
There was no pity in the way she wrote it, just brutal honesty, as if she’d accepted that survival came at different costs for her.
I watched the way she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the way her eyes softened back onto her screen like she hadn’t just said something that knocked the air out of me.
