Winter clutched the start of term in its icy fist. The weather, in all its varying degrees of wet, descended like a grey curtain. From my dorm room window, I watched as Jeremy came calling for Francesca, collar turned up against the cold.
Pain twisted my gut as they left, huddled together against the bitter wind that howled across campus. I threw myself into my studies; that was what I was here for, after all.This is good for me.I stretched my neck and narrowed my mind to focus, devouring textbooks, scribbling notes until my hand ached, and seeking solace in statistics, as I tried to block out the image of them. But the phantom of her scent clung to my skin.
January unravelled with the same inevitability as my resolve, and by the second week of term, Francesca was tapping at my door and calling my name. I stood on the other side, my forehead pressed to the painted wood grain, determined to hold my ground and maintain the fragile peace I’d wrapped around myself. But there was something different in her voice — something that sounded a lot like remorse.
“I miss you,” she said, and I caved.
I opened the door, my chest squeezing at the sight of her — sad eyes painted dark and dressed again in her gothy blacks and ripped denim. She looked so vulnerable, a raw contrast to the girl who had so recently chosen another over me.
“What do you want, Francesca?” I asked, my throat clenching around the words.
She looked up at me through her claggy eyelashes and, with one word, disarmed me.
“You,” she said.
Mentally tearing up my resolutions, I swept aside my better judgement and pulled her into my room.
Francesca’s minty tongue speared into my mouth, her fingers tangling in fistfuls of my hair as she pushed me back against the door and made my world spin.
“Nothing tastes as good as you do,” she teased into my ear.
I arched, yielding to her persistent press as a flood of desire overtook me.
After that, we fell into a new pattern: one where Francesca wound up in my bed most nights. We’d have sex and fall asleep wrapped in each other. Sometimes I’d lie awake, watching the light change through the gap in the curtains and wondering how it was possible to feel so close, yet so distant to someone at the same time. Or how Francesca could make me feel like I meant everything and nothing all at once.
It was fine unless I tried to talk about feelings, or Jeremy, or anything she didn’t want to talk about. Like theflip of a coin, Francesca’s mood would change, darkness clouding her eyes as her temper flared.
“Isn’t it obvious how I feel, Catherine?” she’d rage before pushing me onto the bed and showing me with her tongue, her body a tempest against mine.
“I think it’s ayouproblem,”she’d say with such confidence it had to be true.
“It’s you I’m fucking, isn’t it?” Her words dripped with disdain, but I found some small satisfaction in the implication that it wasonlyme.
I loved the things we did together in the sanctuary of my room, the way her skin felt against mine, the way her body moved, and the secret language we shared, but every touch stoked a slow, painful hunger that left me emotionally malnourished.
“You’re very clingy, Catherine. Perhaps it’s because you lost your mother so young,” she said without stopping to consider the harsh words. They stung like a slap, but I told myself not to be greedy, to be grateful for what was on offer and not take too much. I could only hope my restraint would be rewarded with abundance,so I continued to offer myself up to her as communion.
After a while, an anaesthetic-like numbness set in — even though her words still cut, I barely felt it anymore. I’d lap up every crumb of a compliment, then sit back, bloated and glowing, becauseif she makes me feel this good, how can it possibly be bad?
Francesca changedJeremy and me in ways we had no words for. She seemed capable of carrying on as if our weird dynamic was perfectly normal. For a while, I let her drag me along to our old haunts. I spun like a third wheel as the two of them flirted, the whole time relishing the fact that it was me who’d fall asleep and wake up beside her.
Inevitably, a chasm formed between us. Time alone with Jeremy was out of the question; he talked endlessly about her, stirring an unpalatable cocktail of smug pride and sickly guilt inside me. I knew things he’d never know — the sweet taste of Francesca on my tongue, her whispered confessions in the dead of night, and the way she wrapped herself around me like I was hers. I wanted to tell him everything, but I didn’t want to crush him with the weight of it. So I pulled away, making excuses to while away my time in the library and lose myself in the hushed rustle of pages.
And that’s where the collision occurred.
Two over-caffeinated, bleary-eyed students crashing together in a shower of books and awkward apologies.
“I’m Mei,” she giggled, peering at me through her long fringe as we swept up the fallen books from the floor.
“Catherine.” I offered my hand, and she shook it with both of hers.
“Cat…e…reen,” she repeated, her accent butchering my name in the most endearing way.
“Close enough.” I laughed, and she did too.
“Some words can be difficult for me.”She frowned, and a deep line formed between her brows. “Maybe it’s better for both of us if I can call you Cati?”
I nodded, already basking in the warmth of her energy as I shifted my heavy book bag back onto my shoulder.
