Page 23 of Hostile

I noted it the way I noted everything. By then, I had my own Wyatt Aldridge catalog.

Later, I thought, watching his face in the rain. Ask him later.

He cupped my face in both hands, gently tilted my face up, and kissed me.

It wasn’t rushed or breathless. It wasn’t frantic, performative, or what I expected. Instead, it was calm, assured, and unhurried, like a man who had settled on this place as his forever, with no plans to go anywhere. His thumbs softly stroked my cheekbones, and I instinctively leaned into the touch before second-guessing myself.

When he pulled back, he didn’t go far. His forehead rested against mine, his eyes still closed as the rain fell around us.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since the first day of class,” he said softly.

Since the parking lot, I thought. Me too.

“Don’t read too much into it,” I said instead.

His quiet laugh warmed the space between us. “You said the same thing the first day I walked you to class.”

“And I meant it then too.”

He stepped back, still smiling, giving me room. “Good night, Megan.”

I turned, walked up the steps, and went through the door without looking back. I made it all the way to the second-floor landing before I realized I was smiling.

Oh no, I thought.

Oh no.

CHAPTER TEN

MEGAN: THE PAST

The thing about Harvard in December was that it tried very hard to be beautiful and mostly succeeded.

The cold came in from the Charles River with a particular bite that Savannah had never prepared me for, and the campus took on the quality of a postcard—bare trees, old brick, the kind of gray sky that sat low and close, making the lit windows of every building look warm by contrast. I’d spent the first December resenting it. By the second, I’d begun to understand why people who grew up with real winters talked about them the way they did.

There was something clarifying about cold this complete. It made the world very simple. You were warm, or you weren’t. You were inside, or you weren’t. Everything else was a detail.

I was outside, which was Wyatt’s fault.

He’d texted at seven, asking if I wanted to walk, which was the kind of request that shouldn’t have worked on a December night, with the temperature at twenty-two degrees and a reading list that wasn’t going to finish itself. I’d said yes before I’d even finished reading the message, which told me everything I needed to know about the current state of my better judgment and nothing I didn’t already know.

I changed out of my study clothes before I went, telling myself it was practical. I’d been in them since seven that morning, and they needed washing anyway. I pulled on dark jeans and the gray sweater Christine had declared the exact right color for my complexion, then ran a brush through my hair until the long blonde waves—threaded with the natural browns other women paid salons to imitate—looked more intentional than accidental.

I looked at myself in the narrow mirror on the back of my dorm room door.

I was tall—nearly eye level with most of the boys in my program, which had always made me feel either conspicuous or useful, depending on the situation. My mother said I had my grandmother’s height and my father’s stubbornness, and that both would serve me well. I’d spent most of my life believing her about the stubbornness and learning to accept her words about the height.

I was not, I told myself firmly, changing clothes and brushing my hair because of Wyatt Aldridge.

I picked up my bag and went to meet him anyway.

We’d been doing this for three months. The coffees, the walks, the library’s silences. The first kiss in the October rain and the careful, unhurried way things had moved since then—neither of us rushing, neither of us naming it beyond what it was in the moment, both of us apparently content to let it be exactly what it was and to trust that was enough.

It was enough. That was the thing I kept coming back to, in the small hours when I was honest with myself. It was more than enough. It was more than I’d let myself have in a long time and more than I’d expected to find here, in a city I’d come to specifically to be alone with my plan and my purpose and the clean, forward momentum of becoming someone no one could overlook.

Wyatt Aldridge had not been in the plan.

He was very much part of the plan now, which was its own category of terrifying that I’d mostly stopped trying to manage and had started simply living with.