WRENLEY

By six in the morning my whole life is in three trash bags on the curb.

I packed them by phone light so I wouldn't have to turn on a lamp I no longer pay for.

The first bag is clothes. The second is the swim gear, which is the only thing in any of the bags worth more than the bags. The third is everything else, which turns out to be almost nothing; some books, a mug, a charger, the dead plant I kept meaning to water and apparently could not bring myself to leave.

I don't know why I packed the plant. It's dead. I'm arguably not doing much better, so maybe that's why but I'm sitting on the cold concrete next to it like we're both waiting for a bus that isn't coming.

I have nowhere to go. That's the part I keep arriving at no matter which way I run the problem. There's also no one to call unless I want several hours of concern, disappointment, and life advice I didn't ask for.

But that would mean giving up my dreams to go live the life my parents planned and I am not calling Tess to say can I sleep on your floor and then answer the forty soft questions that follow.

I'm not about to do that because of how much effort I've put into staying here. I need to get a job and I need it fast.

The laundromat behind me isn't open yet. The street's empty except for a delivery truck two blocks down.

So I make the mistake of thinking about my life for thirty seconds and how spectacularly a person can ruin their own morning when they've cut themselves off from everyone who ever knew their real name.

Then a car slows down. And stops. A figure gets out of the car but because he's a bit fat from where I'm sitting, I don't recognise him until he comes closer

And it's him, of course it's him because apparently humiliation wasn't finished with me yet.

Aurel is in practice clothes, his hair is a mess, and he looks at me, then at the three trash bags, and then at the dead plant, but he doesn't say anything stupid, which is somehow the worst part. I could've handled something stupid.

"Hey," he says. “Why are you out here by this time?”

"It's because I'm a creep. I love watching people go about their day while I sit here homeless. "

He looks at the bags again. "How long have you been out here?"

""Long enough to regret being born. Why?” I sigh when I see the frown on his face. “I'm actually waiting for someone." It's the fastest lie I have although it's a bad one.

"Okay." He doesn't believe me but doesn't push either. He just goes back to his car, puts it in park mode, which I didn't tell him to do, and gets out. "Then you can wait for them at my place, because it's freezing and you've got swim gear sitting in a wet gutter."

Wonderful. My options were freezing to death or accepting help.

"I'm fine,” I said and my teeth decided that right now was the best time to chatter. Seeing that it was no use lying, I said “I'm not going to your place."

"We have a guest room downstairs, with its own everything. That way, nobody'll bother you." He says it easy, like it's already decided, like he's done this a hundred times, when I happen to know he has never once done this. "Look, I need my tutor not to have hypothermia,” he runs his hands through his hair. “I know it's a selfish thing but my grade depends on you not dying."

"That's the worst manipulation attempt I've ever heard.” I said between gritted teeth.

"It's working though." He's already crouching to grab the first bag. "You're still talking to me instead of telling me to leave."

He's actually right. I mean, I should tell him to leave. The whole reason I survive up here is that I don't let people close enough to notice things that would trigger their suspicions. Like for example my hair and how it takes hours to dry or the fact that I don't get sick at all or the fact that my body's temperature is actually slightly higher than that of a normal human being.

A guest room downstairs from a hockey player is kinda like the exact opposite of keeping my head down. But because it's forty degrees at six in the morning and the alternative is the bus that isn't coming, I spend thirty seconds trying to think of a better option.

Unfortunately, reality refuses to provide one.

"The gear bag's heavy," I say. "Don't drop it."

He grins like I've handed him something, and pops the trunk.

The moment I saw the house, my face gave me away by how unimpressed I looked. I've seen way better and more beautiful buildings.

Walking from one end of the house to the other took several minutes, and there were so many rooms I couldn't keep count. Nothing rattled as every door swung silently.

The carpets were so thick my feets vanished into them. Sounds floated upward and seemed to disappear before returning as faint echoes.

The kitchen is bigger than my entire old apartment, which is a crime because no one should have this much hallway. As he showed me around the house, I caught sight of a couch that two people could lie down on and not touch.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he says once the tour is over. “So, what do you think?”

“How can you even afford a place like this anyway?” I asked fidgeting with my sweatpants.

“Well, that's the perks of being an only child. If my parents had more children, we would be classified as middle class but since it's just me, there's literally no one else to spend it on but me.”

He grins like someone who's never had to check a bank account before buying groceries.

“If you need anything, my room's upstairs by the left. Get some sleep, you look like you need it.”

And with that, he left me.

I stare at the number again, waiting for it to become a worse idea than my current situation.

“No,” I delete the number before taking a deep breath. “I can do this,” I took another one. “I just need to get my shit together.”

Then I hear screaming upstairs, which is oddly reassuring. Finally, people are having a worse morning than me.

“This isn't so bad,” I whispered when I realised just how big of a mess I'm in before laying down. I meant to rest for an hour. Apparently I blacked out like an elderly Victorian woman waking up when the sky had gone orange with no idea where I was, and for one half-second I forgot all of it.

When I get up, my stomach growls as a reminder that I haven't had anything to eat in twenty four hours. I follow the smell of food which leads me to the shared kitchen. The designers of this house made just one parlour and kitchen so its occupants have to share.

The moment I walk into the kitchen, I stop dead in my tracks.

"Hey," the guy I've been crushing on says. "Swim team, right? From the party." He tilts his head. "You're the new roommate?"

I can't speak. I genuinely cannot make a word out, because my brain is doing the math and the math is insane: the guy I made a deal to win lives across the hall from the boy I made the deal with.

And from the doorway behind me, where he's just come down the stairs and stopped, I feel more than seeing Aurel go still.

He's standing there with a towel over his shoulder, looking at my face; at whatever my face is doing right now, which I can't control and would give anything to take back.

I watched him put it together and understood exactly who I meant. Exactly who he agreed to help me win. Exactly who lives twelve feet from the room he just carried my bags into.

He doesn't say anything, that's how I know it's bad.

WRENLEY

The campus gym at four in the afternoon is the probably the worst possible place to be having a crisis about Aurel Castell's arms, but here I am doing just that.

The place is loud; from the clanking of the metal plates, somebody's bad playlist leaking out of the corner speaker, two guys near the dumbbells arguing about a game, a cluster of girls by the mats who are very obviously here to watch the hockey team train and not to work out.

The whole room smells like testosterone, sweat and someone's too-strong body spray. And in the middle of it, at the rack against the mirrors, is Aurel, pushing a loaded bar up over his chest in a cutoff shirt with his hair pulled back, and I am sitting at a machine I'm supposed to be using, pretending to scroll my phone, occasionally stealing glances at the way his biceps bulges like it's my job.

“Pull yourself together,” I coaxed myself because I hate this. I came here to train and mind my business, instead I'm thinking about the fact that this morning that same shirtless idiot was eating eggs out of a pan twelve feet from the man I'm scheming to date, in a house where I now sleep, in an arrangement so stupid it loops back around to feeling like a trap.

I'm supposed to be focused on Jerry, the one who lives across the hall, who I made an entire deal to win, who is the entire reason I'm tangled up with the boy currently bench-pressing my concentration into dust.

I drag my eyes back to my phone. After the eviction, I decided to pursue a skill I long abandoned because I felt I had no need for.

Three students have texted about alterations, one for her date night dress, the order is a formal wear that needs its last fitting by Friday.

The pay isn't glamorous but I'm determined to move out of his house as soon as I possibly can.

My mind is still on this when his shadow falls over me, and I feel the heat radiating off of him before he speaks.

"You're doing it wrong," Aurel says.

"What do you mean? I'm just sitting down. There's no wrong way to sit."

"I meant before. The pull-down thing." He drops onto the bench across from me, towel around his neck, insufferably pleased. "You were yanking the bar with your arms. You're going to hurt your shoulders, and then who's going to keep me from failing out?"

"My shoulders are fine." I involuntarily touch them.

"The way you exercise is a crime against the human body."

"Uh, excuse you?! I'm perfectly fine, okay?"

"Whatever you say," he has that stupid grin on his face. The one that apparently charms the girls on campus. "Ok Red, let me show you before you injure yourself and tank my GPA in the process."

I frown at the name but that only fuels him the more. I should stop letting the name get to me or else, he's never going to stop calling me that ridiculous name.

"Fine, whatever,” I roll my eyes. “Two minutes."

That's my first mistake. Because showing me means he stands behind me at the machine until our bodies touch, and I can painfully feel every muscle outline on his body.

One of his hands wraps around my elbow and the other flattens against my back, even as his voice drops into this low murmur right against my ear, under the noise of the room.

"Pull from here, not your arms. Drive the elbows down before slowly coming back up." His palm presses flat between my shoulder blades. "There. Feel the difference?"

What I feel is every nerve in my spine come alive, and a heat climbing my neck that for once has nothing to do with what I am. I pull the bar down harder than I need to, just to give the wanting in my chest somewhere to go.

Over by the mats, one of the watching girls says something to another, before they both look at us, and I hear the word roommate travel.

"Got it," I say. "Time's up."

"A little thank you doesn't kill you know" He still hasn't moved his hand. We're both looking at the mirror, at the two of us framed in it, and for one stupid second the gym goes quiet.

"Are you serious right now?"

The voice cuts the whole room in half.

Elise is in the doorway in her warm-ups, gym bag sliding off her shoulder, her face white and tight. Heads immediately turn toward her, before turning toward us like they are remote controlled.

Aurel's hand drops off my back in a flash like the machine went hot. Too late. She saw it. Forty people saw it.

"Elise…" he starts.

"Don't you dare," She crosses the floor fast and the room shifts to watch, phones forgotten in laps, the dumbbell argument going silent.

She stops right in front of me close enough that I can see her pulse jumping in her throat, and her voice comes out low and shaking. "I warned you, didn't I? I told you to stay away from him. And here you are with his hands all over you in front of everyone with absolutely no shame at all. Like the whole campus doesn't already know you moved into his house."

Somewhere behind me a guy goes "ohhh," soft, the sound of someone settling in to watch a fight.

"I'm tutoring him," I say, flat. "And I needed a place to live."

"Right. Tutoring." Her laugh is ugly. "The little charity case sleeps her way into the nice house and calls it studying."

"Ooh," goes the crowd, quieter, a few of them wincing, because that one was meant to draw blood.

Aurel steps forward, his whole body moving to put himself between us. For one second he's about to defend me, and some traitor part of me leans toward it before I can stop it.

Then he stops.

I watch it happen. I watch him look at Elise's white face and her shaking hands, watch something flicker behind his eyes and the words die in his throat.

He pulls back. "Elise, please stop making a scene. Come outside, let's just talk."

So that's what he is. I should've seen it. Golden boy, everybody's favorite, and he folds like wet paper the second his girlfriend raises her voice. All that warmth and not one bone of spine underneath it.

I turn to Elise myself, since nobody else is going to, and I let my voice go cold and loud enough to reach the back of the room.

"I'll say this once. I don't want your boyfriend. I want to not be homeless, a problem you've clearly never had, so I won't expect you to follow it." A couple of phones tilt up now; I don't care. "You want to call me a charity case? At least I earn what I've got instead of being handed it. And next time you threaten somebody, don't do it with your voice shaking in a room full of people. It just tells everyone you already know you lost."

"OHHH…" the crowd goes, openly now, somebody actually laughing, the burn landing in real time.

Elise's mouth opens but nothing comes out.

I pick up my water bottle and walk past both of them toward the door.

I'm almost out when Elise finds her voice again.

"Enjoy the house while it lasts," she growls. "You have no idea who you're dealing with. Give it time but I promise you, there won't be one person on this campus who would look at you without laughing once I'm done with you."

I don't turn around. I push out into the cold and let the door swing shut on all of it.

But my hands are shaking, and it's not from the cold. Underneath the anger, the very thing I've been trying to suppress lifts its head.

“If only you would just let me out once,” the voice in my head whispered. “I promise to make her go away.”

AUREL

Con Law is the one class I can't afford to fail, which is exactly why I haven't understood a word in forty minutes.

Professor Adler is up front saying something about commerce and clauses and a case from seventeen-eighty-something, while I'm staring at the same paragraph in my textbook I've been staring at since the bell, the words sliding off my brain like water off a windshield.

Wrenley would absolutely know what it means. She's someone that could explain it in two sentences and make me feel stupid for not getting it, which is somehow the only way it ever sticks.

But she isn't here. She's probably across campus pretending she didn't just verbally dismantle my girlfriend in front of twenty four people yesterday.

And speaking of my girlfriend.

Elise is in the seat beside me with her head on my chest, the way she likes to sit when there's an audience, her hand resting over my heart, sometimes circling it like she's claiming territory which she is.

Half the lecture hall watched a clip of yesterday on someone's phone before class started. I saw it going around, the angle from the mats, Wrenley's voice, and Elise knows they saw it, so now she's draped on me like a flag somebody's trying to plant back in the ground.

I let her. That's the part I can't explain to anyone.

I sit here with her head on my chest, her perfume in my throat and I let her, because the alternative is what happened the last time I tried to pull away, and I'm not… I can't do that again.

I can still hear her mom's voice on the phone at two in the morning. ‘Please, Aurel. Just don't upset her right now. You don't know what she's capable of when she's upset.’

The thing is, I know exactly what she's capable of because I've cleaned it up. I've sat in the ER waiting room at three in the morning with my hands shaking, telling myself it was my fault for saying the wrong thing.

So yesterday, when her hands were shaking in that gym and her face went that exact color of white I've learned to be afraid of, I froze.

I looked at Elise, who I was scared would do something to herself in the parking lot if I humiliated her in front of the whole school, and I chose the fire I knew over the girl I…

I don't finish that thought simply because I'm not allowed to finish that thought.

The look on Wrenly's face when I dragged Elise out of the gym is something I would never forget in a hurry.

Whatever she thought of me before yesterday, it's worse now, and the worst part is she's right to think it. From where she stood, I was just a coward who wouldn't defend her.

She doesn't know about the ER or the phone calls or the way you have to walk on egg shells around a person like Elise. She just knows I had one job and didn't do it.

I'd rather she think I'm a coward than know the truth. The truth is more embarrassing.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. There's only one person that would message me at a time like this. In fact, I've been expecting his call ever since the results were released.

Dad: Saw your midterm grades on the parent portal. We need to talk this weekend. You know what happens if you lose your eligibility. I didn't pay for four years of hockey so you could throw it away on a degree you're failing.

I read it twice. The thing in my chest that's been tight since I woke up pulls tighter.

I know what happens. He's used that threat so many times, I can practically recite it word for word.

The money stops, the tuition, the house, the whole life everyone thinks I have– gone, the second I stop being useful to him as a story he tells at dinner parties. My son the athlete. My son the future lawyer. He doesn't care which one I am as long as I'm a headline.

"Who's that?" Elise murmurs against my chest, not lifting her head.

"Nobody," I say but then she tries to look into my phone. "It's my dad."

"Oh, tell him I say hi." She smiles up at me, sweet, like yesterday didn't happen, like there isn't a clip of her shaking and shouting going around the whole school.

This is the other thing about Elise. She can rewrite a room in her own head by morning. In her version, she's the wronged girlfriend and Wrenley's the villain and I'm the prize, and she believes it so completely that sometimes I almost do too.

I put my phone away without answering my father.

Finn catches me in the hallway after, falling into step beside me like he's been waiting, which he probably has.

"So that was a fun thing that's all over campus," he says.

"Not you too man," I groan.

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just walking innocently. Next to my best friend, who let his girlfriend call his crush a homeless charity case in front of the entire athletics department and said nothing." He takes a bite of the protein bar he's always eating. "Real innocent walk."

"You don't know the situation, Finn."

"I know the situation better than anyone alive." He says it quietly, not joking anymore, and that's worse. Finn's known me since freshman year.

He's the one who drove me to the ER. Finn knows every reason I have for being careful with Elise, and he's looking at me right now like none of them are good enough anymore.

"I know exactly why you froze. And I'm telling you, as the one person who actually gets it, that reason is going to cost you something you can't get back if you keep using it as an excuse."

"It's not an excuse. It's real." I sigh. “You of all people know that.”

"Both things can be true." He stops walking which makes me stop too. "She's not your responsibility, man. She was never your responsibility. And that girl yesterday– the one who didn't need you to save her, who saved herself and walked out without looking back?" He shrugs, like it's obvious, like it's the simplest thing in the world. "You couldn't take your eyes off her the whole time. I watched you. So did Elise and everybody else."

I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say that isn't either a lie or a confession, and I'm not ready for either.

"Just think about it," Finn says, gentler now. "Before you lose more than your GPA."

He walks off toward the rink, leaving me standing in the hallway. Not long after, the bell rings but I don't move.

For the first time in two years, I let myself think the thought all the way to the end. I don't want this anymore and it scares me more than Elise ever has