Between Us

Chapter 10 — 2AM

I don't know why I picked up the phone.

It was 2am. I was half asleep. My phone buzzed on the nightstand and my hand moved before my brain fully engaged and suddenly I was lying in the dark with the phone pressed to my ear saying "hello?" in a voice that was mostly pillow.

"Did I wake you?"

Zane.

I processed this slowly. "It's 2am."

"I know. I'm sorry." A pause. "I'll call back—"

"No it's—" I sat up slowly, pushed my hair out of my face. "It's fine. What's wrong?"

A longer pause this time. Long enough that I pulled the phone away to check if the call had dropped.

"Nothing's wrong," he said finally. "I just — couldn't sleep."

I should have told him to call someone else.

That would have been the sensible thing. The detached thing. The thing a person who was successfully not developing feelings for their fake boyfriend would do.

Instead I pulled my blanket around my shoulders and settled back against my headboard and said "okay" like it was completely normal for Zane Carter to call me at 2am because he couldn't sleep.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked.

"My dad called today."

I didn't say anything. Just waited.

"He wants me to transfer," Zane said. "To a business school. Says science isn't practical, isn't going to get me where I need to be." A short exhale. "Same conversation we've had approximately forty times."

"What do you want?"

"That's the thing." His voice was quieter now, stripped of its usual ease. "I know what I want. I've always known. I just—" He stopped. "It's exhausting. Knowing what you want and having to justify it to someone who's already decided it's wrong."

I thought about my own mother — not the same situation, but the specific weight of feeling like someone else's expectations were sitting on your chest. "Yeah," I said softly. "It is."

"You get it."

"More than you'd think."

We talked for a long time after that.

Not always about serious things — somewhere around 3am we somehow ended up discussing the most overrated foods in existence which led to a genuinely passionate disagreement about banku that I maintain I was right about.

"You're wrong," he said.

"I'm objectively correct."

"There is nothing objective about your opinion on banku."

"I have reasoning—"

"Your reasoning is flawed."

"Excuse me my reasoning is extremely—"

"Ava." I could hear the smile in his voice. "You're wrong. Accept it."

"I will never accept it."

He laughed — a real one, low and warm and unhurried, the kind that meant he'd forgotten for a moment to be careful about how much he showed.

I stored that laugh somewhere I probably shouldn't have.

It was almost 4am when the conversation finally started winding down, both of us running out of words the way you do when it's late and you've said more than you planned to.

"You should sleep," I said.

"Probably." He didn't move to end the call. "Ava."

"Mm."

"Thank you. For picking up."

I looked at the dark ceiling of my room. Listened to the quiet of the campus outside. Thought about how three weeks ago this boy was just an inconvenience in a doorway and now he was calling me at 2am and I was picking up without hesitation and neither of us was pretending that was nothing.

"You can call again," I said. "If you can't sleep."

A beat of silence.

"Yeah?" he said quietly.

"Yeah," I said.

I hung up at 4:03am and lay in the dark for a long time.

Denise stirred from across the room. "Was that Zane?" she mumbled into her pillow.

"Go back to sleep Denise."

"It was wasn't it."

"Denise."

"I'm just saying—"

"Goodnight Denise."

She made a sound that was half laugh half sleep and went quiet.

I stared at the ceiling.

Outside the first birds were starting — that specific 4am sound of the world waking up before it's supposed to.

I thought about what he'd said. About knowing what you want and having to justify it to someone who'd already decided it was wrong.

I thought about the laugh I'd stored somewhere I shouldn't have.

I thought about the hoodie hanging on the back of my chair and the puddles and the almost moment at the gate and the fact that I'd told him he could call again without hesitating for even a second.

I thought about all of it very carefully and honestly.

And then I thought — oh no.

Oh no.