Between Us

Chapter 8 — The Hoodie

It started with a hoodie.

Which sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds ridiculous. But that's genuinely how it started and I refuse to pretend otherwise because I've committed to being honest with myself about this whole situation even when honesty is deeply inconvenient.

It was a Tuesday. We'd been fake dating for almost three weeks at that point and things had settled into a rhythm that felt dangerously close to normal. Morning walks to BIO 215. Library sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lunch twice a week. The occasional text about nothing in particular.

Tuesday was a library day.

I showed up in a light top because I'd checked the weather that morning like a responsible person and it had said 29 degrees and sunny. What it had not said was that the library's air conditioning was apparently set to Antarctic temperatures and had been since sometime last week.

I lasted forty minutes before my teeth started chattering.

I was trying very hard not to show it because Zane was sitting across from me and I had a personal policy about not showing weakness in front of people I was trying to remain emotionally detached from.

It was not working.

"You're cold," he said, without looking up from his laptop.

"I'm fine."

"You've reread the same page four times."

"I'm processing."

"Your lips are turning blue."

"That's my natural colour."

He looked up.

I looked back at him with as much dignity as a visibly freezing person can manage, which is not very much.

He said nothing. Just reached into his bag, pulled out a dark grey hoodie, and placed it on the table between us.

I stared at it.

"I'm not cold," I said.

"Okay."

"I don't need that."

"Okay."

"I'm perfectly—" a shiver ran through me at that exact moment, because my body has absolutely no respect for my arguments, "—fine."

He went back to his laptop.

I looked at the hoodie.

I looked at him.

I picked up the hoodie and put it on.

It was warm and it smelled like something clean and expensive and I immediately felt about forty percent better and about sixty percent worse for entirely different reasons.

"Thank you," I said, very quietly.

"Mm," he said, which wasn't even a word but somehow communicated everything.

I forgot to give it back.

That's the truth — I genuinely forgot. I walked out of the library still wearing it and only realized when I got back to my room and Denise looked at me with the expression of someone who has just received information they've been waiting for.

"Is that his?" she said.

"It was cold in the library."

"Is that HIS?"

"It was an act of basic human decency—"

"AVA—" she started, and I pointed at her.

"Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything!"

"You were going to say everything."

She pressed her lips together. Sat back. Looked at me with barely contained energy.

"It's fake," I said. "The whole thing is fake. You know this."

"The hoodie doesn't look fake."

I took the hoodie off. Put it on my desk. Went to get my toiletries for the shower.

When I came back Denise was sitting next to it on the desk, not touching it, just existing near it with a meaningful expression.

"Goodnight Denise," I said.

"Goodnight Ava," she said sweetly.

I went to bed.

I did not sleep particularly well.

I meant to return it the next morning. I had it folded neatly in my bag and everything — full intention, full commitment.

Except when I saw Zane at the bottom of the stairs before BIO 215 he took one look at my bag and said "keep it, I have others" and then just kept walking like he hadn't said anything significant at all.

I stood there for a second.

Then I followed him.

"You can't just say things like that," I said, falling into step beside him.

"Like what?"

"Like — keep it. Casually."

"It's a hoodie."

"It's not about the hoodie."

He glanced at me sideways. "What's it about?"

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

Because the honest answer was that it was about the fact that he'd noticed I was cold before I admitted it, and he'd had a solution ready, and he'd offered it without making it a big deal, and nobody had done something that quietly considerate for me in a very long time and I didn't know what to do with it.

"Nothing," I said. "Forget it."

He didn't push. He never pushed.

That was somehow the worst part.

Keira saw me wearing it on Thursday.

I hadn't planned to wear it again — I really hadn't. But it was cold again and it was the first thing my hand landed on in the dark at 6am and I told myself it was practical and not at all a sign of anything.

She fell into step beside me between lectures, appearing from nowhere the way she always did, perfectly put together at 9am like some kind of impossibly organised human being.

Her eyes went straight to the hoodie. I saw it happen.

"Nice hoodie," she said pleasantly.

"Thanks."

"Is that—" she tilted her head, "—Zane's?"

"Yes," I said simply.

A beat.

Something moved across her face — quick and carefully controlled. She smiled.

"He must really like you," she said.

"He does," I said.

And the strange thing — the thing I couldn't shake for the rest of the day — was that when I said it, it didn't feel like a line.

It felt like something I was starting to believe.