CH.10 - After Last Period
1306 Words
Anna's POV
He's at the gym doors when the last bell goes, exactly where he said he'd be, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets like he's been there a while and intends to pretend he hasn't.
I could almost feel my cheeks slightly turning pink as my eyes stayed fixated on him not sticking to any individual detail... just stupidly ogling him.
"You came," I say.
"You'd have done it without me and got caught." He pushes off the wall. "This is easier."
We don't talk about the hallway. Neither of us mentions the sleeve, the jolt, the way he said don't like it hurt. It sits between us the whole way down the empty corridor toward the admin wing, this thing we're both refusing to look at, and it's almost worse than if we'd said it out loud. I'm hyperaware of the space between his arm and mine. I keep it exactly the same the whole walk, careful, like the six inches of air is load-bearing.
The records room is past the main office, down a short hall that's supposed to be staff-only, behind a door with a lock that's older than both of us. Evan looks at it for about two seconds.
"Keep watch," he says.
"How are you going to—"
The lock clicks. He does something quick with his hands that I don't quite catch and the door just opens, and he glances back at me with the ghost of that crooked smile.
"Barely a crime," he says. "Your words."
Inside it's all metal cabinets and the smell of old paper and dust, rows of files going back decades. We find the transfer records fast, and my paperwork's right where it should be, the whole file the office swore was lost, and something hot and tired rises up in me looking at it, because this is the thing that's been holding up my scholarship for three weeks, the thing that could have cost me everything, and it was sitting in a drawer the whole time. It was never lost. Someone just couldn't be bothered to look for the fish girl.
"Hey." Evan's watching me. "You okay?"
"Fine." I clear my throat and start copying down what I need. "It's just been a whole thing. The scholarship's the only reason I'm here. My family can't—" I stop. I don't know why I'm telling him this. "It matters. That's all. And they let it sit in a drawer."
He doesn't say anything for a moment. When I glance up he's looking at me with an expression I can't read, something quiet and a little raw.
"People do that," he says. "Decide you're not worth the trouble of looking. Then you spend your whole life proving them wrong and it never quite sticks."
It's such an exact description of my entire life that I forget to breathe for a second. He says it like he knows it from the inside. Like it's his life too.
"Yeah," I say. "That."
We look at each other across the file drawer, and the pull in my chest goes tight, and for a second I think about closing the distance, about testing whether the hallway was a fluke, about putting my hand on him just to see. He sees me think it. I watch him see it. And he steps back, careful, breaking it, the way he did this morning.
"Get what you need," he says, rougher. "We shouldn't be in here long."
I get what I need. We slip out, he locks it behind us somehow, and we're back in the empty corridor with the whole thing done and no more reason to be near each other, and I feel the loss of the reason like a physical thing.
"So," I say. "We're square."
"We're square."
"You can go back to being someone I don't think about."
"That's the idea."
Neither of us moves.
"Anna."
"Don't do the thing," I say. "The thing where you warn me off. I've had it from Elsie all day. I don't need the sequel."
"You should listen to Elsie."
"I never listen to anyone. It's a documented flaw." I hitch my bag up my shoulder. "For what it's worth. Thank you. For this. For the equipment room. For not being remotely what everyone says you are."
Something flickers across his face, there and gone. "You don't know what I am."
"That's the second time you've said that." I hold his eyes. "You keep saying it like it's a warning. Like there's a real answer and you're daring me to go find it."
"I'm telling you to leave it alone."
"And I'm telling you I've never once left anything alone in my life."
We stand there. The pull between us is so strong it's almost a sound, and I know, I know, that if I reached out right now and touched him, it would happen again, the whole world dropping away, and I want to so badly my hand actually twitches at my side.
Then a voice breaks it.
"Anna?"
Liam. Coming down the hall with his gym bag, still damp from practice, and his face does a complicated thing when he clocks who I'm standing with. Confusion, then hurt, then something harder, all in about a second.
"Hey," he says, to me, pointedly not to Evan. "I've been looking for you. You said you'd let me know about Saturday."
Saturday. The thing he asked me about days ago, the not-quite-a-date I said I'd think about, before the party, before the fight, before a boy grabbed my whole world by the sleeve and yanked it sideways.
I feel Evan go still beside me. Not the dangerous still. A different kind. The kind where a person is very carefully not reacting to something.
"Saturday," I say. "Right. Yeah. That works."
I don't even decide to say it. It comes out half because Liam's standing there looking at me with those hopeful eyes, and half, if I'm honest, because Evan is standing next to me radiating that careful nothing, and some petty scared part of me wants to see if I can make the nothing crack.
It cracks.
It's tiny. Anyone else would miss it. But I've spent all day learning his face, and I see it, the flat blankness going a shade flatter, his jaw setting, something shuttering behind his eyes. He looks at Liam. He looks at me. And whatever was pulling tight between us a second ago, he cuts it clean, steps back into himself, puts the mask on so completely it's like the last hour didn't happen.
"I'll leave you to it," he says, easy, cold, the playboy voice, the one from the rumors. "Enjoy Saturday."
He walks off before I can say anything. Doesn't look back. And Liam's talking, sweet and eager, about where we'll go and what we'll do, and I'm nodding, and the whole time I'm watching Evan's back disappear down the corridor and feeling the pull in my chest strain after him like a line about to snap, and hating myself a little, because I did that on purpose and I don't even know why.
"Anna?" Liam's peering at me. "You good? You went somewhere."
"Yeah." I make myself smile at him, this kind boy who's never once made my world go quiet or sideways or strange, who is safe in every way Evan isn't. "Yeah. Saturday sounds great."
And it will be great. It'll be easy and sweet and normal, everything I keep telling myself I want.
I watch the empty end of the corridor where Evan isn't anymore, and the ache in my chest calls after him, and I already know, with a sinking certainty, that I'm going to spend the whole of Saturday thinking about someone else.
- Writer
