Wuthering Hearts

Chapter Two: Wrong Place, Right Timing

Wednesday was Serena Voss's favourite day of the week.

Not for any romantic reason. Not because anything particularly good happened on Wednesdays. Simply because Wednesday sat exactly in the middle of the week like a deep breath — far enough from Monday to have survived it, far enough from Friday to not yet be disappointing. It asked nothing of her. It just existed.

She had a system for Wednesdays.

Come home. Drop the bag by the door. Change into something that had no social obligations attached to it. Make tea. Read. Exist horizontally on the couch for as long as the evening allowed.

She was on page forty of her book — a worn paperback she'd carried across four countries — legs draped over the armrest, tea going slightly cold on the coffee table, when her phone lit up.

She ignored it.

It lit up again.

Then again. Then four times in fast succession, the buzz of it rattling slightly against the table like an impatient knock.

She picked it up.

Lily Cross added you to: AP ENG — WESTBROOK 🎀📚

Serena stared at this for a moment.

Then the notifications started.

Forty-seven messages in the span of three minutes. She scrolled up with the energy of someone reading a damage report. There were GIFs. There were at least two arguments about the assigned reading that had somehow devolved into a debate about pineapple on pizza. Someone named @dylanjames97 had sent a voice note that no one had acknowledged.

Then, cutting through the noise like a calm hand parting a curtain:

@lily.cross: guys!! our new classmate Serena is in this group now, say hi!! she's super cool I promise 🥺✨

Serena watched the "hi Serena!!" messages accumulate with the detached patience of someone watching weather roll in.

Then: @lily.cross: Serena introduce yourself!! tell them something fun about you!!

Serena set the phone face-down on her stomach.

She picked it back up.

She typed: Hi.

She put the phone face-down again, got up, put on her shoes, picked up her keys and her bag, and went to the grocery store.

Some things were not worth the energy they cost. The grocery store, at least, was transactional. You went in. You got what you needed. You left. Nobody asked you to introduce yourself.

The Westbrook Whole Foods on Meridian Street was the kind of grocery store that took itself seriously. Wide aisles. Soft lighting engineered to make vegetables look aspirational. The kind of background music that made you feel like you were making thoughtful life choices just by being there.

Serena did not take grocery stores seriously. She took a basket, consulted the small list in her head, and moved through the aisles with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd been grocery shopping alone since she was old enough to be trusted with a card.

She was in the homeware aisle — she needed a new mug, her favourite had cracked during the move and she'd been using a hotel freebie for two weeks which was unacceptable — when she heard him before she saw him.

Not Zavier. The other one.

Marcus Reid was standing in front of a display of dinner sets with the intense, slightly panicked focus of a man making a decision above his pay grade. He had a basket in one hand and was holding up two plates in the other, rotating them like he was looking for answers written on the back.

"The white one," Serena said, because she was standing directly behind him and it seemed faster than waiting for him to arrive there himself.

Marcus spun around. Blinked. Processed.

"Westbrook. English class. New girl," he said, pointing.

"Serena," she said.

"Marcus." He looked back at the plates. "Why the white one?"

"It goes with everything. The other one has a pattern that will feel charming for three weeks and then just look busy."

He looked at the patterned plate. Looked at the white one. Put the patterned one back with the decisive energy of a man freed from a decision.

"I'm getting them for my girlfriend," he said, in a tone that suggested he wanted this noted in the record. "Three months. She mentioned she liked these ones."

Serena glanced at the price tag and then back at Marcus with an expression of mild, genuine curiosity. "She mentioned a specific dinner set at three months?"

"She didn't mention this specific one. She mentioned she liked ceramic over porcelain. I extrapolated."

"That's either very thoughtful or a significant misread of the assignment."

"Which one?"

"I genuinely don't know you well enough to say."

Marcus laughed — a real one, caught off guard — and dropped the plates into his basket. He was about to say something else when his attention shifted to a point somewhere behind Serena's left shoulder, and his expression moved through several small calculations very quickly.

She turned around.

Zavier Lennox, outside of school, was somehow worse.

Not worse in a bad way. Worse in the way that things are when they're more real than you expected — when the version of something you'd mentally filed away turns out to have dimensions you hadn't accounted for.

At school he wore the uniform like everyone else, which flattened things into a level playing field, which was at least fair. Here, in a grey long-sleeve pushed to his elbows and dark trousers with the kind of fit that suggested they were not off the rack, he looked like something that had been designed with quiet, deliberate intention.

He was strictly handsome — and that word, strictly, was the only one that applied, because it wasn't about any individual feature so much as the whole unreasonable combination of them. Strong jaw, dark eyes set with a kind of focus that made you feel, when they were aimed at you, like you were the only legible thing in the room. The kind of handsome that didn't announce itself, which somehow made it worse. Broad shoulders that moved with the relaxed ease of someone who'd grown into his height and made a quiet agreement with it. His hair was slightly different today — less intentional, more lived-in, which was objectively not an improvement in any logical sense and yet managed to be.

He had a basket too. He was not, as far as she could tell, shopping for ceramic dinner sets for anyone.

He clocked her in the same moment she turned, and something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly. More like the satisfaction of a puzzle piece you hadn't been looking for landing in front of you anyway.

"Voss," he said.

"Lennox," she said.

"You shop here?"

"I'm holding a basket, so yes, that would appear to be the situation."

"Our families have an account here," Marcus offered, helpfully and unnecessarily.

Serena glanced at him. "I didn't ask."

"I know. I'm volunteering information. It's a gift I have."

Zavier stepped further into the aisle, unhurried, like he moved through spaces the way he moved through school — like the architecture had been arranged to accommodate him and he was simply honoring that arrangement. He glanced at her basket: the mug, a lemon, a small jar of honey, two pears, a packet of pasta, a bar of good dark chocolate, and a paperback she'd picked up from the rack near the entrance because the cover had interested her.

He didn't comment on the contents. Most people would have.

"You left the group chat," he said instead.

She blinked. "How do you know that?"

"Lily sent approximately seven messages about it."

"I didn't leave. I replied."

"'Hi' is not an introduction."

"It's the beginning of every introduction in human history," she said. "I kept it efficient."

He looked at her for a moment with those dark eyes that didn't wander — that stayed exactly where they'd landed, which was on her face, which she found more unsettling than she would have preferred to admit.

"You don't like group chats," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I don't like being summoned to perform," she said. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"One is communication. The other is theatre." She shifted her basket to her other hand. "I don't do well with theatre."

"You do fine with an audience," he said. "You just don't want one."

She looked at him steadily. "That's a more accurate read than I expected from a Tuesday."

"It's Wednesday."

"From any day."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile — the preface to one.

Marcus had, somewhere in the middle of this exchange, drifted toward the rings display at the end of the aisle — small decorative ones, the kind that come in sets and sit in a bowl on a kitchen counter — and was now holding one up to the light with the solemn focus of a jeweller.

Serena looked at him. Looked at the ring. Looked at Marcus.

"He's been together with his girlfriend for three months," she said to Zavier, in a tone that required no elaboration.

"I know."

"He's buying a dinner set, rings, and I assume there's more."

Zavier glanced at Marcus with the fond, tired expression of someone who had been watching this behavior for years and had made his peace with it. "There's a throw blanket in the car. And a candle."

Serena looked at the ring in Marcus's hand. It caught the light agreeably. It was, objectively, a waste of money at three months, three weeks, or any interval before a formal agreement had been established.

"That's—"

"Don't," Zavier said.

She looked at him.

"He knows," Zavier said simply. "He just doesn't care. It makes him happy. And she will actually love it." He said this without performance, without the self-aware edge he usually carried — just stating the thing. "Some people are like that. The feeling comes first and they work backwards."

Serena looked at Marcus, who had now placed the ring in his basket and moved on to examining a set of small glass bowls with equal devotion.

"It seems impractical," she said.

"Most things that are worth anything are."

She was quiet for a moment. He let the quiet be a quiet, which she noted — because most people filled it, and he'd already proven once that he didn't have to. He had the particular stillness of someone who'd learned early that presence was more powerful than noise, and leaned into it with the ease of someone who'd been doing it a long time.

"Is that something you believe," she asked, "or something that sounds good?"

He considered it. Actually considered it — she could see the slight shift, the gears of something more honest moving behind the composure.

"Both," he said. "Sometimes things start as things that sound good and then you live with them long enough that they become true."

She looked at him for a long moment. "That's either genuinely wise or you're testing material on me."

"Can't it be both?"

"You say that a lot."

"Only when it's accurate."

She found her mug two sections over — plain white, good weight, a handle that fit properly, which was all she required of a mug. She held it up. Put it in her basket. Turned to find Zavier had followed, not intrusively, just — in the same direction, at the same casual pace, like he was going this way anyway and would not be making a production out of it.

"You followed me to the mug section," she said.

"I need coffee filters."

She looked at the shelf. Coffee filters were, in fact, on it.

"Convenient," she said.

"Remarkably."

She started toward the checkout. He fell into step beside her with that unhurried ease of his, and she was aware — in the specific, inconvenient way she was aware of most things she'd prefer not to be aware of — that walking next to Zavier Lennox in a grocery store on a Wednesday evening felt different from sitting next to him in a classroom.

Less structured. More actual.

More like something that could become a pattern if she wasn't paying attention.

She was always paying attention.

"Your family has an account here," she said.

"My father likes to support local business," Zavier said, which landed with the particular dryness of a sentence that contained more information than it was giving away. His father was, she'd gathered from the noise at school, the kind of man for whom "supporting local business" meant spending the kind of money that kept local businesses in business. The Lennox name was attached to three buildings in the city center and at least one charitable foundation she'd seen referenced in a local paper.

"Must be strange," she said.

"What?"

"Having a name that precedes you everywhere." She placed her basket on the checkout counter. "Even grocery stores."

He set his down beside hers. For a moment he didn't say anything, and she got the sense that she'd said the true thing again — the one that landed somewhere softer than the surface.

"Sometimes," he said. "You get used to it."

"Do you?"

He looked at her sideways. Quiet again. Honest in the way he'd been honest about Marcus — not performed, just — present.

"No," he said. "Not really."

She paid for her things. He paid for his. Marcus materialized behind them with a basket so full it was bending slightly at the sides, looking content in the way of a person who had completed a mission they'd assigned themselves with love.

Outside, the evening had cooled into the particular blue-grey of a Wednesday in October. Serena shifted her bag up her shoulder.

"See you Thursday," she said.

"AP English," he confirmed, like they were confirming coordinates.

She started walking. Got three steps, stopped, and turned back once — not because she'd forgotten anything.

Just to see.

He was watching her go, hands in his pockets, that not-quite-a-smile at the edge of his mouth. Not triumphant. Not the performance she'd catalogued and dismissed in the first week.

Just — there. Actually there.

She turned back around and kept walking.

On her phone, the group chat had forty-three new messages.

She did not open it.