By the time I made it to my first class the next morning, my phone had three texts from Harlow, all variations of ‘did you hear’ and ‘ok but did you actually hear’ and finally just a string of eye emojis with no other context.
‘Hear what,’ I texted back.
‘MICAH TOLD EVERYONE. Rhys didn't deny the soft thing. Apparently he just stood there and let it happen. The whole team house is talking about it.’
I stared at that for a solid minute before setting my phone face-down on the desk, which had become something of a signature move for me at this point.
He hadn't denied it. I'd been there. I'd heard the silence myself, watched it stretch out a beat too long to be nothing, and I still didn't fully know what to do with it. Silence wasn't a yes. But it wasn't the automatic ‘it's not like that’
