A Billionaire's Rebellion

Chapter Two

The gymnasium had been decorated within an inch of its life. Cheap fairy lights strung in uneven loops across the rafters, a fog machine humming out more smoke than the room could hold, music thudding loud enough that Ellie felt it in her sternum before she heard it. Jenna had dragged her there by the wrist, insisting that one first-week party wasn't going to ruin her GPA, and Ellie was allowed, occasionally, to be nineteen. Ellie had gone along mostly to avoid an argument, already doing the math in her head on how soon she could slip out without Jenna noticing.

She was standing near the drinks table, with a cup of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks mixed together in her hand, when she heard her name over the noise. "Ellie, who leaves the exact change." She turned. Aiden, cup in his own hand, hair damp at the edges from the heat of bodies moving somewhere behind him, a strand of one of the fairy lights briefly caught gold in it. Something in her chest did something small and unhelpful at the sight of him, a flicker of recognition that felt bigger than it had any right to for a boy she'd spoken to exactly once. She told herself it was just the noise, the fog machine, the sugar in her cup that made her overwhelmed. "Aiden, who over tips baristas," she said, glad her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Touché."

He nodded toward a quieter corner near the bleachers, away from the speakers, the gesture easy, unhurried, like he had nowhere he'd rather be than exactly here. "Rescue mission? You look like someone doing math in her head at a party. Tell me you don't want to be here." "I was doing math in my head at a party– and I really do not want to be here." "I figured."

They found the lowest bleacher, far enough from the speakers that conversation didn't have to be shouted, close enough that the party still pulsed around them like something happening to other people. Ellie told herself, sitting down, that this was nothing but a boy being friendly, a quiet corner being quieter than the rest of the room, nothing worth the small nervous flutter she was doing her best to ignore.

What she didn't know, and wouldn't have let herself believe if she had, was that Aiden had clocked her the second she walked in. He'd been mid-conversation with a group of guys from his floor when she came through the gym doors with Jenna, and something in him had gone briefly, involuntarily quiet. Not because she'd dressed up– she hadn't, just jeans and a soft-looking sweater that had clearly been chosen for comfort over impression but because of the way she'd stood in the doorway for a second too long, scanning the room like she was calculating an exit before she'd even entered. He recognized that. He didn't examine too closely why he recognized it, or why it made something in his chest pull toward her instead of away.

He noticed things about her that he doubted anyone else in the room had bothered to notice. The faint line between her eyebrows that appeared when she was doing that math-in-her-head thing, like she was always, quietly, solving something. The way she'd angled her body slightly toward the exit even while she talked to him, some old habit of being ready to leave a room quickly, worn into her like a groove. Up close, under the fairy lights, he could see the smallest shadow of tiredness under her eyes, the kind that didn't come from one late night studying but from something longer, something that had been sitting on her for a while. He wanted, with an intensity that surprised him, to ask what it was. He didn't– not yet. Some things you didn't reach for in the second real conversation, no matter how much you wanted to.

Between them, unspoken, something had started that neither of them had a name for yet. Halfway through their conversation, with Ellie talking about a professor who'd assigned reading before the syllabus had even technically started, a first-year student Ellie vaguely recognized from her dorm hallway wandered up to the bleachers, clearly a little lost, clutching a plastic cup like it was the only solid thing in the room. He asked Aiden something about where the bathrooms were, stammering slightly, the particular awkwardness of someone who didn't yet know anyone at the party and had worked up the nerve to ask a stranger. Ellie expected Aiden to answer quickly and turn back to her– most people would have. Instead, he stood, pointed the kid toward the right hallway with real patience, asked him if he'd come alone, made a small joke that got the kid to laugh and visibly loosen his shoulders, and only sat back down once the first-year student had wandered off looking considerably less lost than he'd arrived. He didn't make a thing of it.

He didn't glance back at Ellie to see if she'd noticed the way some people performed kindness for an audience. He just did it, the same unhurried ease he brought to everything, like helping a stranger find a bathroom cost him nothing at all to give. Ellie noticed anyway. She filed it away somewhere she didn't examine too closely, the same place she'd filed the five-dollar tip and the way he'd remembered her from across a coffee shop. Later, she'd notice it again– the way he thanked the girl handing out cups at the drinks table by name, though he'd clearly only just learned it, the way he made room without being asked for a group of quieter first-year students hovering at the edge of a circle that hadn't thought to include them. It wasn't a performance. Performance had an audience in mind– this didn't seem to know it was being watched at all. She told herself it didn't mean anything specific. Plenty of people were nice. It didn't have to be significant that he was nice to someone who had nothing to offer him, no reason to be remembered, no way of paying it back.

They talked for two hours on that bleacher, the party thudding on without them, and Ellie found herself telling him things she hadn't planned on telling anyone– about growing up on the east side of Dayton, about her mother, the way she'd trained herself to say it, so people's faces wouldn't do that careful, pitying thing. He listened like her words actually mattered enough to sit with, not fix, not rush past. Nobody had listened to her like that for longer than she wanted to admit. He told her, in turn, about Wharton and Yale and dinner parties in Boston his mother wanted for him, and about choosing Dayton instead, deliberately, defiantly, because he liked a city that didn't perform for anyone. "She still hasn't forgiven me," he said, turning his cup between his palms, something rawer slipping under the ease in his voice for just a second. "She calls it a phase."

"Is it?" "No." He said it simply, the way Ellie herself said hard things. "It's just– I'm doing this for me." She understood that more than he probably realized. Somewhere in the two hours, without either of them deciding to, the space between them on the bleacher had closed, just slightly, just enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm without either of them acknowledging it. Ellie noticed. She chose not to think about what noticing meant. It was easier, safer, to call it nothing but a nice conversation with a nice boy at a party she hadn't wanted to come to, than to sit with the alternative, which felt like standing too close to an edge she wasn't ready to look over. They didn't exchange numbers, not exactly. He simply said, "I'll find you," with the quiet confidence of a man who'd never had to chase anything in his life. Ellie laughed it off out loud. In her head, she was a lot less sure she wanted him to be wrong.

Walking back to her dorm under the sodium-orange streetlights, the party noise fading behind her, she told herself, several times, that nothing about tonight had been anything. That the warmth still sitting in her chest was just the sugar from the drink, or the relief of a good conversation after a hard week, or nothing at all worth naming. She didn't quite believe herself. Somewhere between the gym and Cooper Hall, she caught herself smiling at nothing, at the memory of his laugh or the warmth of his arm inches from hers, and made herself stop, made her face go neutral again like she could undo the feeling just by refusing to wear it. It didn't work, not entirely. She let herself not believe it, just for the length of the walk home, before she put it away and told herself she'd deal with it– whatever it was, some other day, when she had the room in her life to deal with anything at all.