Broken First (Never Again)

Episode Eleven

The next morning came quietly, the way mornings tends to do after a day that refuses to leave your thoughts, after an encounter that refuse to leave your head. As Katherine lay on her back, staring at the ceiling of her small apartment, her phone resting on her chest, and she was thinking about Chris. Not the vague, half-formed kind of thinking that drifts in and out of sleep no not that type, this was deliberate. Specific, very direct. She was thinking about the way he walked into a room like he already owned whatever conversation was about to happen. She was thinking about that voice of his, even, unhurried, carrying just enough weight to make you want to hold on to every word. And then there was his face that quiet, effortless cuteness that he didn't seem to be aware of, which somehow made it worse. This wasn’t unusual it was bound to happened because Chris was the man, he was the guy every ladies wanted in college so for Katherine to start thinking this was I wasn’t surprise. To her it was a first-time experience but to those who really knew Chris it wasn’t. Chris can make any girl fall in love with him even on their first day. He can even make to love to any girl on their first day. He was that kind of college bad boy.

As Katherine keep thinking about the encounter she exhaled slowly and reached to place her phone on the nightstand.

Emily noticed it first, the way she always did.

You really do admire him, don't you?" Emily asked, tilting her head with the kind of knowing smile that only a best friend could get away with. Women know themselves and when they are falling for a guy they could easily tell.

Katherine pulled her knees to her chest on the bed and looked away, though not quickly enough. "He is really cute," she said. Simple. Matter-of-fact. As though that were the entire story. You know that moment when a girl is lusting over a guy. From her facial expression you could see it, she was already giving in.

He really got that charisma too." Rachel added from the floor where she'd been lying with her legs propped against the wall, a half-eaten pack of crackers beside her. That thing he has you can't fake it, you know. Either you have it or you don't. Chris has left the three ladies with something to talk about. This was his signature the girls daddy.

It was the weekend, and the three of them had gathered at Katherine's apartment the way they always did when there was nothing particular to do and everything in the world to talk about. Rachel and Emily didn't live far. In fact, none of them lived far from one another they had made sure of that when they enrolled but Katherine had been the only one who refused to share a space.

She had made her position very clear even before they arrived on campus. Back home, she told her mother, there was never a moment that was just hers. Someone was always calling her name from the other room. There was always a pot to stir, a floor to sweep, a duty her mother had decided needed doing at exactly the moment Katherine had sat down with a book. She loved her mother. She truly did. But she needed silence. She needed a place where the rules were hers and only hers.

Rachel had once floated the idea of the three of them finding an apartment together split the rent, split the chores, split the late nights. Katherine had smiled and said no. Not because she didn't love the idea of being close to her friends. She just needed her own walls. Her own version of quiet. The freedom to walk from her room to the bathroom without thinking about whether she'd disturb someone. The freedom to leave a cup on the counter and decide later whether that was acceptable. It was a small life, but it was fully hers, and her mother, understanding more than she usually let on, had helped her find and pay for a neat one-room apartment where Katherine could finally be alone in all the ways she'd needed.

Emily and Rachel understood. They had teased her about it, and then they had respected it. Now they showed up on weekends, made themselves comfortable, and the apartment felt briefly, warmly crowded in all the right ways. They weren’t siblings, they where just friends who are very close to each other and respecting each other’s boundary was something they all understood.

Katherine had made noodles for them. She was really a good cook and Emily always complement her food whenever they are around. She learnt how to cook from her mother. The noodles was nothing elaborates, but that was fine and off course it was really delicious as usual. Although the food wasn't really the point. They sat on the small rug in the middle of the room, bowls in their laps, and they talked, the way girls do when they have gathered for no other reason than to talk.

He wasn't like every other guy, Emily said, twirling noodles onto her fork. "I mean genuinely. Most of them try too hard or they don't try at all. He just was.

"Yeah." Rachel nodded, mouth half-full. "He's polite. Outspoken. But not in that obnoxious way where they're only talking so they can hear themselves. He actually meant what he said." She paused, then narrowed her eyes. "But what was that dressing situation at the cafeteria? Like, was he going for something or is that actually just how he moves every day?"

Katherine laughed before she could stop herself. "He was being intentional," she said. "Anyone who paid attention could see that. He knew exactly what he was doing."

Emily looked at her with a slow grin. "You paid attention."

"I was sitting right there."

"You paid attention," Emily repeated, unbothered.

Katherine gave her a look and went back to her noodles, but the smile was still on her face and she didn't try very hard to hide it.

The thing about their encounter with Chris at the cafeteria was that it had the quality of a story the kind you replay and retell because something about it felt larger than a regular afternoon. It wasn't a dramatic thing. Nobody had shouted or made a scene. But the way it had unfolded, the way Chris had entered the frame of their day with that unhurried confidence, the way Katherine had matched him without entirely meaning to it lingered. The three of them kept returning to it the way you return to a song you can't quite name but somehow already know. Katherine hasn’t really had much of this experience with guys except for one but their relationship wasn’t something special it was just a childhood turn into friendship nothing intimate happened between them so she experiencing Chris is such an encounter was a little new to her.

Chris had not been the loudest person at the cafeteria. He didn't need to be. And that was exactly what made him impossible to forget.

The afternoon stretched on without urgency. By the time the sun started to lean toward evening, neither Emily nor Rachel had made any move toward leaving. The conversation had shifted and wandered through campus gossip, through a movie they all disagreed about, one of which was the series Beauty in Black they had long argument about each characters like Emily was a fan of Mallory while Katherine was in fully support of Kimmie and Rachel was Attorney Verney’s favorite according to her he was his kind of man and even though he was gay she didn’t mind to still get down with him. They continue their arguments, through the impossible question of what they actually wanted to do with their lives and somewhere in the middle of all that wandering, it became silently agreed that no one was going home tonight.

"I'm not moving," Rachel announced, rolling onto her back on the rug. "This floor is actually comfortable and I refuse to walk home."

"You live seven minutes away."

"Seven minutes is a lot when you've eaten this much noodles."

They all laughed, and it was settled. They would spend the night. Katherine dragged out extra blankets and they spread themselves around the room, easy and unguarded the way only real friendship allows. This was usual for them spending a night at each others house wasn’t something unusual. Katherine also spend nights at their place they where friends who had each others back just like Chris and his guys.

Katherine wasn't a party person. She had never been. Even at home before college, while some of her classmates were sneaking out on Friday nights, she'd been the one her mother never had to worry about not because she was incapable of rebellion, but because she genuinely didn't see the appeal of standing in a crowded room pretending to enjoy the noise. Her mother had, of course, issued her warnings before she left for campus. Stay away from parties. Don't let people pressure you into places you don't want to be. Katherine had nodded along, and she had meant it. It wasn't a restriction that required fighting.

Emily and Rachel were the same in that respect. They were first-year students and they hadn't found their footing yet, hadn't figured out which invitations were worth accepting. So they stayed in, mostly, and made their own version of a good time, which on this particular night involved a game of truth or dare that had started out tame and was slowly getting less so.

It was Rachel's turn when the phone lit up on the floor between them.

The sound cut through the game like a clean slice. Katherine saw the name before anyone else did and felt her stomach do that particular thing it had been doing since the day at the cafeteria a kind of bracing, a settling, like a ship adjusting its weight before a wave.

She reached forward and placed the call on voicemail without a word.