Broken First (Never Again)

Episode Seventeen

The night after Katherine couldn’t stop thinking about Chris. She made up her mind. She is in love and really in love and wanted to explore what been in love really mean. That night was Friday night. They had played their love on campus and Katherine went home thinking about him all throughout the night. She counts her time with him as the happiest moment she ever been since she moves into Riverside College and she didn’t care what people like Chelsea say. She believes she was beautiful and she was actually. If you are to count 10 most beautiful girls in Riverside college then Katherine will make it to the list effortlessly. If she was not beautiful Chris wouldn’t have opt in for this game in the first place, so when Chelsea told her she wasn’t all that beautiful she now believes Chris that it was coming from a place of jealousy.

For Katherine she believes there are certain evenings that arrive with a different quality of light, evenings that seem to understand, before anyone in them does, that something significant is about to happen. Saturday came in exactly that way. The sky above campus had turned into something almost unreasonably beautiful: deep gold bleeding into indigo at the edges, the sun making its exit slowly, as though it too had decided tonight was worth watching. The air was warm and carried with it the faint perfume of blossoms from somewhere across the courtyard, and from various corners of campus came the easy, drifting sounds of students releasing the weight of the week laughter, music, doors swinging open into the soft evening.

It was the kind of weather made for lovers. The kind that makes you reach for someone's hand without thinking about it. The kind that turns an ordinary evening into a memory before it has even finished happening. The kind that gets lovers do what they have all be planning to do.

Katherine had spent the entire day in a state she couldn't quite name. the night before Saturday night she couldn’t stop what she was feeling inside. Not anxious. Not restless exactly. Something quieter and deeper than either of those a kind of full-body awareness, a low, steady hum beneath everything she did. She had sat through her afternoon lecture without retaining much of it. She had eaten lunch and barely tasted it. She had responded to messages from Emily and Rachel on autopilot, her mind elsewhere, occupied entirely by thoughts of Chris. Rachel and Emily couldn’t visit her because they both had group project to carry out and Katherine was supposed to be there to cheer them up but she was occupied with Chris all over her mind.

Emily and Rachel weren’t in the same department but the same faculty and they had a course they offered together, and it was this course they had group project on and it was to be submitted on Monday. From their seriousness with the projects, you could sense that one of them was the group leader and they didn’t want to mess this up.

Katherine had not just thoughts but yearning. That was the more honest word to used. She had been yearning for him the way you yearn for something that has become as necessary as air not dramatically, not with the frantic quality of early infatuation, but with the deep, quiet certainty of someone who has stopped pretending they could do without. Six months. Six months of mornings that began with his name in her phone and evenings that felt incomplete until they had spoken. Six months of the garden and the cafeteria and the forehead kisses and the laughter that caught her off guard every time, even now.

She had fallen for him the way Rose fell for Jack completely, recklessly, with the whole of herself and no exit strategy. She had stopped being careful about it weeks ago. The careful phase was over. What remained was simply the truth of it, sitting in her chest like something warm and permanent.

When his text arrived that afternoon dinner at my place tonight, I've made something special for you she had read it three times. Not because the words were complicated, but because of the way they landed. Something in the phrasing. The softness of it. I've made something special for you. Not come over. Not you free tonight. Something special. She had pressed her phone against her chest for a moment, closed her eyes, and felt the warmth of it move through her like the first sip of something that burns pleasantly on the way down.

She had texted back: I'll be there. And then she had gone to find something worth wearing.

The red dress had been sitting in her wardrobe for three months. She had bought it on an afternoon when Emily had dragged her into a boutique near campus and refused to leave until Katherine tried on at least five things. She had tried on seven, bought one, brought it home, and hung it up without occasion. It was not the kind of dress you wore to the library or a group study session. It was the kind of dress that required a reason a specific, deliberate reason and tonight, standing in front of her mirror, she understood that the reason had finally arrived.

It fit her the way expensive things fit when they were chosen correctly close where it needed to be close, falling softly everywhere else, the deep red of it doing something to her complexion that made her look like a more vivid version of herself. She studied her reflection for a moment. Then she let her hair down, shook it slightly loose, and decided that was enough.

She was not dressing for Chris. She was dressing for herself for the version of herself that this evening seemed to be asking for. But she would be lying if she said she didn't hope he noticed.

He noticed.

The door opened before she had finished knocking he must have heard her in the corridor and Chris stood in the frame with the particular ease of someone who had been waiting but was determined not to look like it. He was wearing just his boxers, which on another occasion might have read as careless, but tonight it read as entirely intentional. His chest and arms carried the quiet evidence of someone who moved through the world physically, comfortably in his own body, and Katherine felt the effect of it hit her somewhere below rational thought before she had time to prepare.

She had seen him like this before. But tonight everything was different, and so everything she had seen before was also different.

You look beautiful," he said. His eyes moved over her once not with the sweeping, performative appreciation some men deployed as a technique, but with something more focused, more private. As though he was taking something in that he intended to keep. "That dress." He shook his head slightly, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "It looks incredible on you, Katie."

She felt the warmth of it travel up the back of her neck. She stepped inside and he drew her gently into a hug one hand at her waist, the other at her back, his lips grazing her cheek in a gesture that was both familiar and tonight, somehow, charged with everything that had been building between them for half a year. She felt the warmth of his skin against her bare arm and stayed in the embrace a beat longer than she needed to.

Thank you," she said softly, against his shoulder.

The apartment had been transformed.

Katherine stepped fully inside and stopped, taking it in. She had been here before she knew the layout, the furniture, the specific way afternoon light came through the window on the left. But tonight none of that was recognizable. Miss Donly, whoever she was, had understood the assignment completely. Rose petals traced a path across the floor toward the table, which had been set with candles whose flames made everything they touched look golden. The lighting was low and warm everywhere. The whole room smelled of wax and flowers and the rich, unmistakable scent of pasta cooking a smell that was, somehow, both entirely domestic and intensely romantic in this context.

Chris," she said, and then stopped, because she didn't quite have the rest of the sentence.

Sit down," he said, pulling out her chair with a ceremony she found both slightly funny and deeply moving. "Let me take care of you tonight."

She sat. She watched him move to the kitchen with the unhurried confidence of someone who had rehearsed this and when she later learned that he had not cooked a proper meal in years, that this was something he had done specifically and only for her, it would make the evening sit even more permanently in her memory. But for now she simply watched him plate the food, watched him carry it to the table, watched him sit across from her in the candlelight and smile at her as though she were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

Which, tonight, she was.

Dinner was slow and easy and full of the particular laughter that happens when two people have stopped trying to impress each other and simply enjoy where they are. They shared from each other's plates Chris reaching across to offer her something without asking, Katherine taking it without ceremony, the way couples do when the formality has fully dissolved. Their fingers brushed repeatedly across the table. Neither of them moved away when it happened. The candles burned lower. The food disappeared. The conversation wandered through everything and nothing, the way it did when you were genuinely comfortable with someone not filling silence so much as enjoying the space between words.

You didn’t tell me you are such a good cook. Katherine said.

I wanted to make today about you. Chris replied.

And this place looks extraordinary. Did you do all of this because of me. She continued. Nothing in here is too extraordinary for a beautiful girl like you baby. Chris flattered her.

Their conversation continues. Outside, the evening had deepened into full night. And then, while they were still at the table, the first sound of rain reached them a soft preliminary tapping against the window that grew, within minutes, into something fuller. The kind of rain that arrives without apology and makes going anywhere feel immediately inadvisable.

Katherine glanced toward the window.

Chris said nothing. But she caught the small, private movement at the corner of his mouth not quite a smile, just the shadow of one and she understood that this rain, arriving at exactly this moment, was perhaps not entirely a surprise to him. She let it go. She let a lot of things go tonight.