Broken First (Never Again)

Episode Thirteen

Six months after the real encounter. It been six months with Chris. It been a whole new beginning of togetherness between Chris and Katherine.

Chris constant persistence paid off. That was one thing with Chris, when he wants something no matter how difficult the road is to get there, he will always go without even thinking about the repercussion. To him there was no repercussion for fleeting and living the youthful life God created us to live. Sometimes I want to agree with him but other times I doubt his recklessness. But in spite all of these Chris was a brilliant college student. His lifestyles were his bad character and he was not ready to change anytime soon.

Sometimes when you say six months. It sounds like a short time. six months. But when you have spent those months learning the specific way a person laughs when something genuinely catches them off guard, when you have memorized their walk from fifty feet away, when their name in your phone produces a particular warmth in your chest before you have even read what they said, six months feels like a whole season of your life that you cannot imagine having lived without.

That was where Katherine and Chris were now. Six months from the beginning of something that had started as glances in a corridor and careful words across a cafeteria table, six months from the evening she had answered his call knowing she was going to, six months from the moment she had quietly decided to let him in. And somewhere inside all those months, without either of them making a formal announcement about it, they had simply become a fact the kind of fact that the people around you accept before you have accepted it yourself.

The campus knew. Of course, the campus knew. It is impossible to keep anything quiet in a place where hundreds of young people are living within walking distance of one another, sharing classes and dining halls and the same narrow stretches of pavement between buildings. Word travels the way it always travels among people who are bored and paying attention: quickly, eagerly, with generous additions. It had started as passing observations someone catching them walking side by side near the library, someone else noticing how Chris lingered at her table in the cafeteria long after he had finished eating. Then the whispers. Then the certainty. And by the time they stopped pretending there was anything ambiguous about it, the campus had already decided for them.

People started calling them things. "The college lovers" was the kind one. There was also "that enviable couple," said with the particular edge that means the person saying it is genuinely envious. Someone had apparently coined the phrase "the high school lovers" as a joke about how openly romantic they were as though they had not yet learned the slightly cooler, more self-protective version of affection that older people perform but it stuck, and it was not entirely wrong. There was something young and unguarded about the way they were together. Not immature. Just unashamed.

Chris's friends: Joe, Tucker and Bradley had watched the whole thing unfold from the very beginning. They had been there when it started, had been the ones to make it a bet in the first place, and they were still there now, six months later, watching Chris hold a girl's hand in the corridor with an ease that did not look like performance. They said nothing to anyone outside their circle. That was the code, and they kept it not because they were particularly noble, but because the code was the code and breaking it had consequences.

They still remembered George. George, who had been one of them until he wasn't. He had always had a loose quality about him, a tendency to let things slip in conversation without quite meaning to not malice, just carelessness. But carelessness, when it comes to the kinds of things their group talked about behind closed doors, carries exactly the same damage as intent. The story of their plans a particular night, a particular arrangement, girls who did not know they were part of a plan had found its way back to the school administration and it had nearly taken all of them down with it. The disciplinary meetings. The letters home. The hovering possibility of expulsion. By some combination of luck and careful wording, they had survived it. George had not survived the group.

He had come back eventually, the way people always come back when they realize what they've lost. He had stood at the edge of their table one afternoon with that particular expression of someone who has rehearsed their apology many times and still isn't sure it's good enough. He said he was different. He said he understood now. He said whatever they needed him to say. But Chris, Joe, Tucker, and Bradley had looked at him and looked at each other, and the answer was no quietly, without cruelty, but without any room for negotiation either. Some things, once broken, simply stay that way. Not as punishment but as fact. Their group were made of four young men who knew the value of keeping a secret. The knew never to let out anything no matter how long it takes a secret should always remain a secret and that was what George couldn’t keep.

This was the world Chris moved in. This was the code he lived by. And it was the code that kept Katherine's name clean within the group not because they cared about protecting her, but because their secrets were their own and they guarded them all equally.

But none of that was visible on a Thursday afternoon when the clouds sat low and grey over the campus and Katherine was walking back from a long chemistry class with her textbooks pressed against her chest and a soft, involuntary smile on her face.

She had changed in these six months not in the ways people change when they lose themselves in someone, but in quieter, subtler ways. There was a lightness to her now that had not always been there. She had always carried herself with a certain composure self-possessed, deliberate but it used to have a harder edge to it, a guardedness that kept people at a careful distance. That edge had not disappeared entirely. But it had softened at the corners, worn down by something that felt like contentment.

She was thinking about him, which was not unusual. She found herself thinking about Chris the way she thought about music she loved not constantly, not obsessively, but as a kind of background warmth that she was always faintly aware of. The way he had brought her ice cream from the cafeteria last Tuesday without her asking, knowing her order without being told. The way he sometimes kissed her forehead instead of her lips when she was tired, as though he could tell the difference between what she needed and what she wanted. The way he looked at her in public not performing, not scanning the room to see who was watching just looking, directly and without apology, like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

Her phone buzzed. She shifted her books to one arm and checked it.

Meet me at the garden. Our favorite spot.

She read it twice not because she didn't understand it, but because some messages deserve a second read simply for the pleasure they bring. She typed back quickly: Okay, on my way. And then she tucked her phone away and adjusted her books and kept walking, the smile settling more firmly into place. It was Chris.

The corner near the girls' locker room was one of those campus spots that existed in a particular acoustic shadow sound carried strangely there, bouncing off the concrete wall and the low overhang above it so that voices from inside reached the corridor with a strange clarity, louder than their speakers intended. Katherine had noticed this before. She turned the corner without slowing her pace and the voices reached her immediately.