BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 6: Room 412**

"This is not happening," Annabelle said, standing in the doorway of Room 412 with a single duffel bag and the specific, simmering rage of someone who had run every possible alternative through her head in the last twenty minutes and found none of them workable.

"I petitioned the housing office," Max said, not looking up from where he was very deliberately clearing space on a desk that hadn't needed clearing. "They said no exceptions during an active maintenance emergency. Something about liability."

"You petitioned."

"I tried the emergency line twice." He did look up then, and something in his face was almost apologetic, which only made it worse, because apologetic Max was harder to be angry at than cruel Max, and she desperately needed to stay angry right now. "For what it's worth, I don't want this either."

"I'm sure that's a great comfort to me."

He gestured, stiffly, at the room — a single with a small pull-out cot the RA had wheeled in an hour ago, wedged against the wall opposite his bed with barely two feet of floor between them. "I can take the cot. You can have the bed."

"I'm not taking your bed."

"It's not really an offer, it's just what's happening. I'm not going to make you sleep on a cot in my dorm room like some kind of—" He stopped himself, visibly, before finishing whatever comparison he'd been about to reach for.

"Like some kind of what, Max?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

She dropped her bag on the floor with more force than strictly necessary and surveyed the room like it might rearrange itself into a less impossible situation if she stared hard enough. Three weeks. Three weeks of this — of him, of the careful, awful proximity of a person she'd spent one reckless night with and then spent the following four days pretending didn't exist.

"Rules," she said finally. "If we're doing this, there are rules."

"Fine."

"We don't talk about Friday."

Something crossed his face, quick and unreadable. "Fine."

"You don't mention this to Priya, or Wes, or anyone."

"I wasn't planning to."

"And you keep whatever this—" she gestured between them, sharp and clipped, "—is, entirely professional. Roommates. That's it. Nothing else."

"I can do professional." A beat. "Can you?"

The question landed harder than she wanted it to, because the honest answer was that she didn't know, not with him three feet away and the memory of his hands still uncomfortably vivid whenever she let her guard down for even a second.

"Watch me," she said instead, and set about unpacking her bag with the brisk efficiency of someone determined to make a point.

The first night was, predictably, unbearable.

She lay on the narrow cot in the dark, achingly aware of his breathing across the room, the particular silence of two people both pretending to be asleep and fooling neither of themselves nor each other. Somewhere around one in the morning, she heard him shift, and then his voice, quiet, testing the dark to see if she'd answer.

"You awake?"

She considered lying. "Yes."

A long pause. "I looked you up. After. I don't know why I'm telling you that."

Her whole body went tense. "Looked me up how?"

"Not like that." Another pause, and when he spoke again his voice had lost some of its usual careful control, thinned out by the dark and the late hour into something closer to honest. "Financial aid database has public scholarship recipient names, for the endowment reports. I wasn't trying to — I just wanted to know. About the mom thing. The medical stuff you never talk about but everyone can see if they're paying attention."

She sat up slightly, heart hammering somewhere between fury and something she didn't want to name. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to go digging into my life because you feel guilty about Friday."

"I know."

"I mean it, Max."

"I know," he said again, quieter. "I'm not — I'm not trying to use it against you. I just wanted to understand why you never once, in three years apparently, asked anyone at this school for anything. Not help, not a connection, nothing. Everyone here wants something from someone. You never have."

She didn't answer right away, unsettled by how close that observation cut to something true about herself she'd never said out loud to anyone, not even Josie. "Wanting things from people is expensive," she said finally, into the dark. "You end up owing them. I don't have room in my life for owing anyone anything."

"Do you owe me something? Now?"

The question hung there, heavier than it should have been for something asked so quietly.

"No," she said. "Friday was a mistake. Mistakes don't come with a bill."

She heard him shift again, heard the particular stillness of someone absorbing a sentence they didn't like the sound of. He didn't answer. Neither of them said anything else, and eventually the silence thinned into something almost like sleep, though neither of them, lying three feet apart in the dark, was anywhere close to convinced by their own performance of it.

Max couldn't imagine her staying in the room.

he asked his inner self about the anger he had for her, about the bullying he was planning for her . he couldn't get his mind around it . All he could think of was that night , with her on his body .

he smiled and closed his eyes.