CHAPTER 1 - THE MORNING I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME
1052 Words
I have a rule about mornings. Get up, get out, don't let the room feel like a place you could stay.
Rooms that felt like places you could stay were dangerous. You'd sit down for five minutes and suddenly it was noon and you were still in yesterday's clothes thinking about all the things you hadn't fixed yet. I had too many of those to afford that kind of morning.
So I finished the commission at 7 a.m., saved the file, and sent it before I let myself feel anything about the six hours it had taken. Forty dollars.
Enough for groceries through Wednesday if I was careful, which I always was, because careful was the only mode I had ever been able to afford.
I washed my face, tied my hair back, and went to class.
The part I didn't plan for was Ethan.
The east courtyard was crowded when I cut through it. I had my earbuds in but no music playing, a habit I'd picked up sophomore year that let you hear everything while looking like you weren't listening.
It was how I moved through most of Harwick. Present but tucked away. Visible enough not to be suspicious, invisible enough not to be a target.
I heard him before I saw him, and I heard him because he wanted me to.
"Seren."
My name in his mouth in that particular tone. Flat and pointed and designed to carry. My whole body knew before my brain caught up. My feet stopped on their own.
He was standing at the center of the courtyard with a folder in his hand and an audience he had either gathered or manufactured. Probably both. Ethan had always understood stagecraft better than he understood people.
We had broken up three weeks ago. Two sentences. No cruelty, no performance. I had thought the cleanness of it would make it easier.
I had been wrong.
"I think people should know," he said,
loud enough for the nearest bench, the steps, the cluster by the coffee cart,
"what you actually are."
The courtyard stilled in stages. First the people closest to him, then the ripple outward, that particular held silence that meant everyone had decided to watch.
I didn't move.
He opened the folder. Printed emails. Screenshots. Months of messages rearranged into a story I didn't recognize, one where a girl from a modest family with a design scholarship had looked at him and seen a ladder.
He read some of them out loud. I stood there and let him.
Not because I had no choice. Because I had learned a long time before Ethan that the worst thing you could do in front of an audience was let them see you bleed.
"You used me," he said.
"My family's name. My uncle's firm.
The moment you figured out I wasn't handing any of it over, you left."
"I left," I said,
"because I wanted to."
A few people laughed. It didn't help.
He kept going. I counted the steps to the far gate and calculated the exact moment I could walk away without it looking like retreat.
I never got there.
"That's enough."
Two words. No raised voice. And yet the courtyard went quieter than it had for anything Ethan said, because there was something in them that changed the air itself. Like pressure dropping before a storm.
I turned.
Cael Ashford stood at the edge of the crowd.
I knew who he was the way everyone at Harwick knew who he was, which was the way you knew the weather.
You didn't have to look directly. You were just always aware. Team captain of Harwick's basketball team, the one the scouts came to watch even in practice, the one who made everything look so effortless it was almost offensive. Half the campus had tried to get his attention.
The girls who waited outside the gym after games, who manufactured reasons to share his orbit, who had spent two years trying to find the angle that would finally make him look.
He never looked.
That was the thing about Cael Ashford that everyone talked about when they talked about him. Not the basketball. Not the money, because yes, the family was wealthy in that quiet way that didn't need to announce itself.
It was the fact that he had never once given anyone a reason to hope. No girlfriend. No situation that lasted beyond a single appearance. His teammates joked that the only real relationship he had was with the court.
He was looking at me now.
Not at Ethan. At me. And there was something in it I couldn't name, something focused and specific, like he was checking a coordinate he hadn't expected to find here.
He walked into the space between me and Ethan like he owned every inch of it. Ethan opened his mouth. Cael looked at him, and Ethan closed it.
"Walk away," Cael said.
Quiet. Almost gentle. Worse because of it.
Ethan looked at him with the frustration of someone realizing the audience had shifted. Then he picked up his folder and walked.
The courtyard exhaled. Conversations restarted. Other people's pain becoming background noise the way it always did.
Cael turned to me. Up close his eyes were a grey that didn't settle into any fixed shade. Something moved in them that didn't quite fit the stillness of his face.
"I don't need help," I said.
"I know," he said.
Like it was true and like it changed nothing.
Then, clearly enough for everyone still watching to hear, he said:
"She's with me."
Not a question. Not an offer. A fact, in the same tone you used for things that had always been true.
I stared at him.
The courtyard was not breathing.
Cael Ashford. Who had never chosen anyone. Who the entire campus had spent two years trying to reach. Standing in the middle of the east courtyard on a Tuesday morning telling everyone within earshot that I was his.
His expression gave nothing away. But his eyes, for just one second, one fraction I almost convinced myself I'd imagined, went very dark. And something shifted in the air around him that I had no language for yet.
I had a rule about mornings.
I should have made one about him.
- Writer
