Chapter 3 3
Lila
I did the math four times.
Tuition installment, minus my paycheck from the bookstore, minus the twenty dollars I always lied to myself about having left over, equaled a number so far into the negative that I finally shut my laptop and sat there in the dark of my room, staring at the ceiling, hating that Kael had been right about literally everything.
I texted him before I could talk myself out of it.
Me: Fine. But I have terms.
The reply came back in under a minute, like he'd been sitting there waiting, which knowing him now, even a little — he probably had been.
Kael: I'm listening.
Me: No touching without warning. No making decisions about my life without asking me first. And if this gets weird, I get to end it, not just you.
Kael: Done. Anything else?
Me: Yeah. If your mom shows up and calls me a gold digger to my face, you're buying me something expensive to make up for it.
Kael: Deal. My house. Tomorrow, 7pm. Bring Ivy if it makes you feel better, everyone's going to be there anyway.
I stared at the screen. Everyone. I hadn't agreed to everyone.
"Absolutely not," Ivy said, when I read her the texts twenty minutes later, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a bag of chips she'd raided from my kitchen without asking. "You are not walking into a house full of hockey players by yourself."
"You just said you weren't coming."
"I said I wasn't coming happily. There's a difference." She crunched a chip like it had personally wronged her. "I still think this is insane, by the way. Fake dating the actual scariest man on campus for money. If my mother knew—"
"Your mother doesn't need to know."
"My mother doesn't know anything about my life, that ship sailed years ago." She said it lightly, the way she said most things about her parents, like the joke was doing the job of covering something else. "But I need you to understand that if this goes sideways, I am going to say I told you so, and I'm going to say it a lot."
"Noted."
"And if he's cruel to you—"
"He's not cruel." I said it before I'd really thought about whether it was true, and Ivy's eyebrows went up like she'd caught something. "I mean — he's blunt. He's not cruel. There's a difference."
"Uh huh."
"Don't do that face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing the face where you think you've figured something out."
"I haven't figured anything out." She grabbed another chip, entirely too pleased with herself. "Yet."
His house looked exactly like I expected and nothing like I expected at the same time.
From outside it was just a big off-campus rental, the kind every athlete on this campus seemed to end up in eventually, porch light busted, a motorcycle and two trucks parked at angles that suggested nobody here had ever heard of a driveway. But the second Kael opened the door, the noise hit me first — music, someone yelling about a video game, something that smelled genuinely incredible coming from the kitchen — and it didn't match the cold, contained version of him I'd built in my head from three conversations and a hallway ultimatum.
"You made it," he said, stepping back to let me in. His eyes went past me to the sidewalk. "Ivy's parking?"
"She's circling the block twice out of principle. She'll be in eventually."
"Good. Come meet everyone before you change your mind."
"I'm not going to change my mind."
"I know. I still like saying it." A ghost of that almost-smile again. He was doing it more than I remembered from the hallway, and I didn't love how much I noticed that.
The kitchen, it turned out, was where the smell was coming from, and the source of it was a guy at the stove in a backwards cap, stirring something with the kind of focus most people reserved for surgery.
"Mason," Kael said. "This is Lila."
Mason turned around, spatula still in hand, and broke into a grin so immediate and so genuine it almost knocked me off balance. "The drink girl."
"Excuse me?"
"The drink-throwing girl. From the video." He said it like it was a compliment, which, given the last twenty-four hours of my life, it kind of was. "That was the best thing I've seen all semester. You want food? I'm making garlic butter pasta, there's plenty."
"I — sure. Thank you."
"See, I like her already," Mason said to Kael, like I wasn't standing right there, which somehow didn't feel rude the way it would have from anyone else. "She said thank you. Jace didn't say thank you the first ten times I fed him."
"Jace doesn't say thank you for anything," said a new voice, and I turned to find a guy who looked like he'd walked directly out of an ad campaign, sunglasses pushed up into perfectly styled hair despite it being seven p.m. indoors, phone already out. "I show gratitude in other ways."
"You post about it. That's not gratitude, that's content."
"It's appreciation content." Jace looked me over, unhurried, the way I imagined he looked at everything — cataloguing it for later use. "So you're the one who broke the internet last night."
"I threw a drink at my ex-boyfriend."
"And in doing so, broke the internet." He said it like it settled the matter. "I run a few pages. Gossip, mostly, campus stuff. I already killed two of the worse threads about you this morning. You're welcome."
"I didn't ask you to do that."
"I know. I did it anyway. Consider it a welcome gift." He finally put his phone away, which felt like an actual honor given how it hadn't left his hand since I walked in. "Kael doesn't do this. The fake thing. Ever. So either you're special or you're about to make his life very complicated, and honestly I'm hoping it's both, because I could use the entertainment."
"Jace," Kael said, in a tone that clearly meant enough.
"I'm being friendly."
"You're being you."
"Same thing."
A door somewhere down the hall opened and closed, and a third guy appeared — quieter, dressed in dark colors, moving like he was trying to take up less space than his height actually allowed. He looked at me for a beat too long before he said anything.
"Theo," Kael said. "Lila."
Theo didn't say hello. He tilted his head slightly, like he was listening for something under the noise of the kitchen, and his eyes narrowed, just barely, in a way that made the back of my neck go cold for no reason I could name.
"You smell like rain," he said finally.
The kitchen went quiet for exactly one second too long.
"That's — an odd thing to say to someone," I said.
"It's not an insult." Theo didn't elaborate. He grabbed a plate off the counter, nodded once at Mason, and disappeared back down the hallway he'd come from, leaving me standing there with the distinct feeling that I'd just failed some kind of test I hadn't known I was taking.
"Don't mind him," Mason said cheerfully, sliding a plate of pasta toward me like nothing had happened. "He says weird stuff. It's kind of his thing."
"Does he say it to everyone?"
Mason and Jace exchanged a look over my head, quick enough that I almost missed it.
"Not usually," Jace said.
Kael's jaw tightened, just slightly, the way it had in the hallway when I'd asked how he knew about my tuition — like he'd noticed something and filed it away to deal with later, somewhere I couldn't see.
"Eat," he said instead, nodding at the plate. "Ivy's going to walk in any minute and I want you fed before she starts interrogating everyone."
Right on cue, the front door banged open.
"Okay," Ivy announced to the room at large, heels already coming off in her hand. "Somebody explain to me why there are two trucks and a motorcycle parked like a toddler owns this driveway, and then somebody feed me, because I skipped dinner circling this block being suspicious of all of you."
Mason was already reaching for another plate, grinning. "I like her."
"Everyone likes me," Ivy said. "It's a whole thing. Now who's Theo and why does Lila look like she just saw a ghost?"
I looked down at my pasta and said nothing, but I filed it away too when Theo stopped right in front of me, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him.
He stared at me, his eyes narrowing as he studied my face and his brows pulled together in that familiar way, like something was bothering him but he couldn’t quite place it.
“You smell somewhat…different,” he muttered, his voice low and rough.
Mason groaned from his spot by the counter. “Dude, don’t do the creepy thing. Come on, man.”
Theo ignored him completely. He leaned in just a little, inhaling again like he couldn’t help himself. “I’ve never smelled anything like you before. It’s… not bad. Just… new. Really new.”
My heart gave a hard thump against my ribs. Before I could even open my mouth to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean, Kael cut in from across the room.
“Theo.”
It wasn’t loud, but the way he said it carried weight. Something in his tone made every voice in the kitchen die out at once.
Theo held Kael’s gaze for another long second, the two of them locked in some silent conversation I wasn’t part of. Then he shrugged, like it was no big deal, and stepped back.
“Forget it,” he muttered, turning away.
I definitely wasn’t forgetting it. The words kept echoing in my head, along with the strange way my skin had tingled when he said them.
I was confused if my perfumes smelled truly special from the way he said it.
