Chapter 4 4
Lila
By Monday, I had a seat.
Not a new one — the same lecture hall, the same row I'd sat in all semester — except now Kael Ryder dropped into the chair beside me two minutes before class started, like it had always belonged to him, like he hadn't spent the entire first half of the semester sitting four rows back with the rest of the hockey team.
"You're in my seat," I whispered.
"There's no assigned seats."
"There's an unofficial one. That's worse."
"Then it's unofficially mine now too." He didn't even look up from his notebook. Half the room was already looking at us, phones angled just slightly, and I could feel it like a temperature change against my skin. "Relax, Hart. You look like you're bracing for impact."
"I am bracing for impact. Everyone's staring."
"Everyone was already staring before I sat down. Might as well give them something worth filming."
He said it so evenly, like it cost him nothing, and maybe it didn't — maybe this was easy for him, being watched, being talked about, existing as a rumor before he existed as a person to most of this campus. It had never been easy for me. I spent the entire lecture aware of exactly how close his arm was to mine on the shared armrest, and I couldn't have repeated a single thing the professor said if my life depended on it.
"Okay, question," Ivy said that night, sprawled across my bed scrolling through her phone with the particular energy of someone building up to something. "Did you know there are already three separate accounts shipping you two? One of them made a moodboard."
"A moodboard?"
"Black and white photos, some rain aesthetic, a caption that says the alpha and the storm." She turned the phone around so I could see it. "It has four thousand likes, Lila. Four thousand people have feelings about your situationship moodboard."
"It's not a situationship. It's fake."
"The moodboard doesn't know that."
I flopped back onto my pillow and stared at the ceiling. "This was supposed to make my life quieter."
"When did you think that? At any point during this plan, when did you think quieter was on the table?" Ivy laughed, not unkindly, and tossed her phone aside. "For what it's worth, Tyler unfollowed Selena today. I'm hearing it's not going well for either of them."
"I don't care."
"You care a normal, healthy amount, which is different from not caring." She propped herself up on one elbow. "Speaking of caring a normal amount — Mason texted me."
I sat up. "He what?"
"Asked if we were coming to the party at the house Friday. Very casually. Very just checking, no pressure about it." She was fighting a smile and losing. "I said maybe."
"You said maybe to Mason texting you."
"I said maybe to the party, Lila, don't make it weird."
"I'm not the one who's been smiling at her phone for the last ten minutes." I shot back.
"I'm always smiling at my phone, it's called good skincare content." She threw a pillow at me, which I caught, which meant she immediately threw a second one. "Are we going Friday or not?"
I thought about the moodboard. The four thousand likes. Kael's arm on the armrest, close enough that I'd spent an entire lecture not moving so I wouldn't accidentally brush against it.
"Yeah," I said. "We're going."
The party Friday was louder than the last one, which I hadn't thought possible, and I spent the first twenty minutes attached to Ivy's side while she reintroduced herself to Mason approximately four times under the guise of "making sure he remembered her," which he clearly did, given how fast he found an excuse to bring her a drink personally instead of letting anyone else do it.
I lost track of Kael somewhere around the keg, which was fine, which was the arrangement, we didn't actually have to be attached at the hip every second of every—
A hand landed on my waist.
I knew it was him before I turned around. I don't know how I knew. I just did, the way you know a room's gotten colder before you feel the draft.
"Hey," Kael said, low, close to my ear so I could hear him over the music. His hand stayed exactly where it was, warm through my shirt, not gripping, just resting, like he was testing whether I'd shrug it off.
I didn't shrug it off.
"You're supposed to warn me before touching," I said, tipping my head back to look at him. "That was a term."
"I'm warning you now. Retroactively." His eyes flicked past me, to a guy across the room who'd been not-so-subtly checking me out for the last five minutes, and something in Kael's expression sharpened, just slightly, before it smoothed back out. "Humor me."
"Why?"
"Because that guy's been staring at you since you walked in, and it's annoying."
"Jealous?"
I meant it as a joke. It didn't land as one. Something flickered behind his eyes — surprise, maybe, like the question had caught him off guard as much as it caught me — and for a second neither of us said anything, his hand still on my waist, the party noise going strange and distant around us.
"I don't get jealous," he said finally.
"Okay."
"I don't."
"I believe you." I didn't believe him even a little, and from the look on his face, he knew it.
"Kael!" Mason's voice cut through the moment, mercifully or unfortunately, I genuinely couldn't decide which. "Beer pong, we need a fourth, Jace is being a coward—"
"I'm not being a coward, I have a reputation to protect—"
"You have a losing streak to protect—"
Kael's hand slid off my waist slowly, like he was in no hurry about it, and he shot me a look I couldn't quite read before he let Mason drag him off toward the table. I stood there for a second, waist still warm where his hand had been, and tried to remember what exactly I'd agreed to when I said no strings.
"You two looked cozy," Ivy said, appearing at my elbow with a drink in each hand, one of which she handed to me.
"It's for the cameras."
"There's no cameras right now, Lila. That's just us over here." She raised an eyebrow, entirely too knowing. "Just something to think about."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the face again."
"I have one face, it's the only face I own." She clinked her cup against mine, grinning. "Drink your drink. Watch your fake boyfriend lose at beer pong. Try not to think too hard about anything else tonight."
I tried. I mostly failed. Across the room, Kael missed a shot, swore under his breath, and glanced over at me like he was checking whether I'd seen — and when our eyes met, he didn't look away first. Neither did I.
The week after the party was against every expectation I'd walked in with, easy.
Kael kept the seat next to me in lecture without either of us mentioning it again. Mason texted the group chat at odd hours demanding opinions on whatever he was cooking. Ivy and Mason's "maybe" from the party had turned into an actual pattern of him showing up wherever she happened to be, which she pretended not to notice and definitely noticed. Even Theo had started nodding at me in the hallway instead of just staring, which I'd decided to take as progress.
For the first time since the video, I stopped flinching every time my phone buzzed.
I should have known better than to get comfortable.
I found out Kael's mother was on campus before Kael did.
"Okay, do not panic," Jace said, sliding into the seat next to me in the campus coffee shop like he hadn't just materialized out of nowhere with his phone already turned toward me. "But you should probably see this before you walk anywhere near the quad today."
The photo was clean, professional, the kind of shot that looked staged even though it probably wasn't — a tall, elegant woman in a cream coat, flanked by two equally polished women who couldn't have been older than me, all three of them standing outside the campus admin building like they owned it.
"Who is that?"
"Diane Ryder." Jace said it like it should mean something to me, then seemed to remember it didn't. "Kael's mother. And behind her — the one in green, that's Priya Osei, old alliance family, and the one in white is—" He stopped.
Jace's jaw did something complicated. "That's Selena Voss."
I looked at the photo again. Cream coat, blonde hair, a face I'd only ever seen from a hallway doorway with her mouth open in shock and her hand halfway down my ex-boyfriend's —
"That's her," I said. My voice came out flatter than I expected. "That's the girl. From the party. With Tyler." I said once I'd recognized her face now.
"Yeah." Jace winced, which for Jace was practically an apology. "I was hoping you wouldn't put that together until I figured out how to say it nicely."
"There's a nice way to say my fake boyfriend's mother brought his intended fiancée to campus, and that it turns out she's also the girl my ex-boyfriend cheated on me with?"
"...No. There's not really a nice way to say that one." He pocketed his phone. "I
just didn't want you finding out from a screenshot with a caption on it."
"Too late for that, probably."
"Yeah." He grimaced. "Probably."
