Chapter 2 The Deal

I told myself I wasn't going to think about him.

And for exactly four days, I didn't.

I went to lectures, ate my meals at the same corner table in the cafeteria, submitted my first assignment two days early, and successfully avoided any unnecessary eye contact with Zane Carter in BIO 215. I sat in the third row. He sat in the third row. We existed in the same space with the specific deliberateness of two people who had mutually decided that the other one wasn't worth the energy.

It was going really well, actually.

Until Thursday.

I heard the commotion before I saw it.

It was coming from the corridor outside the library — raised voices, the kind that made everyone within a twenty-metre radius instinctively slow down and pretend they weren't listening while absolutely listening. The kind of voices that had an audience whether they wanted one or not.

I wasn't going to stop.

I had a practical report due Friday and absolutely zero interest in other people's problems. Other people's problems were, in my experience, the number one threat to a GPA that needed to stay above a very specific line. I had learned that early and I had learned it well.

But then I heard my name.

"Ava Mitchell?" A girl's voice, sharp and carrying. "The scholarship girl? Seriously, Zane?"

I stopped.

I know. I know. I should have kept walking — head down, earphones in, the usual strategy that had served me well since the beginning of first year. But hearing your name come out of a stranger's mouth with that much attitude does something to your feet that your brain doesn't get a vote in.

I edged close enough to see around the corner without being seen.

There were three of them — Zane and two girls. One of them I recognised immediately. Keira Hanson. Campus royalty, president of two clubs, the kind of beautiful that knew exactly what it was doing and deployed it accordingly. She was standing with her arms folded, looking at Zane like he had personally offended her entire bloodline going back several generations.

"She's nobody," Keira said flatly.

"Then why do you care?" Zane said. Calm. Almost bored. The specific unbothered quality of someone who had been in enough of these conversations to know exactly how they went.

"Because you've been sitting next to her in every lecture this week and people are talking—"

"People can talk."

"Zane." Her voice dropped to something that was trying to be intimate and landing closer to threatening. "We had an agreement."

"We had a conversation," he corrected. "That's different."

I'd heard enough.

I turned to leave — and walked straight into Zane Carter for the second time in one week.

He caught my arm before I could stumble. Again. With the same reflexes that suggested this was not his first time catching someone who had walked into him, which said something about either his spatial awareness or the general trajectory of his life.

I shook him off immediately.

"Do you just appear out of nowhere?" I whispered, furious and trying to keep it quiet simultaneously.

"Do you always eavesdrop outside libraries?" he whispered back, and there it was — that infuriating almost-smile, the one that had no business being as composed as it was given the circumstances.

"I heard my name—"

"I know." He glanced back toward the corridor, then at me. Something shifted in his expression. The amusement faded, replaced by something more calculated — the look of a person whose brain had just produced an idea and was already several steps ahead evaluating it. "Walk with me."

"Excuse me?"

"Just — walk. Please." The please surprised me enough that I actually moved.

We ended up at the far end of the car park, which felt unnecessarily dramatic, but I let it happen because I was curious and I was already late for nothing and the report could wait twenty minutes while I found out what exactly was happening.

Zane leaned against the wall and looked at me for a long moment — the assessing kind, the kind that was trying to figure something out.

"I need a favour," he said.

"No."

"You didn't let me finish."

"I don't need you to." I adjusted my bag strap and met his gaze directly. "I don't know you. You don't know me. Whatever is happening between you and Keira Hanson has absolutely nothing to do with me and I'd like to keep it that way. Permanently."

He was quiet.

Then — "She thinks we're together."

I blinked. "What?"

"I may have implied—" he paused, choosing his words with the careful deliberation of someone navigating a minefield of their own making, "—that I was interested in someone. And then she saw me sitting next to you in lectures."

The silence that followed was very loud.

"So she assumed," I said slowly, "that that someone is me."

"Yes."

"And you didn't correct her."

A beat. Just long enough to be an answer on its own. "No."

I stared at him. "Why would you do that?"

He pushed off the wall and looked away for a second — the first time since I'd met him that he looked anything other than completely in control of every variable in his immediate environment. "Keira and I have a history. She doesn't take no easily. She never has. I needed her to believe there was a concrete reason."

"And that reason is me." I said it flatly, without inflection. "The scholarship girl. Nobody."

Something crossed his face — quick, there and gone. "That's her word. Not mine."

"It doesn't matter whose word it is." I turned to leave because this conversation had reached its natural conclusion and I had a report to write. "Find someone else."

"I'll tutor you."

I stopped.

The car park was quiet around us. Somewhere in the distance a door opened and closed and returned everything to silence.

"BIO 215," he said, from behind me. "I've taken it before. I aced it. I know you're on scholarship — one bad grade and it gets reviewed. I know how those reviews work." A pause. "I can help you."

I turned around slowly.

He was watching me steadily now — all the casual ease stripped back, the performance gone, just a straight offer laid out plainly by someone who had done the math and knew which number mattered to me most.

"All you have to do," he said quietly, "is pretend. For a few weeks. Just long enough for Keira to move on and find someone else to be interested in. That's all."

I looked at him for a long time.

The rational part of my brain was already listing every reason this was a terrible idea in order of how terrible they were. The slightly less rational part was thinking about my last BIO practical score and the very specific email I had received from the scholarship office at the end of last semester that I had read four times and then filed somewhere I didn't have to look at it.

"If you breathe a word about the scholarship to anyone—"

"I won't."

"And this ends the moment I say it ends. No negotiations."

"Agreed."

I exhaled slowly.

"I want it in writing," I said.

He blinked. Then he laughed — a real one, surprised out of him before he could manage it, the kind that changed his whole face for a moment.

"You're serious."

"I'm always serious." I held out my hand. "Deal or no deal, Zane."

He looked at my hand. Then at my face. Then at my hand again — like he was recalibrating something, like I had done it again, surprised him in the specific way that I was apparently capable of and he hadn't yet found a defense for.

He shook it — firm, warm, one second longer than strictly necessary.

"Deal," he said.

And just like that, I became Zane Carter's fake girlfriend.

God help me.