Chapter 3 Going Public

The agreement was simple.

Walk together between lectures. Sit together at lunch twice a week. Look believable enough that Keira Hanson would get the message and redirect her energy somewhere else. No unnecessary conversation, no complications, no bleeding outside the lines that had been drawn clearly in a car park on a Thursday afternoon.

Simple.

What Zane forgot to mention was that dating him — even fake dating him — came with an audience.

I found this out the next morning when I walked to BIO 215 and the entire corridor went quiet. Not dramatically quiet — nobody stopped moving or pointed or made it obvious. Just that specific kind of quiet where conversations don't stop but they slow down, and eyes move without heads turning, and you become aware of yourself in a way that you usually aren't.

I felt it the moment Zane fell into step beside me at the bottom of the stairs — appearing from nowhere as usual, hands in his pockets, completely unbothered by the shift in atmosphere that his presence beside me had produced.

"Good morning," he said casually. Like this was normal. Like we did this every day.

"Don't do that," I muttered.

"Do what?"

"Appear out of nowhere. It's unsettling."

"I walked down the stairs."

"You materialised," I said. "There's a difference."

He almost smiled — the contained version, the one that stayed mostly in his eyes. "You're dramatic for someone who claims to have no personality."

I stopped walking. "I never said that."

"You implied it." He kept moving without breaking stride. "Come on. People are staring."

They absolutely were.

Lunch was worse.

I had a system — corner table, back to the wall, headphones in, visible to no one, accountable to nothing. It had worked flawlessly for the entire first semester and the first week of this one and I had seen no reason to believe it would stop working.

Zane dismantled it in approximately forty seconds.

He appeared at my table with his tray, pulled out the chair across from me without asking, and sat down with the easy confidence of someone who had never in his life needed permission to occupy a space. Like he'd been sitting there for years and I was the one who was new.

Within three minutes two of his friends had materialised beside him. Within five someone had taken a photo — I caught the flash in my peripheral vision and kept my eyes on my food and told myself this was temporary. Weeks. Just a few weeks.

"You look like you're being held hostage," Zane said quietly, leaning slightly across the table so only I could hear him over the noise of his friends' conversation.

"I feel like I'm being held hostage," I said, equally quiet.

"Smile. Just once. It won't kill you."

"You don't know that."

But I looked up anyway — because he was right, because the point of this was to be believable and a person being held hostage was not believable — and I smiled. Small, controlled, the kind I used in seminars when the lecturer asked if there were any questions and there were absolutely questions but the energy in the room suggested nobody wanted to be that person.

Zane looked at me for a full second.

"That's the most painful smile I've ever seen," he said.

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment."

"I know," I said, and went back to my food.

He shook his head slowly — but something in his expression had shifted, something quieter underneath the dry delivery. Like he found me funny in a way he genuinely hadn't expected and was still deciding what to do with that information.

I looked back at my plate before I could think too carefully about what that meant.

The tutoring started that same evening.

He showed up at the library at six exactly — not five fifty-nine, not six-oh-two, exactly six — dropped his bag on the table across from mine, and pulled out notes that were, I will admit reluctantly and only to myself, extremely well organised. Color-coded in parts. Cross-referenced. The kind of notes that belonged to someone who had actually paid attention.

"You took BIO 215 already?" I asked, flipping through them with more interest than I intended to show.

"Last year," he said. "Failed it first time."

I looked up. That genuinely surprised me. "You failed?"

"Shocking, I know." He didn't seem embarrassed about it — just stated it the way he stated things that were true, with the specific ease of someone who had made peace with their own history. "Didn't show up to enough practicals. Took it again, actually attended, passed. It's not as complicated as the lecturer makes it sound."

I turned another page. His handwriting was unexpectedly neat — the kind that suggested someone who wrote slowly and deliberately rather than fast and carelessly.

"You're actually smart," I said, without fully intending to say it out loud.

He raised an eyebrow.

"I mean—" I caught myself. "You don't seem like you try. Generally."

"Most people don't try at the things they're actually good at," he said, without any defensiveness in it. Just observation. He pulled the notes back toward himself and flipped to a specific page with the efficiency of someone who knew exactly where everything was. "Okay. Chromatin structure. Where are you getting stuck?"

And just like that — without ceremony, without making it a moment — Zane Carter, campus bad boy, fake boyfriend, human inconvenience, became the best study partner I had ever had.

I didn't tell him that.

Obviously.

But still.

We walked out at half eight.

The campus was quieter at that hour — the specific quality of an evening that had settled into itself, distant music from the hostels, yellow light along the familiar paths, the smell of something frying somewhere nearby that made the whole walk back feel more human than the library had.

We didn't talk much on the way out.

Then — just before the path split toward different hostels, just when I thought the evening was closing cleanly — he said, almost like an afterthought he hadn't fully decided to voice:

"You didn't have to agree to this, you know."

I looked at him.

He was looking ahead. Not at me — at the path, at the yellow lights, at nothing specific.

"The tutoring balances it," I said.

"I know." A pause. "I'm just saying. Back in the car park — I didn't give you much of a choice. The way I presented it."

It was the closest thing to an apology I suspected Zane Carter had offered anyone in a considerable amount of time. Possibly ever. It came out sideways, the way apologies did from people who weren't practiced at them, but it was there — genuine underneath the indirection.

I thought about brushing it off. Saying it was fine, it didn't matter, moving on with the clean efficiency I applied to things I didn't want to examine too closely.

Instead I said: "Don't make me regret it."

He turned to look at me then — really looked, for just a moment, the careful management dropping slightly.

"I'll try not to," he said quietly.

And then he was gone — hands back in his pockets, disappearing into the dark the way he did, like he'd never been there at all.

I stood at the fork for a moment longer than I needed to.

Then I went inside. Told myself it meant nothing. Went through my notes for twenty minutes and then went to bed.

I almost believed it.